The question lies at the core of the polycrisis we are living in, where multiple interconnected crises converge and amplify each other, making it very difficult to manage with traditional means and methods. It is not a single event in time; this is a collective experience that has been building up through decades and had its symptoms peak with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ukraine war, and extreme climate events. While facing the threats, we must understand that how we have been going about it so far doesn’t work.
The journey starts with understanding that the institutions that we have built have strayed from the notion of politics as a pursuit “to enable people to develop their distinctive human capacities and virtues – to deliberate about the common good, to acquire practical judgment, to share in self-government, to care for the fate of the community as a whole”. It is the notion brought by Michael Sandel in his book Justice while acknowledging that organizations such as NATO and WTO are not concerned about this purpose, nor any other that doesn’t imply the security or economic exchange.
Solving the complex and systemic challenges we face requires political leadership that enables the capacities and virtues, but above all, it requires collective wisdom capable of bringing about justice. Until then, without justice, we will simply keep on seeing today’s solutions causing tomorrow’s problems.
When seeking justice, there are three theories highlighted by John Rawls and further detailed by Michael Sandel. The first and the second ones are embedded in the principle that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste; the third one brings about sense, purpose, and hope as guiding principles of human development.
The first theory of justice is libertarian. It is associated with the maximization of freedom, mainly through the principle of the free market with formal equality of opportunity. The difficult part of this otherwise straightforward principle is equality. Unfortunately, in real life, opportunities are far from equal. It would only be just if we all started the race from the same starting line. But we don’t.
For over a decade, the entire Ukrainian conflict has been approached from this perspective. The problem is that the Russian side uses the same argument to defend the Russian-speaking minorities. Among other, they call up to same argument as NATO did to annexate a part of the sovereign country; Kosovo in Serbia. And same as NATO they don’t call it a war but an operation. Not only did the NATO bombing of Serbia give Russia a moral pretext to invade Ukraine, but it also pushed it further from the Western democracies. Back then, speaking of the bombing, the lament of Yegor Gaidar, documented by M.E. Sarotte, painted the perspective of future Rusia-West relations: “If only you knew what a disaster this war is for those of us in Russia who want for our country what you want.”
After the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Warszawa pact, there was no longer a need for NATO to exist. It would have probably disintegrated if the main driving force wasn’t economic interest. Otherwise, the question of why NATO expanded faster than the EU would have a different answer, and this war would have been avoided. Unfortunately, the answer lies in the fact that the EU’s single-minded push to achieve a single currency was taking priority over enlargement, as documented by M.E. Sarotte in Not One Inch.
There, we come to the second theory of justice, the utilitarian one. It is where moral goods are translated into a single currency of value. In other words, cost-benefit analysis tries to bring rationality and rigor to complex social choices by translating them into monetary terms. US military support for Ukrainian minerals and other features born out of the Art of the Deal exemplifies how Trump is experimenting with the utilitarian principle, which is the maximization of utility.
Bringing the explicit transactional equation into dealing with the conflict is nothing new, but it has usually been kept away from the eye of the public, hidden behind the flag of freedom. If the focus had shifted towards expanding the EU instead of expanding NATO, Russia would be on a completely different path today. If not within the EU, it would be much closer than it is today. However, NATO, to justify its existence, needed an enemy. China was not interested, so the resurrection of the old cold enemy was a natural pick. Again, it was the utilitarian drive pushing forward the expansion while boosting members’ military budget expenditure and the juicy profit it brings to all those involved in those deals.
Hundreds of billions of euros have gone into killing people instead of investing in fighting the climate change and assuring that we live up to the challenge of pursuing development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
However, the failure of the utilitarian principle of justice is not only evident in the Ukrainian conflict. Just recently, under the economic pressure to secure Europe’s global economic competitiveness, the Union has backed down on its climate ambition. By announcing the Omnibus Directive proposal, instead of improving conditions, the Union has lowered the expectations for sustainability reporting and transparency, which convinces me even further that the nation-state model of social systems organizations is simply unsustainable.
After decades of tunnel-visioned pushing forward of the expansion of freedom under the NATO flag, it is now turned for the ‘art of the deal,’ or better said, the ‘art of the Dealer.’ Natural resources in exchange for protection. Diplomacy as transactionality. What’s different this time is that Trump has got free hands to impose his agenda without too many checks and balances. Absolute power leads to absolute error. Despite having vast historical evidence to back the claim, US voters have decided to test it empirically and gave Donald J. Trump a carte blanche to complete his tweet-based political cacophony. In this process, they are about to discover another historical fact: the larger the nation-state, the greater the prospects for it to become an autocracy. In other words, as someone said, Stalin could never become a figure of authority in a small village. For those leadership traits to thrive, citizens must be disconnected from each other and as far away from the decision-making process as possible.
Which is opposite of the nature of polis where people talk to each other and take responsibility for the quality of the public sphere. The nature of the state-nation structure is to nurture isolated individuals by feeding them the institutionalized instructions crafted by the source of state authority. The separation remains the same whether it’s a state television or a social media platform. The larger the country, the higher the potential for autocracy.
This brings me to the third principle of justice: the teleological one, the one of establishing the purpose of our actions and the image of the flag accompanying this post.
A few weeks into the war in Ukraine, I raised the flag you can see in the image accompanying this post. The choice of the blue flag was not accidental, for it represents peace and sustainability. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, thousands of towns and villages destroyed, and millions of people turned into refugees. Neither libertarian nor utilitarian principle will bring them justice. And while the flag is still waving, it is in shammers as a sad reminder of the state of the peace that is being proposed.
The senselessness of the war, with all its potential for apocalyptic ramifications, together with the setback this would mean for Agenda 2030, got me both worried and angry. The civil war in my homeland has taught me that no nationalist ideal is worth dying for. Common sense tells me that billions of euros blasted away in the senseless manifestation of military power could have been spent in boosting sustainability transition away from fossil fuels and keeping us within a safe operating space of the planetary boundaries.
This is why it is time for us to return to the culture of the polis and embrace the teleological principle of justice, the one proposed by Aristoteles, where telos stands for the purpose, end, or essential nature of social practice. But how can we reason about the purpose of social practice in the face of disagreement?
We do it by bringing forward the essence of a polis, which is not a simple collection of residents on a common site. Polis is about the essence of the public sphere and its teleological nature where the purpose is the good life, and the institutions of social life are means to that end, to paraphrase Aritoteles. This eudaimonic notion seeks to identify the highest human good attainable under the circumstances and should be woven into the social fabric that holds us together.
In the face of the threats of the polycrisis, we need to regain this ability and strengthen the ties between us instead of drifting further into the (ww)web of numb pursuit of utility. Life is so much more! By bringing moral expansiveness into the negotiations on justice, we get the answer to what’s in it for me.
What’s in it for me is engaging with people into pursuing goals that will make human beings move away from this destructive, self-centered activity, as Jiddu Krishnamurti and David Bohm call for in The Ending of Time. The nation-state is not a model that will allow this to happen. The future is going back to polis, and the network of cities brought together into the web of symbiotic relations where natural interdependencies drive collaboration and improve individual and collective well-being. (Read more in; Through ‘More Local’ to ‘More Europe’
Boris Matijas 