Niccolo Milanese on putting planetary politics into practice
If I say ‘planetary citizens assembly’, I wonder what image comes to mind? That of ordinary people from all over the world sitting in the United Nations General Assembly Hall and talking together, instead of delegates listening to the speeches of one national leader after another? Or of an occupied square full of people talking about the planet and its future? Or of every square on the planet all occupied having this discussion? Or of a group of people from our planet Earth preparing to enter into contact with another alien civilisation, thinking about how to start the conversation? I want to suggest that in a way all of these images are good ones, and we should invent a whole theatrical genre of such assembly performances.
Planetary politics is best understood as a particular kind of political concern, which goes along with a planetary awareness or planetary political consciousness. My contention and observation is that this kind of political consciousness is growing significantly, as concern over the future liveability of the planet becomes a central and organising node of all political concerns (or ‘all politics becomes climate politics’). These political concerns often, if not always,
- Expand the constituency of politics (ie. who counts?), to include people and non-human beings that have typically been considered external to the political community. This can include people living in other places, people living in the future, other species, robots, natural objects and features (mountains, rivers, forests…) and ultimately the planet itself. It can even potentially include currently unknown beings such as extra-terrestrial life: the possibility that there may be extra-terrestrial life may put on us the obligation not to pollute space, for example.
- Have an existential character: often planetary concerns are to do with issues that risk extinction, mass destruction or degradation, or radical changes in the meaning of what it means to be human/what it means to be alive. Examples include issues relating to nuclear war, climate change, genome editing, artificial intelligence…
- Cannot adequately be addressed by any one political institution or authority: planetary issues, partly because of their first two features, typically cannot be adequately addressed by any existing political institution acting alone, even those with a global scale such as the United Nations, because they require multi-scalar action across governments and society at large, including significant cultural change.
- Have a preoccupation with deep time: often planetary consciousness is aware of the deep history of the planet, notably that other civilisations and forms of human life have previously existed and that the planet itself has a much older history than humanity, and/or is concerned with the future, including the far future which may be radically different to the present. This consciousness goes along with an accentuated awareness of human impact on the planet, whether or not the idea of the Anthropocene is scientifically to be considered a distinct epoch.
Understood in this way, planetary politics is not best understood as a particular territorial scale at which politics happens. It is possible for a small village to have deliberation about planetary politics, as much as it is possible for a global body such as the United Nations Assembly: indeed, it may even be more likely in a small village than in a highly formalised and state-driven space like the United Nations. The challenge of planetary politics to politics-as-we-know-it is not as simple as expanding participation in territorial terms: the four features of planetary political consciousness above challenge who and what participates in politics; which institutions are addressed by which politics; what the politics of here, today can responsibly decide about elsewhere, tomorrow; and both raises the stakes of politics (or perhaps put better, acknowledges the real existential stakes of politics), and acknowledges the potentially catastrophic implications of both not-deciding and of deciding. Overall, planetary consciousness can be understood as a recognition of the radical contingency of human life as each one of us knows it and of its future, and of the historically created power imbalances that continue to shape the contexts in which each of us speaks. From such a starting point, the pretension to ‘represent’ humanity or speak on behalf of humanity could only be taken as a rhetorical ploy not a representative claim (ie. an appeal to the humanity of each listener).
Starting with this planetary consciousness in mind, what features of citizens assemblies would be important to address planetary concerns? How would these assemblies sound when they make statements after deliberation? I would suggest they would necessarily sound very different to state-based political institutions that we know: democratising politics beyond the nation-state means also making demotic the language of politics, even if a planetary politics may use a language that is strange because it attempts to ventriloquise voices of entities that cannot speak,, give voice to discourses that have been silenced, or translate the voices of entities that speak in languages we cannot understand.
Here are some characteristics of such planetary assemblies that I think might ensure they speak with a different voice of power, power understood as acting in concert, as empowering and emancipating, not dominating or forcing:
Embedded, translocal, contingent
Firstly, such an approach surely would start from local, embedded assemblies and weaving together an assembly of assemblies which is able to act as a space of translation between local realities, contexts and concepts. Having removed the attempt to try to be ‘representative’ of a whole, each assembly would need to integrate alterity whilst recognising its necessarily partial claim to speak on behalf of everyone and everything. There are multiple ways this alterity may be brought into an assembly, some of which are simple and could be very cost-effective: through the inclusion of people who may live locally but have come from afar and who are usually excluded; by involving different nationalities and languages; or by adopting imaginative methodologies which encourage participants to give voice to non-human entities, take account of future generations or of people in other contexts. A feature of the embeddedness of these assemblies would be a reflection on the histories that have created such imbalanced or unjust contexts. The condition each time would be that the limitedness of each assembly meeting in each situation is critically highlighted and integrated into the reflection.
Embodied, public, mediatic
Secondly, such a multiplicity of assemblies would be mostly embodied, taking place in public space, unlike government-initiated citizen assemblies, which often take place in closed and controlled spaces. Embodiment is both a primary relation of each of us with the Earth, and in an assembly the presence of other bodies is a reminder of the complex relation of identity and alterity, in a way that is different from the meeting of disembodied speech. There is nothing inherently disembodied about technology as such – it depends on how it is used, and technologically mediated assemblies need to actively use technology to enhance awareness of bodies and their alterity, not abstract from it. (The use of simultaneous interpretation through headphones and translation booths, of the kind used in the UN, European Parliament etc, is also open to critique for leading to the abstraction from the bodies, listening to a disembodied voice – even verbalisation has a bodily condition).
As Judith Butler has reminded us, there is a reason that the right of assembly and the right of free speech are different: assembling in the public space communicates something political but non-verbal in a different way to public speech. Embodiment in a public space is also arguably a precondition of media awareness and coverage, something strikingly lacking from both the Global Assembly and the Citizens Panels of the Conference on the Future of Europe, particularly if these are compared with more spontaneous assemblies taking place in the public space during moments of protest such as the during the Occupy movement, the Indignados movement or the Nuit Debout, let alone Tahrir Square or Gezi Park. Thus far, streaming into virtual platforms like Facebook or Youtube seems much more effective for amplifying individual political voices than conveying collective deliberation and its results, whilst online platforms such as Twitter or Tiktok may play roles for coordinating between (embodied) physical actions.
Eco-systemic, care-based and agonistic
Thirdly, the assemblies would consciously understand themselves in an eco-systemic set of relations, not only amongst themselves but as depending on and relating to a whole series of other relations, including care relations (in families, for example, or the people who are making sure the room in which they are meeting is well-cared for), relations with the climate, with other species, with institutions of state (health services for example, transport operators which enable getting to the assembly etc), with other parts of civil society. These relations need not always be harmonious or consensual – like ecosystems, and particularly at bordering regions between eco-systems (ecotones), they will also often be agonistic or involving tension, and that may be where they are most creative. The assemblies may refer to each other, refer to other bodies, agencies or organisations in their deliberations, and thereby develop its own planetary corpus of deliberations.
Permanent, dynamic and trans-scalar
Fourthly, the development of a planetary system of assemblies would be understood as a permanent, dynamic, living and trans-scalar collective endeavour. The idea of permanence of citizens assemblies does not point to them meeting all the time, nor of always having the same members – indeed, it is preferable for all the conventional reasons of avoiding vested interests, as well as maximising the number of people who at some point are involved in assemblies, that the members of an assembly change regularly. But permanence points
above all to the idea that the assemblies are capable of learning and developing, and are therefore dynamic endeavours. Assemblies may take on different scales and geographies, depending on the issue under consideration and whom it is most pertinent to include, depending on advocacy strategies of which sets of political institutions are most propitious and relevant to seek to influence. They could also take on different temporalities and reference frames, from exploring the alternatives that were implicit but unrealised in history, to considering today’s problems, to exploring alternative futures.
Performative and Precautionary
Assemblies with a planetary consciousness will be aware that they are always performative in several senses: a) that in assembling and deliberating one is acting b) that there is always another script, another set of characters, even another stage immanently possible to any assembly, and thus each deliberation is unique and contingent; c) that a good planetary assembly will attempt to give voice to, to include, beings which are not currently present, cannot speak, or have been silenced: and this will often require imaginative or theatrical performance. The planetary precautionary principle is intimately linked with this set of methodological considerations: the assemblies will be conscious of their own limits (of knowledge, of context, of inclusion) and so will make recommendations based on the principle of not overstepping these limitations, or a deliberated risk assessment of doing so.
A considerable advantage of this approach to the development of a planetary system of citizens assemblies is, I suggest, that we already have much of it in place. Citizens assemblies of one form or another have developed across the world significantly in recent years: in western countries as government initiated processes to deal with issues politicians do not know how to resolve, or as attempts to restore trust in politics, but also as formats used autonomously by protest groups and others. In Latin America and Africa citizens assemblies and panels have been used to include some of the poorest and most excluded in deliberations about the future of cities and constitutions of countries. Even in authoritarian China, citizens assemblies have been used for participative budgeting, for considering petitions and for urban planning.
Even more importantly almost everywhere across the world there are older sets of practices of assembly and of collective deliberation of one form or another. It seems to be important from a planetary point of view not to assume that every assembly must be held using the same methodologies. Most crucially the principle of ‘random selection’ and sortition based on statistical sampling as it tends to be practiced in government initiated citizens panels in the West is more culturally specific, but begins from an easily universalizable recognition of the limited nature of the ‘usual suspects’ involved in deliberation, and the attempt to propose a neutral, fair and legitimate selection process for who takes part: there seems to be no reason why these objectives cannot be attained in culturally specific ways – and indeed to achieve the local legitimacy of the citizens panel itself, would need to be. Part of the advantage of a dynamic citizens assembly ecosystem would be also to deliberate on these differences in perceptions of legitimacy.
Developed organically from, and in connection with, this translocal tissue of assemblies, a planetary assembly of assemblies could seek to transform the way global decisions are discussed, and ultimately the infrastructure of global governance as we know it. If it did manage to fulfil this role, it would communicate a form of power that is genealogically very different from the centralised statist form, its history of violence and extraction, and the institutions of international relations which has developed alongside this history. As such, planetary democracy may look and sound very different from national or global politics as we currently know it, perhaps much more like how we imagine people might sound in some of the more fantastic images we started with imagining and that alterity would surely be a sign of success.
Niccolo Milanese is a director of European Alternatives, and part of a team across civil society and academia working on developing path-breaking transnational citizens assemblies.