Climate Change and the Nation State: The Case for Nationalism in a Warming World - Hardcover

Lieven, Anatol

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0190090189 ISBN 13: 9780190090180

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2020

Synopsis

The climate emergency is intensifying, while international responses continue to falter. In Climate Change and the Nation State, Anatol Lieven outlines a revolutionary approach grounded in realist thinking. This involves redefining climate change as an existential threat to nation states - which it is - and mobilizing both national security elites and mass nationalism. He condemns Western militaries for neglecting climate change and instead prioritizing traditional but less serious threats.

Lieven reminds us that nationalism is the most important force in motivating people to care about the wellbeing of future generations. The support of nationalism is therefore vital to legitimizing the sacrifices necessary to limit climate change and surviving and the effects of it (some of which are now inevitable). This will require greatly strengthened social and national solidarity across lines of class and race. Throughout, Lieven draws on historical examples to show how nationalism has helped enable past movements to implement progressive social reform.

Lieven strongly supports plans for a "Green New Deal" in the USA and Europe. In order to implement and maintain such changes, however, it will be necessary to create dominant national consensuses like those that enabled and sustained the original New Deal and welfare states in Europe. Lieven criticizes sections of the environmentalist left for hindering this by their hostility to national interests, their utopian political naiveté, their advancement of divisive cultural agendas, and their commitment to open borders.

Radical and timely, Climate Change and the Nation State is an essential contribution to the debate on how to deal with a climatic crisis that if unchecked will threaten the survival of Western democracies and every organized human society.

About this title

About the Author:

Anatol Lieven is a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and a fellow of the New America Foundation. He worked as a British journalist in Pakistan, Afghanistan, the former USSR and Eastern Europe. He has commented on current affairs for leading journals including The New York Times. His books include Pakistan: A Hard Country; America Right or Wrong; Ethical Realism; Ukraine and Russia; and The Baltic Revolution, which won the 1994 Orwell Prize.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 0190090189
• ISBN 13: 9780190090180
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240