By
Griffin Thompson
Africa-Press – Eritrea. As the Russian-Ukraine war stretches into prolonged conflict and the Israeli-Hamas war viciously spirals into cross-border conflicts, a Manichean narrative of good vs. evil is used to explain their politics. In similar fashion, US administrations continue to adopt a dualistic frame of sovereignty vs. servitude when explaining our departures from the world stage. This binary framing is a lazy reflex—despite its lost luster in the decades-long conflicts in Iran and Afghanistan. Policy makers, the media, and the public should demand more creative interpretations of the political challenges engulfing us and a more textured understanding of the chaotic waves of reality swirling about us. The stale dualism that frames current global challenges is the latest example of our flaccid political imaginations, tragically hindering our collective ability at governing such turmoil.
Today’s challenges call for linguistic and cognitive tools that open the aperture of our collective imagination so that we not only offer the proper diagnosis of the ills that surround us but, just as importantly, design a governance pathway to a re-envisioned future. We suggest one such tool that may serve as leaven for a new forward-leaning public discourse that is both explanatory and normative.
One way out of the stagnant dualistic framing is the adoption of the principle of the Reconciling Third, or the Rule of Three. This heuristic involves developing a chain of thinking whereby one concept contributes to the development of a second idea, ultimately concluding in a third, more refined and opulent concept. Cynthia Bourgeault explains: “…this third concept is an independent force, coequal with the other two, not a product of the first two as in the classic philosophy of ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis.”
From Cartesian to Quantum Reality
Central to our thesis is the necessity of moving beyond conventional binary alternatives—local vs. global, democratic vs. authoritarian, and left vs. right—and embracing more variegated forms of thinking and governance.
Social scientists, especially in economics and political science, have long suffered “hard science envy.” Mirowski, for example, noted, “The Marginalists appropriated the mathematical formalisms of mid-nineteenth-century energy physics… made them their own by changing the labels on the variables.” Liberal democratic thinking has been based on a mechanistic image of human nature and, by extension, a mechanistic epistemology of politics.
Today’s political reality requires solutions drawn from a different cognitive frame than that which guided us in centuries past. The complexity of a rapidly evolving technological juggernaut and its unknown political and economic consequences can no longer be comprehended by the billiard ball and pulley and lever metaphors of the Cartesian world view. Similarly, our governance structures, spawned from the starting point of a Hobbesian state of nature and designed by the mechanical engineering mentalities of Madison, Keynes, and Kennan, are proving singularly incapable of keeping up with today’s global challenges. It seems that Schrodinger’s cat yields keener insights to today’s reality than Pavlov’s dog ever hoped to.
The dynamics of globalization that have been transforming social, political, and economic conditions over the past several decades are as complex in nature as they have been confusing in effect. Speaking for an ever-growing cohort of thinkers recognizing the inadequacies of yesterday’s epistemological models, Yaqing Qin highlights the centrality of relationality. “Thus, for any individual actor [nation state, corporation, governor, citizen, consumer, mayor, etc.] to make a decision, the precondition is always that she is an actor in relations…. Whether her action is rational or not, instrumentally or normatively, depends on what type of relationship she has or defines with the specific other toward whom the action is taken. It is the nature of social relationships that defines what is rational…. In an interrelated world, the relational context is very much like an invisible hand that informs and guides an actor as to what action to take.”
What follows from this focus on context and contingency, or, in the language of quantum theory: entanglement, complementarity, superposition, and uncertainty – for decision making (individual or collective), is the need to widen the vision of our multiple relationships, thereby expanding the perspectives that are considered in any action. The tunnel vision of the Trump Administration, guided by the “either/or” dualism of “us vs. them,” tragically constricts our vision, blinding us to how we can authentically effect our national self-interest.
This leads us to the architectural task of designing governance structures suitable to the 21st century. Here again our visionary muscles have atrophied into conventional national vs. local and domestic vs. foreign binaries. The torrent of essays hoping to serve as North stars delivering us from the wasteland of today’s political dysfunctions frequently point in two diametrically opposing directions: greater reliance on global multilateralism or a return to the halcyon days of national isolationism, local charters, and town hall meetings. To be honest, most offered palliatives eschew a strict “either/or” recipe, but most are still lacking in any full-throated endorsement of a creative “both/and” alternative.
A dominant strand of response for governance to today’s turbulence espouses strengthening our multilateral institutions and global regimes. Be it global climate change, planetary pandemics, or artificial intelligence, arguments call for reinvigorated multilateral governance structures. Rising from the ashes of World War II, this liberal internationalist approach argues that global challenges require global decision-making authority. Calls for versions of a Hobbesian Leviathan reinforce authoritarian yearnings that are mounting across the globe.
Conversely, but in more muted tones, are two versions that recoil from such supranationalist exhortations. One version, draped in isolationist and populist nationalist hues, seeks to recapture nation-state sovereignty and resists calls for ceding any such authority. The second version infuses the concept of sovereignty with the empirical test of pragmatism, claiming that subnational jurisdictions are often the source of solutions to global challenges. The former version clings to the Westphalian orthodoxy of nation-state primacy, while the latter espouses the ideals and realities of polyarchal governance and the virtues of localism.
Linguistically jarring terms such as “glocalization” and “fragmegration” have appeared to describe the simultaneous centrifugal and centripetal forces of proffered solutions. Benjamin Barber captured the roiled forces of governance and its contrapuntal dynamics almost thirty years ago in his Jihad vs. McWorld. Barber uses the two terms to juxtapose the parallel forces of local struggles for self-determination and autonomy based on ethnic and cultural identities (Jihad) and the global commercial influences that effectively harmonize regional differences through product commoditization and consumer conformity.
Kaleidoscopes, Nexus Diplomacy, and the Rule of Three
There is no question that political and economic power is shifting geographically and demographically. Everywhere we look, we find competing axes of power, nationally and internationally. Our diplomacy is conducted through interlocking orbits of cooperation from bilateral to plurilateral to multilateral. But the policy lessons learned at each tier of governance are infrequently communicated with the others, thus negating their replicability and effectiveness.
More broadly, we continue to treat each level of government as if each were hermetically isolated from the other. When in fact, decisions made at each level invariably affect both the higher and lower authorities’ abilities to execute solutions to any problem. Decisions made at the WTO or UNFCCC, for example, affect not only the nation-states represented at these bodies but also city councils, state legislatures, and regulatory bodies not represented. Conversely, local jurisdictions consistently serve as laboratories of experimentation testing policies and programs, the results of which are frequently ignored by higher spheres of authority. In other words, using Quantum vocabulary, all levels of political jurisdictions are invariably “entangled” with the others. Why for example, aren’t mayors and governors included in national delegations to such negotiations as WTO, UNFCCC, and other multilateral policy making bodies? Politics and jurisdictional jealousy are the simple answer, an answer that should no longer be tolerated.
Given the growing importance of cities and the rather dismal record of supranational processes, it is reasonable to propose that we attach greater importance to how cities can supplement, but not supplant, the existing Westphalian cartography of the nation-state hegemony. Instead of relying only on a strengthened multilateral governance architecture, we should be designing ways to integrate the creativity and pragmatism of local solutions to the problems that beset us nationally, regionally, and globally. Conversely, we need to design institutional ways to connect the successes at the local levels, wherever they are found, to inform local action across the globe as well as the pluralistic experiences multilateralism can bring to bear. The global trends of urbanization and the trends of political and economic decentralization underscore the importance of pursuing more blended forms of governance.
We can envision a governance architecture, drawing on the Rule of Three, that sufficiently acknowledges the legitimacy and value of each individual tier of decision-making from the local to the global, while seeking to construct the all-important connective tissue between the tiers. An illustrative metaphor would be the kaleidoscope which for our purposes is an extension \(the “reconciling third”) of the microscope and the telescope. Thus, we develop a more variegated perspective of a reality by combining the attributes of the microscope (subnational and national) with those of the telescope (supranational), which yields the prismatic views of the kaleidoscope. As we move from the local to the global to the blended, we adopt the qualities of each tier yet transcend that tier unto a more insightful understanding of our reality. Like a kaleidoscope, policymakers can dial in the appropriate policy measure from whatever perspective is relevant.
One illustration of how relationality can be expressed in policy making bodies occurred during the Obama Administration in its efforts to address climate adaptation and resiliency. In 2013, the State, Local, and Tribal Leaders Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience Task Force was established through Executive Order. Task Force members, including city, state, and federal officials from both political parties, met to find ways to make our country more resilient to the effects of climate change. Central to their findings was the need for “vertical and horizontal policy alignment.” Members at each level of government found multiple examples of how regulations and laws at one level inhibited progress on climate adaptation and resilience at other levels of government.
This failure of vertical policy alignment is found to be a common problem in most policy areas. Relatedly, it was found that various federal agencies often promulgated conflicting programs and regulations internal to other federal-level actions. Successful policies are frequently evident at each level of government; it is the lack of connectedness, built on the ignorance of relationality, that is the source of inadequate implementation. Disjointed and disconnected policies and programs, both horizontally and vertically, thwart innovative solutions.
Siloed sectoral policies and isolated governance jurisdictions must give way to a blended conceptual landscape governed through overlapping spheres of authority. Siloed diplomacy, in other words, must yield to “Nexus Diplomacy,” animated by the understanding that reality is relational, and solutions are born of and implemented by an interconnected network of practitioners and citizens. It is a proven fact that solutions spawned by differing perspectives, diverse orientations, and pluralistic experiences are more effective, more efficient, and more equitable.
Nexus Diplomacy is based on the recognition that all things are connected biophysically, geopolitically, and diplomatically. The 21st century is defined by “networks” and “connectivity,” yet our governance structures are atomistic in nature. Our geopolitical challenges are best met through integrated thinking, and our bilateral and multilateral diplomatic relations must be grounded on conceptual and political linkages.
This new vision asks us to pay tribute to and benefit from the multiple spheres of authority that currently punctuate the policy landscape. The Rule of Three acknowledges the shifting political topography of international affairs where foreign policy and security affairs are the purview of multiple actors—public and private, at multiple levels from the cities to multilateral agencies. While we continue to live in the Westphalian world of nation-state sovereignty, seepage of such sovereignty to cities, states, provinces, civil society, and corporations is increasingly apparent. Our foreign policy actions need to better reflect such diffusion of authority and power. President Trump proclaims that Washington is broken; he is correct. He can fix part of what’s broken by adopting a kaleidoscopic approach to problem solving while advocating for a more enlightened vision of tomorrow.
moderndiplomacy
For More News And Analysis About Eritrea Follow Africa-Press
