What Nationalism and COVID-19 Tell Us About The Climate Emergency
When conversations about global warming crop up in our living rooms, our workplaces, and around our kitchen tables, we tend to leave out a formidable guilty party: nationalism. The scarcity of international climate action has been attributed to everything from corporations to capitalism to laziness, all while nationalism hid, pulling the ropes backstage. At its very core, nationalism is a boundary-building process. The creation and cultivation of a distinct national identity requires narrative-builders, like elite social casts and national governments, to emphasize exclusivity. A clear-cut group identity or nationality mandates distinction between who is “in” and, more importantly, who is “out.” Research shows that we need a combination of major investments in new renewable technology, high market prices on fossil fuel emissions, and ensured mutual-destruction treaties to reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses in the Earth’s atmosphere (Nordhaus, 2022). But despite all of the global agreements made in the last three decades––the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, the Copenhagen Accord of 2009, and the Paris Climate Accord of 2015––international cooperation is failing, over and over again, to make even a dent in the worsening reality of global warming (Maizland, 2022).
One major root of this failure is what economists call the “free-rider” problem, when members of a group attempting to solve a collective action problem are incentivized to “free-ride” and reap the benefits of others’ efforts without helping to pay the cost (Olson, 1965). When countries neglect to do their part in cutting global emissions, they can still reap the benefits from countries that are actually pulling their weight. It is impossible to exclude a noncompliant country from enjoying the results of another nation’s reduced greenhouse gas output––we all breathe the same atmosphere––so there is no real incentive for any singular nation to take the lead on drastic climate action. This is the nature of voluntary participation: all climate action is optional because there is no global organization powerful enough to impose consequences on non-participants. Nation-states, each with their own vested interests, identities, cultures, and executive organization, answer to no one but themselves. The only method experts have come up with to beat this climate “free-rider” problem is some sort of major mutual destruction agreement between the United States, the European Union, and China––the largest CO2 polluters with the economic and political power to do something about it. But between diplomatic tension and the rivalry between the U.S. and China splashing regularly across our headlines, such a deal seems far off (Freidrich, 2020).
A useful way to frame the relationship between nationalism and climate policy is to look into the world’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. On a surface level, the two issues look remarkably similar: neither COVID-19 nor global warming recognize international borders. They affect us all, regardless of what corner of the world we call home. Looking deeper, if we examine the international response to COVID-19 as a precursor to climate change in the next few decades, the situation is bleak. As the senior fellow at Carnegie Europe in Brussels Stefan Lehne tells us in his piece “What the COVID-19 Pandemic Tells Us About Climate Change and Diplomacy,” nationalism flourishes in an atmosphere of fear. When COVID-19 hit, “across the world, nations turned inward.” He explains further, “protecting one’s own citizens trumped all other concerns, and xenophobia proliferated” (Lehne, 2021). Many countries saw major increases in anti-Asian racism, prejudice against immigrants and refugees, and blatant discrimination against Black and brown communities (Milano, 2021). Especially in Western nations, the sentiment was clear: if you did not match the image of domestic “identity” prescribed by nationalism, you might be carrying the disease. On a global scale, this “turning inward” meant that nobody standardized their disease prevention policies, so COVID-19 took a needlessly devastating toll on human life. Like Lehne describes, “geopolitical rivalries deepened and multilateral cooperation and institutions suffered from the pervasive spread of the nation-first mindset” (Lehne, 2021). As with the climate crisis, nationalism damned them all. If we are to take anything away from the international response to COVID-19, it’s that true global emergencies are exacerbated—not reconciled—by nationalism.
So where does that leave us? If every nation-state defines “self-preservation” as protection for only those who match the exclusive identity standard set by elite social castes and national governments, how can humanity ever put the brakes on the climate crisis? Stefan Lehne hit the nail on the head in his condemnation of nationalism: “An approach based on keeping insiders safe and outsiders out, by its very nature, breeds national egotism. Global warming, by contrast, imposes the opposite logic. No nation can be safe unless all relevant players act together” (Lehne, 2021). The terrible truth of the matter is that all relevant players will not act together until they feel climate change as an apocalyptic threat to the preservation of their curated “identities,” at which point it will be far too late. Unless fossil fuel emissions from the Global North drop immediately, and by enormous margins, a 2 °C temperature increase will be upon us around 2060 (Vetter, 2022). This is not to say that ameliorating the crisis is impossible––in fact, action depends on a certain degree of hope––but with nationalism playing a major role in foreign policy, it is improbable. Climate change knows no borders, so nationalist sentiments cannot coexist with effective solutions. We have to work together if we hope to make it out alive.
References
Friedrich, Johannes, et al. “The World's Top 10 Emitters.” World Resources Institute, December 10, 2020. https://www.wri.org/insights/interactive-chart-shows-changes-worlds-top-10-emitters.
Lehne, Stefan. “What the COVID-19 Pandemic Tells Us About Climate Change and Diplomacy.” Carnegie Europe, October 26, 2021. https://carnegieeurope.eu/2021/10/26/what-covid-19-pandemic-tells-us-about-climate-change-and-diplomacy-pub-85643.
Maizland, Lindsay. “Global Climate Agreements: Successes and Failures.” Council on Foreign Relations, Council on Foreign Relations, November 4, 2022. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/paris-global-climate-change-agreements.
Milano, Brett. “With Covid Spread, 'Racism - Not Race - Is the Risk Factor'.” Harvard Gazette, April 23, 2021. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/04/with-covid-spread-racism-not-race-is-the-risk-factor/.
Nordhaus, William. “Why Climate Policy Has Failed.” Foreign Affairs Magazine, February 10, 2022. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2021-10-12/why-climate-policy-has-ailed?utm_medium=promo_email&utm_source=lo_flows&utm_campaign=registered_user_welcome&utm_term=email_1&utm_content=20221201.
Olson, Mancur. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and The Theory of Groups. Harvard University Press, 1965.
Vetter, David. “Earth Stands '50:50' Chance of Passing 1.5 Degrees Warming Within 5 Years.” Forbes Magazine, May 11, 2022. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2022/05/10/earth-stands-5050-chance-of-breaking-15-degree-barrier-within-5-years/?sh=55d5f2f3302a.