The World Space, or Our Intertwined Lives. Interview with Frédéric Ramel
It's a fact: we cannot conceive of our lives outside this planetary space that we all share. What we do, how we vote, what we buy have effects that we often don't realise, and often at the other end of the planet. It's staggering, and the resurgence of populist regimes within democratic states shows us that some people are turning in on themselves, on their territory, on their nation-state, in order to think they can get away with it. The textbook Espace mondial (World Space), written by Frédéric Ramel in collaboration with Aghiad Ghanem, illustrates the profound interdependence of social, environmental, security, and political issues. We asked Frédéric Ramel for an interview.
Who is this textbook aimed at?
It is aimed first and foremost at students taking the “Espace mondial” course in the third semester of the Collège universitaire at Sciences Po. This course has been a great success on all campuses, being the most popular choice among the subject courses offered by the institution. It will also be available to undergraduates for introductory courses on international relations in the Political Science and Law faculties. But beyond students, I would also say that the book is aimed at all those who wish to gain insight into the international issues of our time.
The composition of the book itself offers a variety of entry points: through the graphic and cartographic representations, through the inserts, through the themes of the chapters. In other words, it is aimed at anyone with an interest in international relations.
How is the book organised?
Like all the textbooks in the Avec Sciences Po series, Espace mondial is based on the twelve sessions of the six-month course. Like the first two volumes, published by Nicolas Delalande and Blaise Truong-Loï for nineteenth-century history, and by Florence Haegel forpolitical science, readers will find the original "to read, to see, to listen to" sections, which aim to diversify related teaching materials beyond the usual bibliographies.
For my part, I have adopted four sequences, each made up of three chapters, to punctuate the teaching process: contextualisation, structuring, regulation, and tension (between the closed and the open).
As well as presenting the tools that enable us to grasp the world, the first section looks at the characteristics of the world space, which is both unequal and unbalanced, and at major changes in the international system. The main features are the compression of space, due in part to the extractive industries, and planetisation, which corresponds to a gradual collective awareness of the fact that we live on a single planet. In other words, this first part describes our planetary condition.
By describing different relationships to national borders, the second part looks at three major processes that are helping to shape the world in which we live:
- the stateisation of the world—modern states are the architects of international relations, placing at their heart the principles of sovereignty and independence;
- the transnationalisation of the world—from multinational corporations to non-governmental organisations, organised crime and even ordinary individuals, who are also meddling on the world stage; and
- the regionalisation of the world—the very experience of international relations begins with interactions between neighbours on the same continent, but also with the presence in these regional spaces of intergovernmental organisations whose public agenda has been enriched since the end of the Cold War.
The search for a common order and rules lies at the heart of the third part, whether to regulate globalisation or to establish peace. Focusing on the dynamics of cooperation, competition, and war, this central section also and above all enables us to assess the role of military power and the current reshaping of rivalries between states. While military relations remain a central aspect to be taken into consideration, they do not exhaust the multiplicity of forms of confrontation.
The final section looks at the tension between closure and openness in international relations. It draws on Bergson’s The Two sources of morality and religion, in which he distinguishes between two positions: that of the closed, which limits our moral duties to the group to which we belong, and that of the open, which transforms them and extends them to humanity as a whole. Through the prism of identities, religions, and our relationship with the environment, I examine the dividing lines that not only are taken up by national states but also go beyond them. These dividing lines fuel cultural differentiation in the way we experience our allegiances and beliefs, and in the way we view our relationship with nature. While these divides do not necessarily lead to armed conflict, they do generate controversy and struggle, as in the case of whether or not climate change is admitted.
I have also taken the liberty of innovating in this book, by using an image at the end of each chapter, sometimes inspired by a work of art, which is intended not to summarise the argument, but to offer an original perspective on the theme being dealt with: the “dice” for rivalries between great powers, or the “drop” for identities (with the work of Bill Viola ), for example. The aim is to suggest a variety of ways of understanding international, global, and even planetary phenomena.
This video presents the work He weeps for you, 1976 by Bill Viola.
You write that our lives are increasingly interconnected, through links that often go beyond us, in this world space. Is this global space a network? How would you define it?
T
he idea of network is very stimulating for our thinking. It has been used in a variety of ways in the discipline of International relations, particularly since the 1990s. However, it is not the key concept from which I approach the world space.
When I talk about increasingly interconnected lives, I have two targets and a metaphor in mind. The first target corresponds to the billiard ball model often used by realist approaches to international relations. They think in terms of exclusively military balances of power. The second target is the opposition between internal and external affairs. Such an opposition is based on the idea that national frontiers send back to back the world of the good life inside states and the world of survival outside. These two targets do not take into account the interweaving of phenomena in which we evolve.
This interweaving (or the idea that our lives are increasingly intertwined) supports the metaphor of weaving. Our actions, more or less explicitly, create threads that lead to a tightening of the issues we face. There are many examples. Let's mention just a few: the ecological transition is leading to greater exploitation of natural materials, which is increasing both our dependence on energy and our ecological degradation; the development of obesity now affects all societies, including those in the South, which are exposed to an increasingly standardised and degraded food supply; the outbreak of an inter-state war between Russia and Ukraine, or the war between Israel and Hamas, exposes the rest of the world to a series of consequences from the energy, strategic, and military points of view, but also quite simply from the political point of view (from university campuses to the political life of third countries). The neo-populist currents in democracies and the neo-sovereignist foreign policies that emerge when their leaders come to power offer one response among others to this intertwining: withdrawal. This is further proof that what happens inside and outside nation-states cannot be pitted against each other. For here, the blows to multilateral cooperation from these currents are fuelled by phenomena within national societies, such as the erosion of the economic conditions of the middle classes in Western European countries.
More specifically, you mention two particularities of the world space. It is being shaped by a process of planetisation; and it “makes” a global society. Can you elaborate on this analysis and give us a few examples?
Globalisation, understood as the abolition of distances, has been and remains a process from which world space is analysed. By mobilising the notion of planetisation, and even more precisely what I call “planetary winding”, I am seeking to detect a different process from that of globalisation. Planetisation is less about distance than about time and the world as such. It takes the form of a convergence of national histories into a single history, that of humanity living on the same cosmic star. The planetary approach is not limited to recognising the various forms of degradation of our natural environment. It is also based on the experience of wars with multiple properties, on exposure to globalised sounds and music, and on the emergence of a “sense of the Earth” that takes into account the plurality of living species.
Planetisation is not an unequivocal process. It is the subject of controversy. While some players admit it and promote the habitability of the Earth, others reject it and remain attached to representations of world space that are not planetary, but "global". These representations favour the sustainability of development, or even a reinforced extractive policy. What's more, planetisation interferes with the rivalry between the great powers, which are broadening their strategic agenda by emphasising controlled interconnectivity (e.g. the Belt and Road Initiative led by China), access to common spaces with a view to reaping the benefits (the conquest of space in which private players are involved), or by shaping minds through scientific and educational programmes offered outside their territory by dedicated institutions. Together with planetisation, I am also mobilising the notion of the noosphere (or "sphere of the mind"), which, when it first appeared in the writings of the Russian geochemist Vernadski and the palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin, was an initial way of thinking about the entry into the Anthropocene, although it was not the term in use at the time. Added to the existing layers that make up the biosphere, the noosphere is a geological force in its own right. Protecting this noosphere is no easy matter, as is the deterioration of humanitarian aid, or its militarisation through manipulation or digital interference.
The world space is not just a place for interaction, whether between states or between players of different kinds. It is a "world society". This idea is at the heart not only of the research programme of the English School of International Relations, but also of approaches inspired by the sociology of international relations, whatever the traditions of thought that animate them. Making a world society means taking into account the varied roles of civil society actors (a more or less robust mechanism for inclusion in the decision-making processes of intergovernmental organisations). Building a world society also means examining the principles, values, and rules that are mobilised, used, circumvented, or flouted. In other words, examining the ways in which states, alone or with other actors, seek to regulate behaviour. Chapter 3, which closes the first part on the planetary condition, takes multilateral cooperation as an example. Multilateral cooperation seems to have lost its way as a result of the current strategic downturn. By looking beyond the tip of the iceberg, and drawing on recent collective research carried out in particular by GRAM, the Groupe de recherche sur l'action multilatérale (Guilbaud, Petiteville, Ramel 2023), I suggest a different perspective that helps to qualify the idea of a crisis in multilateralism. From this point of view, the ICC's recent decision to confirm the arrest warrants against the leaders of Hamas, as well as against the Israeli Prime Minister and Defence Minister, illustrates the existence of this world society with regard to the application of the law of armed conflict and international humanitarian law.
One of the current challenges of "creating a world society" is also to take into account the points of view defended by non-Western states and societies. The debate on post-colonial approaches in International Relations is based on an epistemological critique: that of IR as an "American science" (Hoffmann [1977] 2001), described as a hegemonic discipline. The textbook Espace mondial describes these controversies and the way in which the search for the common is carried out in such a context: the adoption of foreign policy postures inspired by pre-modern traditions (see the chapter on "the competitive game between great powers"), measures for the restitution of cultural property (see the chapter on "identities"), and the Africanisation of security (see the chapter on "security in the era of the Anthropocene").
You refer to the concept of Great Acceleration when thinking about the modern world space. What can you tell us about this?
The Great Acceleration is a thesis developed mainly by climate historians who focus on the post-1945 period (McNeill and Engelke 2014). The acceleration, on the other hand, is much broader. Here, my purpose is to import the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa's (2010) analysis of modernity into International Relations. In discussing the theses of modernity, which emphasise commodification (Marx), rationalisation (Weber), and individualisation (Simmel), Rosa considers that there is also, and above all, a character specific to modern societies: their stability lies in an untimely increase aimed at putting the world at our disposal, controlling it, and exploiting it. Acceleration is therefore not just a historical process of a climatic nature. It is also the result of a certain relationship with the world that goes back to modernity itself, to the end of the Middle Ages, and which of course intensified with the Industrial Revolution. Reading Espace mondial from the point of view of the acceleration of the world offers two advantages. The book places the transformations of this space in the long term, i.e. beyond the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It also provides a stimulating lens through which to view the current divisions between the players involved in this acceleration, which is not limited to the climatic consequences of one type of economic production. It is also a way of relating to the world. States, companies, and other societal players are adopting a variety of positions with regard to this acceleration of the world: it should be reinforced, channelled, or opposed.
The emblem of Sciences Po is the lion and the fox... The textbook includes two new animals, which complement the strength and cunning embodied by the lion and the fox: the nightingale and the tortoise. What are their characteristics and how do they complement our two quadrupeds?
This was a decisive point in the discussion with the director of Les Presses, Julie Gazier. I agreed to take on this project on condition that the bestiary was expanded! It may seem anecdotal, but for me it was really fundamental. Why was that? The nightingale evokes delicate song and, more broadly, sensitivity, emotion, and imagination. As for the tortoise, it embodies ancestral wisdom, serenity, and, above all, the close link with longevity. By including them in the textbook, I wanted to show that while strength and cunning are of course always present in the global arena, other phenomena are emerging and need to be taken into account in the analysis. The sensitive on the one hand, and the planetary on the other.
The presence of these two new figures is justified for two additional reasons. Firstly, these four animals also symbolically evoke the four elements: the lion's fire, the fox's earth, the nightingale's air, the tortoise's water. How can life itself—and politics—be envisaged without their alliance? Secondly, the nightingale and the tortoise add verticality to the horizontality of the lion and the fox. The turtle's anchoring and attachment to the planet, the nightingale's elevation and appeal to the imagination. Every day, teachers and students enter our school via the porch where this emblem stands. It implicitly refers to Machiavelli and the debate on virtue, advising those in power to sometimes behave like animals in politics, whereas the Ancients, and Aristotle in particular, rejected such a distortion of action. Including a nightingale and a tortoise is not just a matter of cultivating our "inner child" (something that younger generations sometimes find hard to do). It is also, and above all, about not considering force and cunning as the only coordinates of politics. In a way, this assertive choice is in line with a remark made by Bruno Latour in a note on the future of research at Sciences Po in August 2007. For him, "Sciences Po remains in the public mind a high-level professional school. However, none of the school's traditional subjects develop in the long term without a profound renewal of concepts, methods, theories, practices and sensibilities" (Latour 2007: 6).
I would like to thank Julie Gazier for following me along this path, as well as Aghiad Ghanem, who contributed to the writing in the same spirit of shifting accents. Not to imagine new cities that have never existed, but to enrich our understanding of world space in this nascent third millennium...
Interview by Miriam Périer, CERI.
References
- Hoffmann S. [1977] 2001. “An American Social Science : International Relations” in Robert M.A. Crawford and Darryl S. L. Jarvis (ed) International Relations – Still an American Science ? Towards Diversity in International Thought. New York, State University of New York Press, pp. 27-52.
- Guilbaud A., Petiteville F. Ramel F., eds., Crisis of Multilateralism? Challenges and Resilience. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
- Latour, B. 2007. "L’avenir de la recherche à Sciences Po, mémo destiné à la direction de Sciences Po," August.
- McNeill J. Engelke P. 2014. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. Cambridge, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
- Rosa H. 2010. Alienation and acceleration. Towards a Critical Theory of Late Modern Temporality. NSU Press.
Illustrations
Photo 1: Aerial view of a timber storage area in the Amazon rainforest. Photo by Tarcisio Schaider for Shutterstock
Photo 2. Beijing, China - 1 October 2016. Photo by testing for Shutterstock.
Photo 3. Student demonstrations in Paris, 01 May 2024. Photo by Pierre Laborde for Shutterstock
