Governing the Future

Where does the authority of global government come from?

All forms of (human) Authority have this in common: they make possible the exercise of an action that does not provoke a reaction, because those who could have reacted abstain from doing so consciously and voluntarily.

-Alexandre Kojève

Current political discourse has a peculiar preoccupation with controlling the future. Hence, on the one hand we increasingly seem to be governed by deadlines: 2030 for the UN Sustainable Development goals; 2035 for the ending of sales of new petrol and diesel cars; 2040 for the making of cycling and walking ‘the natural choices for shorter journeys’; 2050 for ‘Net Zero’; and so on and so forth. And on the other hand, predicting, forecasting and modelling the future has become an obsession of government everywhere in the world, made most obvious during the Covid era (when ‘we must do X because, if we extrapolate from where we are now, Y will result if we do nothing’ became the governing structure of our entire lives), but evident across the piece, with climate change being the most notable example.

Clearly, whenever anybody plans anything, or indeed takes any action at all, they have in mind that the results will manifest themselves, definitionally, in events that are yet to pass. But I aim to show here that there is something deeper at work in contemporary government’s fixation on the future, understood not merely as a bunch of stuff that will happen, but as a something that is itself to be governed - measured, analysed, and acted upon so as to be improved. The obsession says something vitally important about the nature of governing authority in our age. And also, as I will show towards the end of this piece, it helps us to critique that authority, and imagine that other possibilities may emerge.

‘A better, more sustainable, peaceful future for our people and planet’

Let us begin, then, with a matter that is particularly apropos.

It would, of course, be to engage in tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorising to suggest that representatives of the world’s governments would ever all get together at a gigantic shindig in New York in order to discuss how they are going to transform global governance. But it just so happens that, as I am writing this post, representatives of the world’s governments are, well, all getting together at a gigantic shindig in New York in order to discuss how they are going to transform global governance.

The event is called the Summit of the Future, and it promises to ‘forge a new international consensus on how we deliver a better present and safeguard the future’. One result, amongst other things, has been the adoption of a Pact for the Future, which sets out how ‘the Heads of State and Government, representing the peoples of the world’ will ‘protect the needs and interests of present and future generations’ at ‘a time of profound global transformation’. And annexed to this is nothing less than a Declaration on Future Generations, which commits to ensuring that said future generations ‘thrive in prosperity and achieve sustainable development’.

This all stems from a wheeze dreamed up in 2021 by the current UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, called Our Common Agenda - essentially a plea for the continuing relevance of the United Nations in the mid-21st century. The idea here is that, by billing COVID-19 and the ‘climate crisis’ as a watershed moment or ‘inflection point’ in history akin to the Second World War, it will be possible to reinvigorate the organisation - and, in particular, revamp the way its constituent bodies are financed (that issue, funnily enough, arises again and again and again) - by presenting humanity as facing a choice between ‘further breakdown and a future of perpetual crises’ or a ‘breakthrough to a better, more sustainable, peaceful future for our people and planet’. The message, then, is pretty transparent: since, without the UN, a ‘future of perpetual crisis’ beckons, wouldn’t it be a jolly good idea for the UN to continue to exist, and ideally be more lavishly funded?

The Summit of the Future was always intended to be the capstone for Our Common Agenda, and would ideally produce an ‘outcome’ of some kind that could be pointed to in order to evidence its success. Sure enough, it seems like some sort of a consensus has emerged, one of the results of which being the aforementioned Pact for the Future; from what one can gather, there were a few holdouts (Belarus, Russia, Syria, Iran, North Korea, and so on), but in the end more or less all UN members are nominally signed up.

As one would expect given the title of the event, the central theme of the Summit of the Future, and the Pact, has been - you’ve guessed it - the future. And here I must give you fair warning; you’d better get used to the word ‘future’, because you are now going to have to read it a lot. On the first two pages of the final text of the Pact for the Future alone I counted ‘future’ appearing on 17 separate occasions; a quick CTRL-F search reveals it appears 88 times in the document in total (although some of these will just be headings and subheadings). The future, in other words, gets mentioned a very great deal, and the word begins to lose all meaning in the face of such repeated use.

Thus, we are told, Heads of State and Government are coming together in New York ‘to protect the needs and interests of present and future generations’; the multilateral system and the UN, we hear, ‘must be fit for the present and future’; the Pact itself, we learn, will help ‘deliver a better future for people and planet’; the 75th anniversary of the UN is described to us as an opportunity for reinvigoration so as to ‘ensure the future we want’ based around ‘the well-being of current and future generations’; the drafters proclaim their confidence that they will soon be on track towards a ‘better and more sustainable future’; we are warned that, if we don’t pull our socks up and eat our greens, we will lurch into the aforementioned ‘future of persistent crisis and breakdown’; and so on.

And the substance of the Pact is relentlessly future-oriented. Everywhere we encounter things being ‘transformed’ and ‘renewed’; at every turn we are told to welcome the prospect of ‘progress’; we are bombarded with talk about ‘paths’ and ‘steps’ and ‘road maps’, about ‘building’ and ‘striving’, about ‘acceleration’ and ‘keeping pace’; we are continually reminded that ‘nobody will be left behind’. The image that is painted is one of continuous and endless advancement towards an idealised set of objectives: nothing may stand still, and the past is an irrelevance - the only thing that matters, the Pact seems to suggest, is where we are going and how we will get there.

As I earlier mentioned, it is one thing to declare intentions, which will ineluctably concern the future; it is quite another to treat ‘the future’ itself as a site of government, to be manipulated, disciplined, re-made, or re-shaped. And it is the latter, rhetorically, that is indeed what the Pact of the Future and its Annexes seem to be doing. These documents do not merely set out a policy agenda. They reify ‘the future’ almost as another reality or world - one into which we are about to step, and which we will be able, with the right amount of knowledge, foresight, skill and predictive capabilities, to mould in advance, as though we are all architects planning the refurbishments of the dream home which we will shortly inhabit.

Hence, the Pact’s agenda describes something akin to a heavenly end-state, in which poverty is ‘eradicated’, hunger ‘ended’, gender equality ‘achieved’, a ‘just and lasting peace’ built, ‘freedom from terrorism’ realised, and so on. Where a problem cannot be simply made to go away, the image that is presented instead is one of careful and continuous management: a Tocquevillian ‘vast and tutelary power’ which ‘defuse[s] tensions, seek[s] the pacific settlement of disputes and resolve[s] conflicts’; ‘restore[s], protect[s], conserve[s] and sustainably use[s] the environment’; ‘seize[s] the opportunities associated with new and emerging technologies and address[es] the potential risks posed by their misuse’; and so on. A future is thereby constructed in which everything is known in advance and accounted for, and every foreseeable problem provided with a remedy before it happens; it is, as it were, nothing other than the end of contingency as such, forever and ever, amen.

The Summit of the Future and the contents of its outcome document, then, dovetail nicely with developments in modern governance in the round - both in the domestic and international spheres. We see in them emerging something akin indeed to a doctrine, or theory, of the future as something that has a concrete existence that we can know, and carefully shape, if only we have the sufficient knowledge and expertise. This transforms the future from a great unknown into something more akin to a blueprint or schema, waiting to be unfolded and, thereafter, realised.

Founding, conserving, and expanding dominion

What explains this almost neurotic focus on a reified future? And why does it matter? The answer to both of these questions is complicated, but important, and I ask you to bear with me while I sketch it out.

In earlier posts (such as this one), I have described modernity as having brought with it the understanding, thanks to the Scientific Revolution, Renaissance and Enlightenment, that the world was not just a staging post on the way to rapture, but something possessing its own independent existence, and therefore with the potential to be acted upon. This meant it became possible to imagine that mankind could indeed improve the world (and its own moral awareness). But at the same time, due to precisely the same series of intellectual developments, the position of the ruler itself became problematised. While the medievals may have been content to understand the ruler’s status as natural or pre-ordained, to the modern mind the ruler was, to use Michel Foucault’s word, in a position that was ‘synthetic’ - not natural or pre-ordained, but indeed unnatural and contingent: something to be analysed, questioned, challenged, and even over-thrown.

It followed, due to the confluence of these developments, that the modern State emerged as an answer to the question of why it is that government should exist, and endure, across time - it was a set of governing practices that governed the world precisely so as to justify its own status. Being ‘fragile and morally questionable’, temporal power was driven to govern on the basis that it was necessary for it to do so, in order that it should be able to continue to exist. Thus we find emerging the concept of raison d’Etat: government as rationalisation for what Giovanni Botero (1544-1617) referred to as the ‘founding, conservation, and expansion of dominion’.

And, as I have elsewhere explained, in our current age, it makes sense to cast the emerging sphere of global governance in roughly the same terms. As the institutions of global government are themselves ‘fragile and morally questionable’ for the same reasons as the State institutions are in modernity, and as the ‘founding, conservation, and expansion of dominion’ will therefore in parallel be their obsession, it becomes easy to agree with Foucault’s description of the State as merely an ‘episode’ in government - and to identify global government’s likely preoccupation to be the same as that of the modern State: i.e., rationalising its own existence. This - following Phillip Cerny - is what I tend to call raison du monde, the globalised equivalent of raison d’Ètat, understood as that form of reason which justifies the practice of global governance.

From all of this, we glean a description of modern government itself - whether in the domestic or international plane - as being carried out in conditions of contingency, and without firm foundation. And we thereby gain an understanding of governing in the modern sense as being driven by the needs of contingency: government in whatever guise is performed in the interests of dominion as such, because modern dominion is always, as it were, ‘synthetic’ and lacking in natural or theological justification, and therefore driven to simply govern in order to survive.

The authority of the ‘intelligent’ over the ‘unthinking’

This is all well and good, but perceptive readers will perhaps have realised that this is all really to foreground the problem of authority. The medieval sovereign possessed authority because his position was fixed, and reflected the position of God in the universe and the father in the family. It was pre-ordained (which is not to say, of course, that it did not come with its duties and obligations). The modern State, being ‘synthetic’, does not, and cannot, possess authority in these terms. And nor, by extension, of course, can global government. Therefore we must consider the problem of authority as being at the heart of modern anxieties concerning raison d’Ètat, and indeed raison du monde.

Holed up in Vichy Marseille in 1942, the Russian émigré philosopher Alexandre Kojève wrote an odd, but illuminating, paper concerning these matters, available nowadays in English in book form with the title The Notion of Authority. It was never published in his lifetime and he certainly did not intend for it to become public; it was apparently circulated quietly to figures in the French government of the day. It is therefore a highly discursive and schematic text, and it is at times difficult to figure out what sources the author is referring to. But in it we find an exceptionally important section which sheds light in particular on the future as an aspect of political reason as I have here described it.

Kojève, having set himself the task of ‘knowing what authority is as such’, begins by categorising historical theories of authority into four types. The first puts ultimate authority in God, from whom all other forms of authority derive; this is the position of the medieval scholastics, to which we have already alluded. The second bases authority on what is just, or right; this, Kojève associates with Plato. The fourth theory situates authority in the relationship between master and slave - he who has authority being the one who is ready to risk his life to be recognised, while he who is a slave being the one who has chosen submission over death; this theory of authority is that of Hegel.

It is the third theory of authority, though, which is of particular importance for our purposes, and that, Kojève tells us, is the theory of Aristotle. Here, the justification for authority is based on ‘wisdom, knowledge, and the possibility of anticipating, of transcending the immediate present’ - on, that is, having a grasp on the future, as opposed to merely the now. And this leads quickly to a rapid ‘phenomenological’ account of Aristotelian authority, in which, Kojève tells us (the eccentric capitalisations are his):

[T]he Master has the right to exercise an Authority over the Slave because he can anticipate, whereas the latter only notices immediate needs and is guided exclusively by these. It is therefore, if we like, the Authority of the ‘intelligent’ over the ‘unthinking’, of the ‘civilised’ over the ‘barbarian’, of the ‘ant’ over the ‘grasshopper’ [this is presumably a reference to Aesop], of the ‘clear-sighted’ over the ‘blind’.

This, he goes on - remember, this is being written in 1942 - to say that it is this form of authority which accounts for the ‘the dux, the Duce, the Führer, the “political leader” [sic], and so on’.

This requires some unpacking. What Kojève means is that this form of authority is predicated on the ability to see further than others; it is a justification for being in charge that is based on being the only one who has a clear project in mind, and therefore the only one who is in a position to give orders. In such a situation, those who do not have a project, or who are not able to give orders, fall into line -and are willing to cede authority if they accept that they ‘see less well and less far’. And Kojève uses a very simple illustration of this:

A band of kids gather to play. One of these kids proposes to go and steal apples from the orchard next door. Immediately, by doing so, he casts himself in the role of the band’s leader. He became this leader because he saw further than the others, because it was he alone who thought out a project, while the others did not manage to get beyond the level of immediate facts.

It will be immediately seen that, in this aspect at least (Kojève was at pains to make clear that this was only indeed one element of the very complex makeup of the modern State), modern government - with its special interest in the future - reveals a strongly ‘Aristotelian’ streak in the terms in which Kojève here represents it. Modern government, as we have seen, derives its authority from the fact that it sees further than the people - it knows, or can predict, the future - and from having a project in mind for responding to it. I know, government says, that if (say) a particular virus is allowed to spread unchecked then X-million number of people will die, and I know how to act so as to forestall that outcome. I have, to repeat, a project, and you - the population - will cede authority to me on that basis. It is really just a glorified variation on children stealing apples, but just with a very large band of children and something much bigger at stake than the baking of a pie. Phenomenologically, then, it is clear that Kojève was onto something.

But it is his - very short - description of the conditions within which this form of authority emerges that is of particular interest. Here, he seems to emphasise that this means of establishing authority is a feature in particular of the very earliest and most primitive forms of rule, and indeed can be understood as the most elementary basis for human political organisation in the crudest sense:

[E]verything suggests that the first ‘true’ leaders emerged in the same manner: a band of ‘Masters’, ‘aristocratic brigands’, rally around a Leader who proposes a plan for a raid; and he is invested with an absolute Authority as long as the execution of his project lasts: he is a ‘dictator’ or even a ‘king’.

And it will immediately be seen that here we get a very clear understanding of the characteristics of human authority in, as it were, the state of nature - where somebody who happens to have a claim to be able to see further and who therefore has a project in mind stakes his claim to be in charge. And it will likewise be seen that this is a plausible account of what human authority looks like phenomenologically, and of the basic pattern or structure upon which it rests, when every other justification has been stripped away. When there is no theological basis for authority, or legitimation through the dispensation of justice, there is only really might-makes-right (which is not really authority so much as coercion) or the ‘Aristotelian’ appeal which Kojeve stakes out: I should be the one who governs, because I can see the future and have a plan to respond to it, and you do not.

From this, we are given an important insight. The modern State, and the global governance system, for all their purported sophistication, are in many ways driven to derive their authority from the least sophisticated basis of all: seeing far, and claiming that the ability precisely to project themselves and their followers forward into the future is a legitimate ground to boss everybody else around. And this goes a long way to explaining why it is that the future is such an obsession for our leaders - whose framework of governance, let us remind ourselves, is ‘fragile and obsessive’ (as, again, Michel Foucault put it), and lacking any justification for its authority at all save for the highly contingent claim to be governing effectively. In the end, all that this boils down to is the logic of the children and the apples, although of course it is presented in much more high-falutin’ terms than that: ‘forg[ing] a new international consensus on how we deliver a better present and safeguard the future’, as the Summit of the Future might put it.

As schematic as they may be, then, Kojève’s comments on the phenomenology of his ‘Aristotelian’ theory of authority are highly apposite for our current governing moment, showing to us why it is that seeing the future and claiming to have a hold on it has become so important, and why it is that in particular government in modernity should slide so easily into this modality - deriving from its lack of legitimacy, its lack of grounds, and its lack of any moral or principled justification for its status. This alone makes these comments worth paying attention to.

But, as promised, revealing the logic of the authority of modern government in this way also opens it up to potential avenues of critique. And this leads us to two further, I think valuable, reflections in closing.

First, we are hereby provided with a clear understanding of why it is that, at both State and global level, the world’s governing classes are so concerned about the spreading of ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’, and countervailing narratives in general. If one derives one’s claim to authority from the ‘fact’ that one knows the future, then it obviously follows that one will jealously guard that privilege by denying to anybody else the capacity to suggest that the future may look a little different, or may indeed be uncertain. And this suggests that it is through alternative appeals to authority - on the basis of spiritual/theological derivations, or on the basis of a properly worked-out theory of justice - rather than just competing ‘projects’, that genuinely alternative models of government will emerge. Conservatives, take note: merely having a different idea about how to steal apples from the orchard, or some ideas about different games to play on a sunny afternoon, is not in itself enough. What is necessary is a competing basis of authority entirely to the one that modern government currently rests upon.

Second, we also gain an understanding of how it is that our contemporary governing model will come to an end. If one’s authority rests on seeing further than everyone else - on knowing the future and having a project to realise within it - then it only takes the future turning out differently for one’s position of authority to collapse like the proverbial house of cards. And we can all, I think, see this playing out in real-time all around us. Those who govern us are continuously telling us: a) what the future will look like, and b) how they intend to govern it. As the future turns out to be very different to the picture they have painted, and as their projects to govern it come to naught or dissolve into disorder, then we will inevitably see new and better patterns of government emerge - it cannot be otherwise, though it may take longer than any of us would wish.

The Summit of the Future is very important, then, in telling us a great deal about what the future has in store: uncertainty, mystery, struggle, hope. None of these, ironically enough, are contained in the Pact for the Future itself. But they lie in store nonetheless, taking into account what the text represents: the least sophisticated and most childlike form of authority of them all, and therefore the most likely to be ultimately superseded.