The 2024 UN Pact for the Future outlines a brave plan for a new world order. Its ideas are not new. The plan echoes the Brandt Commission on the North-South issue in the 1970s and the Carlsson-Ramphal Commission on global governance in the 1990s. Will political...
The future as progress The belief that the future is progress broke through with the French revolution and the enlightenment philosophy that paved its way. Before that, a cyclical time perspective had prevailed since antiquity. Cyclical time had a political...
This essay argues for a new universal meta norm in a time when there is no convincing grand narrative. The point of reference is the UN universal human rights declaration in 1948 and the de-essentialising postcolonial debate around key concepts like hybridity,...
Herfried Münkler, Welt in Aufruhr. Die Ordnung der Mächte im 21. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Rowohlt 2023. (“World in Turmoil. The Order of the Powers in the 21st Century”). The beginning is drastic. The promises of the future as progress that characterized the idea of...
Jonathan S Blake and Nils Gilman, Children of a Modest Star. Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises. Stanford, Cal: Stanford University Press 2024. This book sets the bar high in its ambition to radically rethink the present world order based on sovereign national...
The discourse around globalization sped up in the 1990s. It was a strong expression of the remaining impact of the nineteenth-century narrative on how Europe civilized and modernized the world. Europe was capitalism and democracy as ever-expanding forces for the...
