The Greening of Machiavelli

The Evolution of International Environmental Politics

Tony Brenton

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367221249
• eBook ISBN: 9781000007107
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

First published in 1994. Environmental issues present a daunting challenge to the international system. The destruction of the tropical rainforest, the Chernobyl explosion and the ozone layer 'hole' all underline the transnational nature of environmental threats and the need for states to act together in order to tackle them. How have such environmental issues entered political agendas in different parts of the world and how has that affected national positions? Can governments ever reconcile their own national interests with the international cooperation needed to deal with transboundary issues such as climate change?

This book traces the history of international environmental negotiations and regulations and looks at the domestic policies upon which cooperation in the international community depends. It covers some major milestones in recent history, from the Torrey Canyon accident through to the Rio 'Earth Summit' and the emergence of the European Community as a major international environmental actor. It also looks at cross-cutting issues such as the role of non-governmental organizations, the environmental impacts of world agriculture and trading arrangements, industry's attitudes, and the relationship between democracy and environmental protection. It concludes by examining how the international system has adapted, and may adapt further, to deal effectively with environmental problems, and reflects on the implications of this for the future.

Chapter 1

Introduction

A man who wishes to act virtuously in evety way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. Therefore if a prince wishes to maintain his role he must learn how not to be virtuous.

NICOLO MACHIAVELLI

1.1 The new agenda

The purpose of this essay is modest, and largely personal. I worked on international environmental affairs, first in the European Community and then in the British Foreign Office, from 1986 to 1992. It was a good time to be there. I travelled the road from acid rain through the ozone layer to global climate change, taking in such picturesque detours as theN orth Sea, Chemobyl, and global deforestation.

For a conventional diplomat such as myself this was novel territory. Traditionally the business of diplomacy has been to manage the external relations of states. Internal affairs were rigidly excluded from consideration (indeed, the Charter of the United Nations explicitly prohibits the organization from interfering in the internal affairs of member states). But the environment was part of that fast-growing area of international business known at that time as the ‘new international agenda’ which also included such issues as human rights policy, drugs and AIDS. These are subjects on which internal policy and external policy are inextricably mixed. The solution of a domestic problem of, say, river pollution or rising drug addiction requires action at the international level; and international agreements on, say, human rights norms are explicitly intended to affect internal arrangements in the states involved. The model of interaction among states was evolving from the collision of billiard balls, which touch only at a single point and do not change shape, to the mingling of immiscible oils on a glass surface where the whole shape and form of each component can be altered by the pressure of the components around it.

The emergence of this ‘new agenda’ of course reflects the enormous growth in recent decades of interdependence between states, and in particular of interdependence on matters other than the traditional political and security concerns that have hitherto dominated international relations. For example, over the past 40 years the proportion of the world’s products traded internationally has more or less doubled and the absolute value of international trade has increased more than tenfold. Many more people are moving between countries (over the past 15 years the number of air miles travelled annually has tripled and the number of refugees has increased by a factor of six).¹ National currencies have largely drifted out of the control of their individual issuing governments and merged into a single unified global market with a turnover which is estimated at over $1 trillion per day.² A less widely advertised, but politically perhaps even more significant, area of growing international inter-penetration is that of transborder data flows. The impacts of this phenomenon have so rapidly become global commonplaces that their novelty and long-term impact are in some danger of being forgotten. But such developments as, for example, the emergence of CNN, the ubiquity of Yes Minister on the world’s one billion television sets, and the inability of the Chinese government to keep the news of Tienanmen Square, or the Soviet government the news of Chernobyl, from their respective peoples plainly have profound significance for the future shape and viability of particular national political regimes (notably those that have relied heavily on news management for their survival) and distinctive national cultures.

1.2 The environmental debate

The environment has formed a significant component of this new international interpenetration and interdependence. It is by now a truism, but also true, that many forms of pollution do not stop at frontiers. We will see below in some detail how growing human numbers and rising levels of economic activity have produced environmental consequences which are regional or even global in scale and which require international action to tackle them. The radiation from Chernobyl fell on 21 countries. Acid rain is now a continent-wide phenomenon in both Europe and North America. No single country is responsible for the decimation of the world’s whale stocks, and only international cooperation can create the conditions for their regeneration. Climate change is global in both its sources and its impacts.

¹ L. Brown, M. Kane and E. Ayres, Vital Signs 1993–1994, Earthscan, London 1993.

² P. Kennedy, Preparing for the Twenty-first Century, Random House, New York 1993.

One striking aspect of this new subject matter is that, again unlike more traditional foreign policy subjects, it has been the source of intense domestic political controversy. In the UK, such issues as the Middle East dispute and the Falklands war caused relatively little domestic political argument. The dumping of nuclear waste and the control of power station emissions, on the other hand, have led to epic, and enduring, political rows. These disagreements, moreover, go beyond discussion of particular pollution issues to a quite profound ideological cleavage as to the true extent of the environmental threat that faces us, and the extent to which our lifestyles will have to change to meet it.

One striking aspect of this new subject matter is that unlike more traditional foreign policy subjects it has been the source of intense domestic political controversy. The dumping of nuclear waste and the control of power station emissions have led to epic, and enduring, political rows.

One point of view, which has been espoused throughout Western Europe and the US by green movements and environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs), holds that quite dramatic changes are needed in the resources we consume and the effluents we produce if human prospects are not to be seriously endangered by global environmental degradation. A persuasive array of statistics is offered to support this view. World population is increasing by about two million people a week; the world’s tropical forest, which covers about the same area as the US, is diminishing by the area of Florida every year; one-third of the world’s cultivated surface has been degraded to some degree by human agriculture; and the earth’s climate is now changing at the fastest rate seen for 10,000 years. Jonathon Porritt, a leading British environmental campaigner, has written: ‘The earth has just about coped with one billion people living a western, materialistic lifestyle. There’s not a hope in hell that it will cope with five or six billion, let alone ten or eleven billion, subscribing to a similar fantasia’.³ Such views cannot be dismissed as those of a radical and unrepresentative minority. The current Vice President of the US (not a position one generally reaches by being radical and unrepresentative) has, for example, called for the rescue of the environment to become ‘the central organizing principle for civilization.’⁴

This school of thought has taken up a haunting parable, put into circulation by Garret Harding (who ascribes it to an earlier author), known as ‘the tragedy of the commons’.⁵ The image is of a group of herdsmen grazing their cattle on common land. All know that the addition of an extra cow to any herd increases the pressure on the common. But that cost is shared among all the herdsmen while the profit from keeping the extra animal accrues to its owner alone. Thus each herdsman gains from every extra animal he keeps, and will add to his herd. With Sophoclean inevitability the herds expand, the common is overexploited, its agricultural worth exhausted, and the way of life of the herdsmen themselves destroyed. The application of this story to national ‘commons’ of, for example, clean rivers and pure air, and to the ‘global commons’, such as the oceans and the global atmosphere, is plain. Left to themselves, profit-maximizing individual users (in the nation-state case) and self-interested nation states (in the international case) will expand economic activity, knowing that the consequent polluting emissions will be dispersed among all, while the economic benefit from the extra production will be confined to the producer alone. Thus, inevitably, emissions will rise and the environment in which they are deposited will degrade, ultimately to the point where our prosperity, and even survival, may be at risk.⁶

³ J. Porritt in J. Porritt, ed. Save the Earth, Turner Publications, London 1991.

⁴ A. Gore, Earth in the Balance, Houghton Mifflin, New York 1992.

⁵ G. Harding: ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science, 162, 1968 pp 1243–8.

⁶ I use the word ‘parable’ deliberately. Much of the rest of this book is intended precisely to explore the question of whether the earth really faces a tragedy of the commons. A number of authors, notably E.E. Ostrom (Governing the Commons, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1990) have pointed out that even at the primitive local level epitomized by Hardin’s herdsmen there are cases, e.g. of common meadows in Switzerland and shared water rights in Spain, where the users have managed to establish arrangements to avoid the overuse and ultimate exhaustion of the resource.

In its international application this forecast of environmental destruction of course draws heavily on a tradition in political thought most popularly associated with the name of Machiavelli. It was he who urged ‘the Prince’ (in contemporary terms, the nation-state government) amorally to pursue his own interests, and expediently to set aside any concern for the global good. In fifteenth-century Italy the product of such politics was an era of warfare and betrayal among petty statelets, which accordingly neglected the very real external dangers they jointly faced until they were consumed by them.

On the other side of the environmental argument, John Maddox, editor of Nature, has written of the ‘pantomimic wave of overreaction to some of the supposed dangers of environmental contamination’. This view has been widely echoed in sober and intelligent newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and the London Economist. Indeed, given the extent of public concern about environmental issues, it is striking how dismissive well informed and thoughtful people remain about the whole environmentalist case. They will accept that particular incontrovertible instances of pollution and its effects such as London’s ‘killer’ smogs, oceanic oil slicks, or even the hole in the ozone layer, require urgent action. But they are much more sceptical about the general thesis that a radical change in relationship between mankind and nature is required if disaster is to be avoided. They point out that the environmentalists’ trend lines to disaster take no account of the technological and other developments, which have regularly falsified such predictions in the past, for example in the case of Malthus. The gloomy predictions are flatly contradicted by experience in the West, where in many ways the environment is getting not worse but better, and where government action to tackle particular environmental problems is a regular event. Indeed, many will argue that political concern on the issue is grotesquely out of proportion to its true importance, partly because of sensationalist media coverage. During the late 1980s, when popular environmental concern was approaching its peak in the UK and throughout the West, I regularly heard such doubts about the objective justification for the popular frenzy advanced at high-level meetings on the subject, both inside and outside government.

1.3 Aim and Structure of this essay

This essay is an attempt to chart a course between these two points of view. At the time I was directly dealing with the subject matter I was uneasily aware of the tension but had no leisure to explore the issues in any depth. A sabbatical year from the Foreign Office, spent at Harvard, gave me that leisure. The central theme which I have tried to address is the extent to which environmental politics, particularly at the international level, has produced an adequate response to the environmental challenge. Are national governments and the international system doing enough to tackle the environmental problems that confront us?

This is plainly a question with a scientific component. But it is by no means exclusively, or even predominantly, a scientific question. The simple model according to which scientists identify a threat and governments act to solve it has emphatically not been the pattern of international environmental activity over the past 20 years. Even when scientists are agreed on the nature of the problem (and on many environmental issues, especially the large ones such as climate change, they are often far from being so), the route to remedial action is a long one. Governments have many other considerations, notably of economic impact and domestic public acceptability, to take into account in framing their responses. Thus, while I have included some description of the science relating to the various issues where that has seemed necessary, the bulk of what follows is devoted to a history of international environmental issues from their first great eruption on to the political scene in the 1960s up to the present day. I have not endeavoured to be encyclopedic, but simply to cover the principal waystations with some explanations of their significance. Like most other items on the ‘new international agenda’ much of the international activity is incomprehensible without some understanding of domestic environmental politics, which I have also, therefore covered at some length.

The history, and the implications drawn from it, are intended to be objective, and indeed my own views have shifted (in a markedly more optimistic direction) in the course of the research that has produced this book. Nevertheless, on territory so strongly ideologically disputed objectivity is a slippery concept (some would say a chimera) and it is therefore only fair to readers to forewarn them of where I stand. First, I prefer to follow Machiavelli in avoiding judgements as to whether the world’s current economic and political ar rangements are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. I am more interested in the practical question of how, given these arrangements, we can best tackle the environmental problems that face us. Second, I think of myself as a moderate (or, in current parlance, ‘light green’) environmentalist. It is difficult to work for any period of time in the field without being persuaded that the noxious byproducts of industrialization and economic development constitute a direct threat to future human health and prosperity unless vigorous action is taken to contain them. Moreover, this threat is now of sufficient magnitude to constitute one of the central challenges currently facing national governments and the international system. I am not, however, persuaded that we yet face an environmental crisis which will overwhelm us unless we make very rapid and dramatic changes to our lifestyles and aspirations. Third, I am an unreconstructed anthropocentrist. I can see the importance of other species and the ecological balance for the survival and amenity of mankind. But I see no basis for ‘dark green’ environmentalist contentions that they have any intrinsic value over and above this. If a starving sailor were trapped on an island with the last dodo, I would support his right to eat the dodo for dinner.

1.4 The role of the state

The emphasis of this book is very much upon the action of states. This may seem paradoxical. The emergence of the ‘new agenda’ is plainly a symptom of the diminishing autonomy of the individual nation state. Governments are decreasingly able to set their own exchange rates, control population movements across their borders or prescribe what television programmes their people should watch. It is therefore worth asking whether a history of international environmental action which focuses on government policies and attitudes doesn’t miss the point. Maybe the real...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Summary and Conclusions
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. The Birth of Environmentalism
• Chapter 3. The Stockholm Conference
• Chapter 4. From Stockholm to Rio: Domestic Developments
• Chapter 5. From Stockholm to Rio: International Developments
• Chapter 6. The Road to Rio
• Chapter 7. Climate Change
• Chapter 8. Biodiversity
• Chapter 9. UNCED: The Preparations
• Chapter 10. UNCED: The Conference
• Chapter 11. The Future
• Index