From Critical Theory to Planetary Politics; Rethinking Power, Knowledge and Ecology – A conversation with Ian Manners

For episode six of this season, “Global Governance Beyond Neoliberalism”, we had the pleasure of hosting Ian Manners, professor of political science at Lund University. Manners has decades of experience in teaching in Denmark, Britain and Sweden and is widely known for his work on normative power, European integration, and global politics. His research explores how values, identities, and political norms shape international relations and governance beyond traditional state-centered approaches. 

Through his conversation with our host, Hagen Schulz-Forberg, Manners delves into the role of norms and values in global governance at a time marked by geopolitical tensions, democratic challenges, and planetary crises. This episode invites listeners to rethink the relation between Europe and the wider world, not only through a lens of institutional coordination but of global interdependence.

Academic Reference: 

Ian Manners, Hagen Schulz-Forberg; From Critical Theory to Planetary Politics; Rethinking Power, Knowledge and Ecology – A conversation with Ian Manners. Global Perspectives 29 June 2026; 7 (1): 162775. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2026.162775

This podcast was created and produced by the Research Center for New Critical Politics and Governance (CPG).

To watch the video version of this episode, please visit the link below:
https://cas.au.dk/en/cpg/podcast/mapping-the-planetary

Transcript

Hagen: Welcome to Planetary Choices. In this season, we're looking at questions of global governance beyond neoliberalism. And arguably, we're facing a lot of issues today with geopolitics going a little crazy, the problem of the climate crisis looming and questions of governance and legitimacy really in the center of how to understand the international world.

And I guess it's also clear that the national and the international are co-constructing and are

in mutual crisis today. And who better to talk to than to Ian Manners, who for many years, decades even, has been trying to understand exactly these kinds of crises, the interaction between a crisis of ideas, a crisis of organization and governance, and polity building constitutionalism, as well as all sorts of social communication that we need to understand if we want to understand national and international, transnational relations. Ian is a professor of political science at Lund University. He has given us, as I said, many interesting concepts to think with and it's just wonderful to have you with us, Ian.

Ian: Great. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

Hagen: You’re welcome. Let me start out by asking you how you got into all this business of trying to understand the world as complex as it is through, I should have said earlier, the European Union as kind of your most favorite test case.

Ian: Yeah, I mean, it's a long and strange story. I studied international studies in the US. I came back to London and studied American studies. I worked briefly as a trainee for the BBC. And during that time, the Cold War ended and everything I knew was wrong. And was the EC going to survive? Who knew? So I thought, OK, I've seen some very interesting events happen. End of the Cold War, the Gulf War, change of government in the UK, what led to the birth of Maastricht and the Maastricht Treaty in the European Union. So I started by writing my PhD on what changes the end of the Cold War had meant to the EC, then EU.

And I covered five different case studies because it seemed to me interesting to five really different and totally unconnected areas of EU policy, ranging from climate change, from asylum and immigration, from enlargement of the EU support for democracy, and from the idea of a European defence and security policy. And during that time, it just became clear to me that existing theories and existing ways of thinking about international cooperation needed to change with the times, as did the institutions themselves. So I started to try and theorise what did it mean to be an EU? Why did the EU come about? And that was the basis of my PhD in the early 90s. But it wasn't a fulfilling strategy. It needed time, understanding the EU and the EU in its global context at the time then. It took maybe 10 years of reflection before I came to a sort of a solution that I felt comfortable about, which was what was it that drove the EU and the European corporation. And initially I played with Pierr Bourdieu's ideas of symbolic interaction, symbolic power. And then round about the end of the 90s, it became quite clear that I could use ideas taken from other types of transnational cooperation, particularly the role of NGOs, transnational organisations, who didn't use physical power. They didn't even have economic power. They had the sort of the power of the belief, the idea. And I just took the breath. That will be normative power. That will be what you…

Hagen: I don't want to reduce you, of course. That was an article you came out 20, 25 years from now.

Ian: Yes, at least. 

Hagen: But it's been with us and it's been a very... it's been a catch-up. But yes, so it's that normative power that if we read you correctly, that kind of binds together those five policy fields and maybe even more. So it would breathe this kind of connectivity into those various policy fields. So normative power, Europe, is one thing. I'd love you to elaborate on how you look at it today, 25 years later. What's left of the early form of normative power that you discerned then in the 90s, early 2000s, which wasn't a very different phenomenon from then it is today, I guess. I would argue that. And also maybe we could branch out a little bit from the EU's normative power to the role of the EU in the world as it is today, in the international governance today. 

Ian: Two great and very interlinked questions. I think if you treat normative power as many, I suppose, do and don't perhaps get the irony in the title, normative power is a contradiction in terms. How can you be both normative and powerful at the same time? And the answer is no, you can't. One is the antithesis of the other in a conventional way of thinking about power and normativity. But my intention was always, and I hope it's become clear, but as most people only read the article and nothing else. If being normatively powerful involves taking actions together, then it's as important today, in fact, more so than it was back in the 90s. If you think that taking actions together isn't EU member states or EU transnational groups or EU parties or advocacy groups or NGOs, it is in fact all of us have some incredible challenges that were unimaginable in 1989, 1990. But today, the fundamental challenges across the planet really require thinking beyond one particular actor, whether it's a regional integration organisation, even whether it's the UN, if it's the Society of States, to think how do we take actions together that aren't international politics, aren't conventional understandings of power, are self-empowering, but are in fact us empowering, and by us I mean everything. And I think here in the year 2026, thinking through and beyond conventional understandings of power is an absolute prerequisite for the conversation about, for example, how do we address climate change? How do we address economic inequality? How do we address social injustice? How do we even start to think about international conflict and intranational conflict, which is escalating across the world? And how do we deal with this in a political system which is de-democratising very, very rapidly? And for that, I think normative power becomes an essential stepping stone to thinking differently, not just about the inaction of power, but also about international politics as a field of thought.

Hagen: Well, I couldn't agree more, but let's pick this apart a little bit if you allow me. So when you mention normative power, let's say hands-on power, more direct power, I'm thinking of course about the militarisation of politics these days. And so arguably the European Union is also forced to do that, and there's a whole wave of investment into armaments and the whole Ukraine-Russia war is of course the reason for that. So how do you see a normative power framing this move, just this policy field as such? What will be the normative power of the EU in that situation?

Ian: For a scholar of the EU who's studied the EU since it was the EC, it is simultaneously an astonishing moment in the study of European integration and a deeply worrying one at the same time. Because suddenly the EU has become inordinately popular amongst its own citizens, amongst its member states, amongst accession countries, you know, an Icelandic referendum, a Norwegian referendum, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia. The former Yugoslav succession states or successor states, everybody wants to join, not just for political reasons but for security reasons.

Hagen: Let’s see about Georgia.

Ian: Yes, no, inevitably. Let's see about all of these states. And so on one hand, this is incredibly interesting. The developments on the defence side and the security side are super interesting. One component of my PhD was on the development of a defence component to the EU, absolutely unimaginable in the 1990s. Why would you? You know. And one of the reasons I chose it, it was utterly separable from the other case studies, the other four case studies. Each one was independent. There was no overlap. And so, you know, here we are, as you say, 25, 30 years later, and suddenly these things become interesting. But they're also deeply worrying at the same time because does it then mean that we have, and people assume this to be the case, we've given up on the economic or civilian power of the EU, that that's no longer important, that we've given up on the EU as a champion of democracy, human rights, rule of law, of the green transition, of equality, of solidarity in an international sense, that those elements which people presumed were the starting point for a conversation about normative power have been dumped in favour of, well, it's security stupid. What's the question? Yeah, it's security stupid, but it's also a lot of self criticism about can we really export all of these ideas? Well, we, is this not a little, you know, soft speaking colonialist voice telling the world how to democratise, how to do their human rights? But I think, you know, just to stop you there, that sort of assumption assumes that that's conventional power. We tell you how to live your life. But if you assume that normative power is taking action together, then people don't want democracy. And I don't mean at the national level, I mean at the sub-national, at the transnational level, should be taking actions together, irrespective of where they are located on the planet.

Hagen: Is that what you would call normative empowerment and shared communion?

Ian: To a certain extent, yes. Yeah. And the idea of communion then gets you beyond the idea of society or civilisation or nationhood towards an imaginary of what a better life could be like. And I think that's extremely important for for an academic or a scholar to help and

assist improving people's lives, not just analysing it, you know. So, yeah, I use the term communion in a non-religious sense to describe what I thought the EU is, but what other acts of sharing could be, which is somewhere between a sociological community and a political union. And it's a term that's established within the literature, particularly psychological literature, that gets us out of these kind of dichotomies of between, you

know, state versus federation.

Hagen: Yeah, federation. Exactly. What does it all mean? 

Ian: Unhelpful words and language to describe emergent forms of political action, not just in Europe, but across the planet, particularly driven by, I think, local or trans local solidarity and cooperation, which we are very poor at imagining. You know, we assume, oh, that's globalisation. No, it's not. It's something far more important. So, yeah, in that respect, normative, imperative, and it's part of the possibility of creating a different world and  different imaginary that gets us out of the roots that led to, for example, the Ukraine war or the Sudanese war or the Eritrean war, the Ethiopian war, the war in Gaza, the conflict in Venezuela. I think the international politics of the 19th century, based in nationalism and modernity and the function of that conflict hints us today. We can only imagine a world that way, or it's become commonplace to imagine. So the language of Trump or Putin or Xi or Modi sounds just like European empires of the past. And the EU has been very, very careful not to return to that past in its attempt to join the multifocal world.

Hagen: It's true. I sometimes catch myself thinking as well that this is an ironic situation in history when a lingo that used to be European is shared everywhere but in Europe. So there's a kind of... 

Ian: We hope…

Hagen: Europeanisation of the rest of the world.

Ian: Yeah. 

Hagen: Yeah. I understand it correctly by embracing these kind of understandings of a state, of a nation state, of who is the actor in global governance and who's not, whereas the European Union is trying to overcome this. Or is it really?

Ian: Yeah. Perhaps not. And let's think of the von der Leyen presidency, came into power wanting to create the new Green Deal, but actually has become a very popular leader because she's creating the new European state, in an ironic sense.

Hagen: Yes. But...Also because of this new competitiveness. I mean, we've changed from green transition to competitiveness if we want to group leading concepts. So green transition, yes sure, we talked about it five years ago, three years ago, we still want to kind of wrap that into, package it into the new EU. But now we need to be competitive and we need to be resilient. But mind you, it's not the good old neoliberal competition. It's to be competitive with the US and China. It's a different form of competitiveness that may involve industrial politics and subsidies and all that. What do you make of that? How do you see this policy in relation to the climate crisis in the green transition?

Ian: I mean, it is simultaneously making things worse and diverting, I think, our attention to the genuine roots of the challenges that we need to think when we're thinking more holistically and thinking beyond today and tomorrow and thinking to the day after tomorrow. I think the sort of the embrace in particular by this Commission and by this European Union of industrial policy focused on European champions, on securing in particular the materials and the technologies necessary to compete with, in particular China and the United States. Sounds so much like China and the United States, you then ask yourself, well, what is the European Union for? Is it simply to mimic other great actors? And there's a lot of people that believe that yes, that is what the European Union is for. But does it actually genuinely address some of the most serious challenges? I think it does. I think it pushes them off our attention span. And one of the advantages of the EU was its ability to formulate long term plans that went beyond the normal democratic cycle. So they weren't just five year plans. They were sort of, OK, the EU has a plan in 2010 to become net zero fossil fuel use by 2050. And that's a long term plan that is very difficult within democracies to enact or stick to because of the changing nature of government. So I think the EU has become sort of trapped by other people's rhetoric and the language of technology, of competitiveness, of the single market has sort of returned us a little bit back to 1992 and the Single Market Act, which is in itself was a desperate act of trying to rescue the integration project from the sort of industrial collapse of the 1970s and the 1980s, in particular in Western Europe and then eventually in Central and Eastern Europe.

Hagen: Let me zoom back a little bit on the terminology that you introduced so that you give a shared communion, but also what makes you go to normative power, that you have this urge in your work to come up with a terminology that helps you understand the complexity of what you're observing. Now, arguably, normative power Europe was built on or was necessary because there was a dissatisfaction with the existing theoretical language, which made you come to this terminology to grasp and, you know, inspiring many others by doing that. What is the role you have as a political scientist in there in developing theory in relation to society, politics, that you kind of identify with as you build your theories?

Ian: Very good. A great question, actually, and one that forces me to reflect. Let me just start by addressing one question which you've implicitly raised, which is normative power Europe. I tend not to use that phrase despite it being that I was having difficulty getting published anywhere. One of the challenges you face if you are trying to innovate conceptually and theoretically is it's very difficult to get published in the conventional world of mainstream.

Hagen: I can only agree with that.

Ian: So in the end, I was sort of forced to borrow the language of Hadley Bull and his critique of civilian power Europe and play with it in a way to introduce new conceptual innovations. In some respects, I think I regret using that term because I stopped using it within two years. But on the other hand, it sort of works, but in a worrying sense. But to come back to the question itself. I think it's really important if you are, and I self describe myself as a kind of critical social theorist, somebody that realizes the importance of a necessity of a critique of modernity and the knowledge and technologies that come with it. The ability of those that own the economy, to also own the politics, own the society and own the knowledge about those factors. I think the obligation as an academic, as a teacher, is to raise awareness as how we can engage in a critique. When the very textbooks we use have been funded by the people that want to believe one certain view of the world. And so in the broadest sense, for me, critical social theory is engaging in a critique of the actually existing world in order to help free up or emancipate ordinary people from the potential risks that come with that modernity. But I think there's a second side to that. And notions of critique or imminent critique, a critique of the claims made against the actual reality of people's lived lives, require a type of imagination. A very good scholar called Molly Cochran wrote about a pragmatist critique. American pragmatism is similar to European critical theory in the sense that it tries to get you to think of what might lay outside of your tools, or the master's tools, if we can use that language from post-colonial studies. And there you need imagination. You need to invent critiques and terms and concepts which people haven't heard of, like European communion or communion, the term itself, like normative power, which is alien to the way people are used to thinking. And in some respects, some of the terminologies that I'm now using to think beyond today's politics to the day after tomorrow, such as planetary politics or planetary organic crisis, are also part of that process. And I think both as a researcher and a teacher, just getting the world of knowledge and the world of students to think differently, to take a step, not backwards, but sideways, and to look at the field that they've been taught. Are you being taught what you need to know, or are you being taught what the discipline says the discipline looks like? And I think that's a tremendous weakness in contemporary academia. So my response to your question is, yeah, I think part of our job is to think differently at the same time as we think the same as mainstream academics and research.

Hagen: Could you expand a bit on your understanding of critique?

Ian: Yeah, yeah, okay.

Hagen: Super.

Ian: Yeah. I mean, for me, critique is an essential component that draws together a wide variety of what I would term critical social theories. There was a great book written in 95 by Craig Calhoun called Critical Social Theory that tried to do this. If he tried to do it today, it'd have to be a 10 volume set. So all the way from, let's say, materialist and Marxist historical materialist and gramscian and neo gramscian perspectives through to, let's say, more kind of Frankfurt School critical theory. Okay, we know about materialism, but what does the materialism do to knowledge and to culture?  Through to feminist critiques. Okay, we know about the material aspects. We know about the knowledge. What does it do to the production and reproduction of gender and gender roles and gender politics? Through to post-colonial studies. Okay, well, we know what it does about gender, but what about questions of race and power structures in a global sense, you know, the North, the global North, the global South and how they relate to each other. For me, what wasn't in that book and what is essential today is to add an additional dimension and we could, of course, talk about cultural studies and the role of Stuart Hall, or we could talk about critical race theory. Of course, if this is broadcast in the United States, we won't be allowed to talk about critical race theory, but…

Hagen: It will be broadcast.

Ian: Excellent. But for me, green or critical green theory is an essential component missing from existing debates that I think the center and the emphasis on the planetary has to bring main front and center into a critical social theory that's also about, okay, humanism, post-humanism. How do they work together? You know, not just materialism and post-materialism, humanism and post-materialism. And that would be a more complete spectrum. So when I talk about critique, I'm not just talking about questions of class. Or questions of knowledge, or questions of ownership, or questions of gender, or questions of race, or questions of coloniality. I'm also talking about questions of the environment and the planet. And so that's my broad understanding of critique and critical social theory beyond, let's say, 1990s understandings of what constitutes broadly critical social theory. 

Hagen: That's quite the palette of many colors. And I agree. I mean, you mentioned it yourself as you were answering my question. Some of the terminology you call it an understanding of today, that we need to think the human and the non-human together. And I will probably add a neo-humanist perspective to the post-humanism. There seems to be more hope in the ring of a neo-humanism, which would think those two together. So in Menbe and other authors in that direction. Now this organic crisis, that's another term you use. But before I'd like you to explain on that, let me see if I understood that communion term correctly. So communion, I think, in my mind, it opens wonderfully, because it goes against all those categories that you mentioned, state, federation, human, and the ones that we know. So communion would be a wonderful thing to study both national, local, transnational, global connections and networks, groups of people who would even study them in the online world, as in the offline world, or in the shared space between the online and the offline. So that communion can be studied, I guess, and it can also be foundational, you say, for a new form of governance.

Ian: Yeah, yeah, in some respects. Let's go back to a book I co-edited during the pandemic, a very interesting time to study communion on transnational solidarity.  Now the pandemic was one component, but green politics, refugee politics were other components of this. And for me, what was interesting was to study the EU in transnational solidarity, not as an actor, but as a component of it, where you could look at state to state solidarities, you could look at region to region solidarities and non-solidarities, of course. But I was most interested in transnational or translocal solidarities. And the action of people's around questions associated with the pandemic, which invariably meant communicating and forming a type of communion with people they would never be and would never know in a first-hand sense. But similarly, actions, and it was at the same time, I think, 2019, Fridays for Futures, Scientists for Futures, Direct Action Groups. And then finally, refugee support groups at the time were still popular. You know, We Welcome Refugees. I know this seems like a lost land of imaginary, but these were all...

Hagen: It feels like long ago.

Ian: It was long ago. You know, these were all acts of communion, mostly perpetuated by ordinary people who saw a sense of change and a change that the international system wasn't giving them, and a sense of solidarity beyond conventional understandings of communities as being local. So translocal is the best way, I think, of capturing that notion of communion. Yeah.

Hagen: And so now, ideally, that communion, that motivation to act in communion would be motivated by planetary concerns.

Ian: Yeah, that would be the hope. You know, if normative power is actions in concert with the other to address wider concerns, then communion is part of that action. But the terminology originally comes from Hannah, our own theorisation on plurality and agnostic, agonistic tensions between different groups engaged in political acts together. But I think it is a useful way of thinking about the merit of people trying to work together to address something that their community or their town or their region or their city or their state or their regional organisation or the international community, which invariably means a community of states in that sense, fails to see or cannot see because it's become unfashionable to do so. And I use that word, fashion, in a cultural sense, that we're living in a culture in which strategic autonomy, national power, the discourse of nationalism from when? The 1870s, the 1930s, the 2020s has become extremely fashionable and commonplace. And so for me, my teaching and my research is about imagining otherwise within that sense.

Hagen: Yeah. I'd like to know what you think of the claim that I talked to Michael Zurn the other day. And we were talking about nationalism as well. And he was, of course, so that's one side of the development that we are observing these days. And the other is the crumble of the - the detriment of global governance organisations based on what was called, you know, the rules based on. And he would locate the death of global governance in the Oval Office roughly a year ago when President Zelensky and President Trump had what was it a meeting?

Ian: No. 

Hagen: It was a basis. So what's your take on that strong phrase? You know, it's the death of the world, as we know it.

Ian: I mean, in some respects, he's right in a conventional sort of hate to use the word liberal, but what's understand internationally as a liberal viewpoint. That's correct. But if it was a rules based order based on the Oval Office, then it wasn't a rules based order at all. 

Hagen: from the beginning.

Ian: Let's have a rules based order. Let's have that conversation. You know, you wouldn't imagine creating global governance by having 10, 20 allies in a room somewhere in San Francisco dreaming up the rules for everyone else to follow when they eventually gained independence. That's not a rules based order. That's, in some respects, a type of hegemony.

Hagen: You mean, of course, you know, in the mid 40s when you're sure there was a continuation of all power structures at the birth of the United States.

Ian: And, you know, if you want to witness the problem in the Oval Office, it's the problem of having veto states dictate what goes on in Ukraine when Ukrainian people have very little say in this practice. And that's commonplace across the world. You know, the list of conflicts that I raised earlier, inevitably have veto states, veto players either saying, oh, we need intervention and we can do it or forget it. We don't care about your conflict. There's no rare earth minerals in your country, sorry, or there's no petroleum in your country. Genocide it is, you know, being nonspecific here for very good reasons. But it worries me that we're giving up on a system that wasn't very global governance in the first place. If global is used as a terminology to describe the human world in that sense, then I think something far better should have materialized, particularly around about the early 1990s when the frozen system of international power that was a function of the Cold War period should have been unfrozen. And yet it's interesting. And of course, I look on the UK or France or United States or China as Russia as being countries that were still happy to continue with freezing that order. So to then claim that they speak for, you know, a liberal order that's gone and that's, you know, a bad thing or a good thing is just ultimately hypocrisy. But my concern is right. You know, what replaces it isn't better than what went before. And so I think there it is right to feel a sense of loss. Well, at least there was something there before that at least made an attempt to address economic inequalities, population challenges, global health, economic systems that sometimes failed. The Security Council at least talked about conflicts, even if it was not necessarily possible to do something about it. And that conversation now seems to have lapsed into multipolar conflict. And I don't like using the word multipolar because I think it's inaccurate.

Hagen: It's another difficult term to use, but…

Ian: to say the least.

Hagen: Well, it's true. I mean, we don't really have a rules based on a more of a role space or everybody do, you know, everybody act in their role as expected. And yes.

Ian: Yeah. And that's why speeches by Mark Carney surprise us. 

Hagen: Totally.

Ian: Because some a role that, you know, as acting out of character. That's right. Yeah. Your candidate, your job is to support the US without questions. And suddenly that changes overnight. And everybody, academic or diplomatic is set.They're going, oh, yeah, I've just woken up.

Hagen: And so now with all this, we have the planetary as is it a new narrative? Is it a narrative of hope? Is it a narrative of emergency? You call it in that we say that we need to understand it as an organic crisis. You mentioned that earlier. What is that in relation? How do you group then the planetary into this, the strength problems that we have? 

Ian: Yeah. Let me start by talking about the planetary and planetary politics. 

Hagen: Yeah.

Ian: If the planetary isn't a radical new paradigm, then it's nothing. We may as well not use it. If we just say planetary instead of global, then let's finish this interview and I'll go home.

Hagen: No need to please stay because I'd love to hear what you say. Yeah. I mean, the planetary, I think has an even draws an advantage from distancing itself from the global. 

Ian: Yeah.

Hagen: I mean, you can make long lists of that's the global, that's the planetary and the global is the bad guy. 

Ian: Well, I don't know if it's the bad guy.

Hagen: Well, if you're a chakra, but you are others, the global is all about capitalism power, hierarchy, colonialism and planetary appears as a new land of hope.  Whereas of course, there's also power and power issues and of contestations. 

Ian: Yeah. I mean, for me, invoking the planetary and in my case, planetary politics is about a radical transformation, the way in which we think about life on Earth. And this involves thinking not in an egocentric way. Yeah, the Anthropocene, you know, it's thinking in an ecocentric way, the planet Earth, the only home we will ever know as Carl Sagan will put it. Secondly, it involves us thinking symbiotically, as Lynn Margulis would have it, in the sense that everything, everyone on this planet is in some way interconnected. We don't realize that, or we often don't realize that. And that doesn't just mean human life and non-human life. It also means the types of interactions that we're talking about in our conversation today. And I'll illustrate this in a second when I talk about planetary organic crisis. The issues that we thought were disconnected are in fact very, very connected and cannot be addressed separately. And the third component to that is that we have to think holistically. And this is where, for instance, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis work on the Gaia hypothesis is important. There's only one system on planet Earth, and it's the ecocentric system of all life. Now, we can talk about political systems, economic systems, social systems, systems of conflict. But they're deeply interlocking on this one system. And it's taken us, I think, the book was released, Gaia, a new look at life on Earth in 1979. It really took another 20 years before people started to talk about the Earth system. But not thinking about what does that mean for the study of humanity. We know what it means for biology or for chemistry, and the Anthropocene is a geological time phase or not, period of time. This requires us to take one more reflection on why we would talk about the planetary and why it has to be a radical transformation the way we think. It seems to me that the case studies that I started researching on and talking about in the 1990s, economic, social, ecological, conflict, political. Well, I chose them because they were separable. But today, it is inseparable. You cannot review, analyse them apart from each other. And the planetary organic crisis is a crisis of the planetary system, but it's also a political crisis, which was the way that Gramsci originally intended the term organic crisis to be used, which was a crisis of the system as a whole. He meant a national political crisis. I mean a planetary political crisis. Let's take five parts of this story, if I can. 

Hagen: Please do.

Ian: Although the Industrial Revolution provides the origins of the modern political system as we know it, there was part of that modern period, let's say, the French and American revolutions onwards. The Great Acceleration really occurs from the 1970s onwards. What we would describe, I suppose, today as globalization or neoliberal globalization. The intense interdependence of economies irrespective of political system. Since the 1970s, one of the outcomes of this has been increasing and accelerating inequality. 

Hagen: Yes. 

Ian: Both within and between states, interestingly. A transnational class system, certainly, but multiple components of that class. This inequality has led to tensions in particular, injustices between the global south and the global north, which hypothetically would argue would have ended with the end of the colonial or imperial period, but actually has accelerated and become actually quite worse. It's led to another type of tension, and that's not in the economic realm, that's in the social realm. If you look at social injustice, questions of during COVID, of health and health outcomes and life expectancy, questions of justice and injustice on questions of gender and between women and men. Intergenerational justice in particular. Those three in particular are in fact worsening in many respects. Yes, certainly the role of the World Health Organization and the rollout of global vaccine and inoculation programs has improved to a certain extent in easily addressable. But if you look at health outcomes within countries, they're worsening because of economic inequality. So the social and the economic are clearly tied together. Because of these inequalities and injustices, the possibilities of actually addressing the roots of human in particular overconsumption and lifestyle behavior in the ecological field have been made far worse. The global south asks itself, why should we hold back on our development if you are unwilling to address your overdevelopment?

And so reaching agreement, whether it's the Convention on Biological Diversity or whether it's the International Panel on Climate Change or whether it's the Framework Convention on Climate Change, reaching agreement where inequality and injustice is accelerating becomes improbable. So it becomes unsustainable. You take these three areas, you think, what causes then, what are the outcomes of this? And one of the outcomes, I think, is the way in which it affects conflict and the roots of conflict. And I'll take two examples. They're not self-evident, but they're an interesting example. First and foremost, the Arab uprisings in 2011. 

Hagen: Very 2013. 

Ian: One of the things that drove that and drives conflict across the Sahel, and to be honest, into the Horn of Africa today, is a mixture of extremely negative post-colonial consequences with ecological costs to the region. It was not coincidental that the first moment of the Arab uprisings was the self-immolation of a market keeper in Tunis because of the rising cost of food. It's inevitable today across the region and across the planet. And these factors don't necessarily cause, but they worsen conflict. Second example, if you look at the Central American Dry Corridor, you see a similar pattern of challenge and conflict there. Not exactly the same. But climate change in the region itself is worsening the livelihood and increasing and adding to criminality in the region, which is in itself driving some of the worst examples of refugee fleeing and exploitation in the region, which leads you to the gates of the United States. So these two examples of complex conflict and tensions, I think, serve as an example of what is to come in rising inequality, rising injustice and ecological breakdown, which leads you to the fifth dimension, which is politics. Whether autocratic or democratic, it seems to me quite clear that the decline of democracy and the rise of autocracy is a function of the irresilience, the inability of political systems to respond to inequality, injustice, unsustainability, insecurity. And autocratic, kleptocratic leaders are perfectly willing to take advantage of this and say, "Huh, our system works. Democracy, in fact, is dysfunctional." So to go back to the original point, when I studied these five areas originally, they were entirely separable today. The planetary organic crisis makes it improbable that you can study them separately. In fact, you have to think of them holistically as part of one system. And that, for me, is the planetary organic crisis. It's not an original idea. To me, it was an idea invoked initially by critical political economists. But I think, for me, it really captures why you need planetary politics or the planetary as a radical alternative paradigm to think holistically. Because there's no point in just saying, "Oh, we're in a multipolar world. The liberal world order has ended. Oh, dear, oh, dear, we need new institutions of global governance. We need to let India onto the Security Council. Yes, that will solve it. Or we need to get Russia off of the Security Council". You actually have to address the roots of the crisis that we're in. And to do so, you have to imagine, name and think about how you do that. A very long answer to a very short question, by the way.

Hagen: Brilliant. Thank you very much. That was great. Could I ask you to maybe even add the role of law to this as maybe a sixth field? Because that's all granted. And the United Nations is, of course, in an institutional, I'd say, also crisis. I think it's fair to say it is. And alternatives, how to reform it, are out there. None of them are really convincing. So is there a new institution? And what law would breathe in that institution? Would it be planetary earth system law?

Ian: Very interesting. 

Hagen: Where are the roots of that law? If the old international law was rooted in nation states, where is the new international law rooted in?

Ian: Great. Let me take a step back. To start with, initially I chose five because new security thinking in the 1990s had five-dimension security. And so I used that as a model for my PhD. And it seemed manageable. In truth, it's unmanageable to write a PhD with five case studies in it, particularly as large as they were. So anyone that wants to bring extra dimensions to the conversation is perfectly willing to do so. I chose five, mostly because I have five digits and it's quite easy to spell out. But there's an incredible risk. So you could introduce law, geography, anthropology, other fields of study, the humanities, the arts, etc. All of this is probably, it's just in my world, and I've chosen to focus on five because it's manageable in my head. And it seems to make sense when I'm trying to spell out the logic that drives the planetary programming crisis. But yes, law is an example of one of many other dimensions you could bring to the table to the conversation. In my work on the EU and its normative power and external actions, I have the role of the rule of law, one of the case studies. And in that case study, I look at both supranational law within the EU in the way it attempts to promote and project it into other legal fields or legal areas. But I also look at international law in the way in which the EU behaves within international law, whether it's the support for the International Criminal Court or the rulings of the World Court in The Hague. But then equally interestingly is kind of transnational law and the extent to which this humanitarian law that goes beyond the EU and the EU has to behave in. And then there's the very interesting and challenging relationship between the European Convention on Human Rights and the EU and the EU's attempt to sign up to or support that law and that interpretation and that organisation or not. And so, for instance, when I wrote the first normative powerpiece in 2002, I was most interested in one of the case studies I was quite familiar with because of family history, which was the abolition of the death penalty. Well, that wasn't an EU idea, but it seemed to quite capture in one simple case what I was trying to look at when I was looking at the EU and its support for the promotion of the abolition of the death penalty. But it was in fact stepping up and assisting international NGOs and transnational NGOs rather than say, this is our policy, join us. And the way in which the EU is adapted to trying to apply that has been very interesting. Today, it tries not to push the abolition of the death penalty, but allows other countries, particularly recent countries who have abolished the death penalty themselves, to take the lead and to support them in doing so. So for me, that's an interesting example of actions in concert with the other. And often it's the case that the reasons countries have the death penalty at all, for two reasons. One is the extent to which they have simply copied from their imperial masters existing policies. Now, the UK has abolished the death penalty, France has abolished the death penalty, so then you're left in a very interesting historical timeframe. And the other reason is they want to execute political dissidents. And that's still very, very popular. The overwhelming use of the death penalty, in particularly in autocratic states, in dictatorships, is to annihilate political opponents. That sort of answers your question in a roundabout way.

Hagen: It does. And it also brings me to, I think, the last broader theme I'd love to tackle, which is, well, it does sound a little depressing. The autocrats and the death penalties and the need for politics and the need for...What about democracy? How do you see the role of a democratic shaping, or is there a possibility of a democratic shaping of that shared communion, taking into account the planetary needs that we have? Or are the planetary needs, the planetary limitations, sometimes do they not come across as limiting? Here are limits to what you can do. And democracies, I'd like to translate them. Of course, they are, you know, they're systems of, let's say, civilized disagreement, ideally. We don't go to war and we don't go loggerheads and we don't have conflicts. We have our confidence in disagreements in Parliament or in the press on the streets, and that's all fine. We do that. But also democracies, you know, you shape the society as you want it. You have some kind of freedom to shape your society. How do you see that in interacting with the planetary needs?

Ian: Okay, so here comes an interesting story. Democracy and the promotion of democracy was one of my original case studies. For the last 20 years, democracy has been declining absolute numbers of democracies and in terms of number of people across the world who live in a democracy. One of the interesting stories about where the opposition to democracy comes from actually comes out of the Brexit debate. At the time 2015, I was following the debates and I couldn't work out why it was that the debate on Brexit was over before the referendum was even held. And actually the same thing happened a few months later in the United States elections for Trump. Why was it that so many of my friends were convinced that Brexit and Trump were the best things for democracy? Now, it's taken me 10 years to work out what's going on, but democracy isn't being beaten by autocracy. Democracy is defeating itself. Opposition to thinking in a planetary sense to genuinely addressing the five sorts of challenges that we've talked about here and I've raised as just examples. Invariably comes from both within autocracies and most interestingly from within democracies. Particularly, the rise of the far right isn't an accident of time. It is a function of the support that's being given to it by in particular libertarian thinking and neoliberalism as a political movement enacted through in particular right wing libertarian and far right anti libertarian. Political activists. So if you go back and think, why is it that we're not talking about inequalities because we're talking about refugees. Why is it we're not talking about injustice because we're talking about sexual minorities? Why are we not talking about the environment because climate change is a myth? Why are we not talking about conflict horrendous conflict around the world. Well, because we're too busy about not talking about the Epstein files, you know, why is it we're not talking about the decline of democracy. Oh, because Europe is in civilizational erasure. We're not being the genuine democracies of the United States or other autocrats would like us to be so. In each and every case, and this is where we go back to the story of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s, they're sat there saying to themselves, how is it that we're not talking about the decline of German democracy. Here we are again in the 2020s. How is it that we're not talking about all these crises issues, but we're talking about other things. And I think a lot of this is to do with internal opposition to the functioning of democracy within democracies by those that are benefiting from these crises. So I think we have to go very careful when we talk about democracy and the decline of democracy. I think democracy is an essential element in addressing the planetary organic crisis, but more importantly, I think people that care about the crisis also tend to care about democracy, but they want to address the roots of the crisis first before they can think about actually functioning democracy in the genuine sense. And I think that's the right way to think about these things. It's not to say that it is more, it's mostly important to democracy, but I think it's, it's become in some respects hollowed out as the Frankfurt School believed to be the case in the 1930s. So I've come back to my critical theory roots, I suppose.

Hagen: Wonderful. Why not? You have good reasons to do that. Thank you so much. This has been a tour de force through questions of democracy, global governance, the role of the EU in it, all variations of planetary crises and grouped together with a terminology that you have given us to think with. The organic crisis, the shared communion, planetary symbiosis. And I thank you also for pointing out where you got those ideas from. Otherwise you come in and oh my God, Ian has all of these wonderful ideas and you do. I always steal my last question from my favorite BBC podcast in our time. And you've been working on it.

Ian: Melvin Bragg.

Hagen: You see Melvin Bragg. And he always asks, and he, the BBC forces, of course, you need to be, you need to download it and you need to pay. And then you get the extra minutes where Melvin Bragg asks his guests, is there anything that you would have liked to talk about that we didn't get a chance to talk about?So is there any extra?

Ian: Yeah, there is. And it's the reason why we're doing this conversation.

Hagen: Go.

Ian: You asked me why I invent conceptually and why I think theoretically in this way. 

Hagen:Yes.

Ian: And I think education in the broad sense of not just a university, but actually a conversation, an engagement, a dialogue, a broadcast. What we're doing now is absolutely essential as part of the planetary and a part of planetary politics. We can, and I would advocate, we need to begin with education. The conversation about how education takes place, the role of schools, of colleges of further education, of universities, of lifelong education are all part of the realization that will lead to and must lead to a different type of planetary politics. So, yeah, education and the role in particular of active learning pedagogies. My role model was a chap called Ken Robinson, you know, always advocated that education must be individually and organically addressed to the learners, not to the institutions that create the education in the first place. So that would be the missing question. Thank you for that.

Hagen: Thank you for that. And we will surely keep on talking in the next podcast, at least. So come back, listen to planetary choices, listen to this conversation, which is ongoing, with which we also try to innovate a little bit our own research practices by talking to Ian, by talking to others and by gathering more and more data points to create spaces of inspiration and further questions and some answers. Thank you very much.Thank you, Ian. 

Ian: Thank you.

Further Readings: 

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1989. “Social Space and Symbolic Power.” Sociological Theory 7, no. 1: 14–25. https://doi.org/10.2307/202060.

Bull, Hedley. 1982. “Civilian Power Europe: A Contradiction in Terms?” JCMS: Journal of                     Common Market Studies, 21: 149-170. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-           5965.1982.tb00866.x

Calhoun, Craig et al. 2007. Critical Social Theory, 2nd ed. Maryland: Blackwell Publishing. 

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2021. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cochran, Molly. 1999. “International Ethics as Pragmatic Critique.” Normative Theory in                         International Relations: A Pragmatic Approach, 171-72. Cambridge: Cambridge                           University Press.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1929-1935. Prison Notebooks, vol. 1, edited by Joseph A. Buttigieg and                      Antonio Callari. Columbia: Columbia University Press (1997-2007). 

Hall, Stuart. 1980. “Cultural studies: two paradigms.” Media, Culture and Society, vol. 2, 57-72. London: Academic Press Inc. 

Krunke, Helle, Hanne Petersen, and Ian Manners. 2020. Transnational Solidarity: Concept,                     Challenges, and Opportunities, i-ii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Lorde, Audre. 1983. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In This                  Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga             and Gloria Anzaldúa, 98-106. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. 

Lovelock, James. 1979. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lovelock, James and Lynn Margulis. 1974. “Atmospheric homeostasis by and for the biosphere: the gaia hypothesis.” Telus, vol.  XXVI, 2-10. 

Margulis, Lynn. 1998. Symbiotic Planet: A New View of Evolution. New York: Basic Books.

Manners, Ian. 2002. “Normative Power Europe: A Contradiction in Terms?” JCMS, vol. 40, n. 2, 235-58. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5965.00353. 

Mbembe, Achilles and Deborah Posel. 2005. “A Critical Humanism.” Interventions, vol. 7(3), 283-286. London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group. 

Robinson, Ken. 2010. “Changing education paradigms.” TED Talk, RSA Animate, October.        Video, 11 min., 40 sec. https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson _changing-                  education_paradigms. 

Sagan, Carl. 1994. A Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. Toronto:                              The Random House Publishing Group. 

Schulz-Forberg, Hagen and Michael Zürn. 2026. “The Shifting Tides of Global Governance––A Conversation with Michael Zürn.” Global Perspectives 2, 7 (1): 159010. doi:                             https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2026.159010.