The Burden of Innocence: Arendt’s Understanding of Totalitarianism through its Victims Elena Muglia Author Emerson Rhodes Meruka Vyas Editors Hannah Arendt set out to describe an ideology and government that burst past understandings of politics, morality, and the law asunder. In Origins of Totalitarianism , Arendt argues that totalitarianism could not fit into previous political typologies. Instead, it navigates between definitions of political regimes like tyranny and authoritarianism, as well as distinctions historically made between lawlessness and lawfulness, arbitrary and legitimate power. Even then, Arendt holds on to the idea that totalitarianism can be described and analyzed despite escaping traditional understanding as a political ideology and system. In the preface of the first edition, Arendt expresses this hope, writing that Origins was: “Written out of the conviction that it should be possible to discover the hidden mechanics by which all traditional elements of our political and spiritual world were dissolved into a conglomeration where everything seems to have lost specific value and has become unrecognizable for human comprehension, unusable for human purpose.” One of the traditional elements of our “political and spiritual” world that she inquires about are questions of innocence, guilt, and responsibility. How can these concepts, which have both moral and legal implications, be applied and understood in the case of Nazi Germany, a regime void of morality and legality? Many political theorists have explored Arendt’s understanding of guilt in her report Eichmann in Jerusalem . In the report, Arendt utilizes Adolf Eichmann’s case—a Nazi Party official who helped carry out the Final Solution—to provide a concrete example of someone who is guilty but does not fit traditional understandings of what is required to be criminally guilty. Alan Norrie points out that Arendt exposes the tension between Eichmann’s lack of criminal intent, mens rea , and his criminal and evil actions (Norrie 2008. 202). The totality of totalitarianism complicates his criminal guilt, as Nazi Germany rendered every member of society complicit in its crimes. To unpack this complex nexus of guilt and responsibility, Iris Young looks at two of Arendt’s essays; “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility” and “Collective Responsibility” (Young 2011, 90). Young outlines how Arendt understands guilt as centered on the self, while responsibility implies a relationship with the world and membership in a political community (Young 2011, 78). Guilt arises from an objective consequence of somebody’s actions (Young 2011, 79) and is not a product of someone’s subjective state. With this understanding, everybody in Nazi Germany was responsible (irrespective of whether they took up political responsibility), but not everybody was guilty. Those who acted publicly against the Nazi Regime, like the Scholl siblings, took up political responsibility in a positive sense (Young 2011, 91). Richard Bernstein, who also discusses Eichmann, shares this understanding with Young—Eichmann is criminally guilty, but bystanders are not. Bernstein, however, elucidates that the bystanders’ responsibility is imperative to understand because their complicity was an “essential condition for carrying out the Final Solution” (Bernstein 1999, 165). By focusing on the areas of guilt and responsibility and primarily looking at Eichmann, however, these scholars leave a theoretical gap in understanding the relationship between the victims—the stateless and Jewish people for Nazi Germany—and totalitarian ideology. These groups lack political responsibility within the totalitarian system because their innocence implies a separation from the world and a political community. In her essay “Collective Responsibility,” Arendt notes that the twentieth century has created a category of men who “cannot be held politically responsible for anything” and are “absolutely innocent.” The innocence of these victims and their apoliticality strikes at the heart of why Arendt postulates that totalitarian ideology and terror constitute a novel form of government—“[it] differs essentially from other forms of political oppression known to us such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship.” Totalitarianism targets victims en masse , but their status as victims is not based on any action they take against the regime. While Norrie, Young, and Bernstein all address that Arendt thinks that any “traditional” conception of the relationship between law and justice cannot be applied to totalitarianism directly, by focusing primarily on Eichmann, they are missing and understanding of a group of people that allowed totalitarianism to explode these notions. By tracking and parsing through Arendt’s understanding of the innocents and innocence in Origins of Totalitarianism and placing it in conversation with her understanding of action in The Human Condition, I elaborate on the unique and lack thereof, political relationship between totalitarian ideology and the innocents. I argue that the condition of innocence of the victims represents the essence of totalitarianism’s unique form of oppression and negation of the human condition. The positioning of the innocents in a totalitarian society acts as a lens for how totalitarianism aims to reshape traditional notions of political, moral, and legal personhood. I demonstrate this by first outlining what created fertile ground in the 20th century for the condition of rightlessness of the innocents. Second, I highlight how the targeting of innocents in concentration camps lies at the heart of totalitarianism’s destruction of the juridical person—someone who is judged based on their actions. Third, I argue that by bending any notions of justice, totalitarianism destroys the moral person, a destruction that is best expressed in the innocents’ lack of internal freedom. Finally, I argue that all these components entail severing the victims from a world where they can appear and be recognized as humans. Overall, I contend that while many of the techniques unleashed on the innocents apply, to an extent, to everyone under totalitarianism, including people like Eichmann, the innocents represent the full realization of totalitarianism’ attempt to alter the essence of a political and acting person. To understand how totalitarian regimes created a mass of ‘superfluous’ people who existed outside the political realm, it is first necessary to highlight what conditions Arendt thinks sowed fertile ground for totalitarian domination and terror in the first place. A crucial condition is rooted in the failures of the nation-state in dealing with the new category of stateless people in the interwar period in Europe. Following WWI, multiethnic empires, like the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, dissolved, which led Europe to resort to the familiar nation-state principle—presuming that each nationality should establish its state. As Ayten Gundogdu writes, “the unquestioning application of this principle turned all those who were ‘ejected from the old trinity of state-people-territory’ into exceptions to the norm” (Gundogdu 2014, 31). These exceptions to the norm, as were Jewish people, could not be repatriated anywhere because they did not have a nation. Instead of integrating these minorities and making them fully-fledged political members, policies like Minority Treaties codified minorities as exceptions to the law. The massive scale of refugees that existed outside a political community left a set of people without any protections apart from the ones that the state gave out of their own prerogative and charitable actions. This stateless crisis crystallized, for Arendt, the aporia of human rights—even though human rights guarantee universal rights, irrespective of any social and political category, they are enforced based on political membership. Human rights end up being the rights of citizens, leading the stateless to a condition of “absolute rightlessness.” This condition of rightlessness does not entail the loss of singular rights—just like the law temporarily deprives a criminal of the right to freedom—but a deprivation of what Arendt calls the right to have rights. Defined by Arendt as a right to live “in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions.” Instead of being judged based on actions or opinions, the stateless are judged based on belonging to a group outside the nation. This innocence, an inability to be judged based on one’s deeds and words, is the defining mark of the statelessness’ loss of a “political status” (Arendt 1951, 386), which primes these groups of people for the particular form of oppression that totalitarianism entails. While the stateless and their condition of rightlessness was constructed even before Nazi Germany, the existence and the continuous creation of a mass of innocents lies at the core of the raison d’étre of totalitarian politics. According to Arendt, totalitarianism operates based on a law of Nature and History, which has “mankind” as an end product, an “‘Aryan’ world empire” for Hitler. Mankind becomes the “embodiment” of law and justice. Jewish people, under Nazi Germany, are portrayed as the “objective enemy” halting nature’s progression, whereby every stage of terror is seen as a further development that is closer to achieving the development of the ultimate human. This continuous need to follow a Darwinian law of nature leads Arendt to define one of totalitarianism’ defining features as the law of movement: the only way that totalitarian regimes can justify their existence, expansion, and domination, and it relies almost entirely on the group of innocents. The innocents are crucial components of the concentration camps because they are placed there alongside criminals who have committed an action. If they only targeted “criminals” or those that committed particular actions, the Nazi party would have scant logic to fulfill its law of movement. The “innocents” are “both qualitatively and quantitatively the most essential category of the camp population.” in the sense that they exist in an “enormous” capacity and will always be present in society. Totalitarianism relies on innocents because their existence removes any “calculable punishment for definite offenses.” Totalitarian politics aim, eventually, to turn everyone into an innocent mass that could be targeted, not because of their actions, but their existence. Even criminals were often sent to concentration camps only after they had completed their prison sentences, meaning they were going there not because of their criminal activity but rather arbitrarily, sacrificing a mass in favor of the laws of history and nature. The condition of rightlessness combined with total domination, exerted through the concentration camps, obliterates the juridical person for all the victims of totalitarianism. The juridical person is the foundation of modern understandings of law, constituting a person who bears rights and can exercise rights and who, in derogation of the law, faces proportional and predictable consequences. By destroying the juridical person and turning its victims into a mass of people who exist outside any legal framework and logic, totalitarianism operates beyond any previously conceived notions of justice. As Arendt explains: “The one thing that cannot be reproduced [in a totalitarian regime] is what made the traditional conceptions of Hell tolerable to man: the Last Judgment, the idea of an absolute standard of justice combined with the infinite possibility of grace. For in the human estimation, there is no crime and no sin commensurable with the everlasting torments of Hell. Hence the discomfiture of common sense, which asks: What crime must these people have committed in order to suffer so inhumanly? Hence also the absolute innocence of the victims: no man ever deserved this. Hence finally the grotesque haphazardness with which concentration camp victims were chosen in the perfected terror state: such punishment can, with equal justice and injustice, be inflicted on anyone .” By “traditional conceptions of Hell” tolerable to man, Arendt means a Hell where every individual will be judged based on their actions and nothing else on the day of the Last Judgment. Totalitarianism shatters this idea and any existence of an “absolute standard of justice” through the concentration camps, which creates Hell on earth but without any rightful last judgment. Even more importantly, because of these innocents and the arbitrariness and “haphazardness” of the way they are chosen, Arendt explains that state punishment can be “inflicted on anyone.” A tyranny targets the opponents of a regime or anyone who causes disorder, but totalitarianism cannot be understood through such a utilitarian lens. As Arendt points out in various places in Origins , without understanding totalitarianism’ “anti-utilitarian behavior.” it is difficult and impossible to understand its use in targeting people who commit no specific action against the regime. Concentration camps and terror materialize the law of movement like positive law materializes notions of justice in lawful governments. The guilty are innocents who stand in the way of movement. Totalitarianism does not only operate outside any traditional forms of legality and juridical personhood but also transcends any understanding of morality—the moral person is destroyed just as the juridical one is; and this is, once again, fully expressed through the treatment of innocents who become the ideal subject of totalitarianism. The ideal subject of totalitarianism lacks both internal and external freedom—which is precisely what is imposed on the victims. A lack of internal freedom implies an inability to distinguish right and wrong. As Arendt explains, “totalitarian terror,” in the concentration camps, achieves triumph when it cuts the moral person from “the individualist escape and in making the decisions of conscience questionable and equivocal.” The Nazi Regime achieved this by asking the innocent to make impossible decisions that involved balancing their own life and the ones of their families. This often involved a blurring of “the murderer and his victim.” by involving even the concentration camp inmates in the operations of the camp. Concerning this, Robert Braun talks about Primo Levi’s discussion of the complicated victim—explaining that those who survived the concentration camps are always seen as suspect because of these blurred lines (Braun 1994, 186). Arendt has a parallel opinion to Levi that focuses more on those victim’s subjective state, explaining that when they return to the “word of the living,” they are “assailed by doubts” regarding their truthfulness. The innocents represent the perfect totalitarian subject as their doubts represent an inability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, which Arendt describes as the “standards of thought.” What is most striking about the destabilization of conscience is that it results in an inability to a freezing effect and an inability to act. As Arendt explains, “Through the creation of conditions under which conscience ceases to be adequate and to do good becomes utterly impossible, the consciously organized complicity of all men in the crimes of totalitarian regimes is extended to the victims and thus made really total.” Regardless of what “good” entails, doing it entails committing an action that is for others. Doing good can be understood as analogous to how Young interprets Arendt’s understanding of political responsibility… further explaining how the victims are left to a condition of non-responsibility through their inability to both distinguish what is right and wrong, and act on it. The erasure of “acting” in totalitarianism gains new meaning, or rather a more comprehensive explanation, when looking at Arendt’s discussion of acting in The Human Condition. Arendt’s work in The Human Condition illuminates the full extent of why acting becomes impossible under totalitarianism, especially for its victims. As Nica Siegel explains, an essential aspect of her understanding of action in The Human Condition is the spatialized logic that grounds action in a space where one can “reveal their unique personal identities and make their appearance in the world.” Only in this way can an action take place as it has a “who”—a unique author—at its root, and thus has the potential to create new beginnings. With this understanding, totalitarianism is the antithesis of action for everyone, to an extent, but completely for the innocent. Totalitarianism removes their space to act internally—through the destruction of conscience explained in the previous section—and externally—removing any place to appear publicly. The innocent are removed from the rest simply by being in the concentration camps, isolated from everyone else but also from one another. This means that totalitarianism, in practice, removes any source and space for spontaneity. Arendt defines spontaneity in Origins almost identically to how she defines action in The Human Condition , saying that spontaneity is “man’s power to begin something new out of his resources, something that cannot be explained on the basis of reactions to environment or events.” This condition of the innocent also illuminates why creating new and making a political statement is impossible under totalitarianism. As Arendt explains, “no activity can become excellent if the world does not provide a proper space for its exercise.” As with many other tactics in totalitarianism, this lack of excellence and new beginnings is rooted in the fate of the innocents. Nobody’s actions can “become excellent” if they face the same consequences of the concentration camp as the mass of those who commit no action. This is why under totalitarianism, “martyrdom” becomes “impossible.” Just as totalitarianism assimilates criminals with innocents in their punishment, political actors are also assimilated to this category, as they are “deprived of the protective distinction that comes of their having done something,” just as the innocents are. What totalitarianism does to its victims is, therefore, a symptom of its wider perversion of human individuality and action in general. Even perpetrators like Eichmann lose their sense of individuality—A.J. Vetlesen has described the phenomenon as a double dehumanization between the victims and the perpetrator Every bureaucrat in Nazi Germany was replaceable and totalitarianism made them feel, paradoxically, “subjectively innocent,” in the sense that they do not feel responsible for their actions “because they do not really murder but execute a death sentence pronounced by some higher tribunal.” Jalusic argues that both aspects of humanization have in common, the “loss of the human condition.”, but what Jalusic misses is that Vetlesen, by arguing that it is the persecutors that dehumanize themselves to avoid personal responsibility and alienate themselves from their actions—thus going against the cog in the machine theory. The perpetrators retain a level of agency that is ultimately denied to the victims. The victims do not alienate themselves from their actions, as they cannot act in the first place. When Nazi officials send victims to the concentration camp, they lose any ability to appear and thus face a loss of the human condition, as Arendt describes in The Human Condition, “A life without speech and without action, on the other hand-and this is the only way of life that in earnest has renounced all appearance and all vanity in the biblical sense of the word-is, literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men” The emphasis she places on action as being an essential part of living “among men” explains why, according to her, totalitarianism, unlike other forms of oppressive governments, transforms “human nature itself.” While she uses the term “human nature,” she makes a strict distinction between human nature and condition in The Human Condition , arguing that it is impossible for us to understand human nature without resorting to God or a deity. Even in Origins , when talking about human nature, she criticizes those, like the positivists, who see it as something fixed and not constantly conditioned by ourselves. In light of her understanding of the human condition, I argue that Arendt means that totalitarianism undermines an essential part of the human condition, not human nature. Arendt views the human condition, as opposed to human nature, as being rooted in plurality. By plurality, she means that each individual is uniquely different but also shares a means of communication with every other individual, and thus, the ability of each individual to make themselves known and engage with one another. With this in mind, “human plurality is the basic condition for both action and speech,” as each individual can make a statement and be understood by others. The treatment of victims and their innocence as their defining factor highlights that fellow humans can distort and condition crucial aspects of our human condition in favor of laws that pretend that humans can instill justice and nature on earth. To a degree, totalitarianism subjects everyone to the conditions of “innocence” that victims face. What distinguishes the victims from other agents under totalitarianism is that they demonstrate the ability of totalitarian ideology to instill a complete condition of innocence by playing a person entirely outside any political and legal realm and, by extension, outside of mankind. Innocence under totalitarianism is not a negative condition—in the sense of not having done anything, not taking action—but it is primarily a lack of positive freedom—the ability to do something and act. Arendt’s understanding of innocence elaborates on the unique condition of superfluousness under totalitarianism. This ‘superfluousness’ is justified through a legal and political doctrine that explodes past legal and normative frameworks by being based on movement instead of stability. The law of nature is in a constant process of Darwinian development, with the superfluous innocents as the sine qua non to keep going. A lot of what happens to the innocents, as their obliteration of a space to act, does happen to everyone under totalitarianism; however, the innocents bear the full expression of totalitarianism and fight past notions of moral, political, and legal personhood. The innocents are not only cut off from this personhood but also from what Arendt thinks it means to be human, as they represent an inability to do what human beings do, which is to create beginnings through spontaneous action. The unique condition of innocence that the victims of totalitarianism face exposes totalitarianism’s own legal and political theory. The Law of Nature that Nazi Germany espouses here cannot exist without the realization of a group of innocents who prove the nihilistic idea that humans can be sacrificed for perfected mankind. As Arendt explains, the concentration camps are where the changes in “human nature are tested.” We can only understand how totalitarianism could occur by looking at this unique political erasure. The terror and fate of the innocents act as proof for everyone in the totalitarian regime that they could be next. The status of the victims also sheds lights on the inexplicable deeds that Eichmann committed, as Arendt writes that one of the few, if not only one, discernible aspects of totalitarianism is that “radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally superfluous.” Totalitarianism proves that it is fellow humans who are dehumanized, albeit to a different degree, who completely sever an individual’s ties from political and legal structures meant to protect them. This conclusion and elaboration of the peculiar form of oppression and domination of totalitarianism has pressing practical and theoretical implications for modern-day politics. As Arendt explains, totalitarianism is born from modern conditions, and so looking at how modern polities can and do create superfluousness can be a thermometer for descent into totalitarianism. After all, it is important to remember that statelessness in the 20th century came before totalitarianism’s domination and terror. References Arendt, Hannah. “Collective Responsibility.” Amor Mundi: Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt , edited by S. J. James W. Bernauer, Springer Netherlands, 1987, pp. 43–50. Springer Link , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3565-5_3. ---. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil . Penguin Books, 2006. ---. The Human Condition: Second Edition . Edited by Margaret Canovan and a New Foreword by Danielle Allen, University of Chicago Press. University of Chicago Press , https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo29137972.html. Accessed 8 May 2024. ---. The Origins of Totalitarianism . 1951. Penguin Classics, 2017. Benhabib, Seyla. “Judgment and the Moral Foundations of Politics in Arendt’s Thought.” Political Theory , vol. 16, no. 1, 1988, pp. 29–51. JSTOR , https://www.jstor.org/stable/191646. 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Author Name < Back Interview with Geoff Mulgan Catherine Nelli JPPE: Great. So, we'll start off speaking about your new book, Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination . Could you explain what political imagination and radical political imagination are before speaking about what the book is about, your argument, and your process researching and writing it? Mulgan: So I became more and more concerned in the last few years that we might have a worsening problem of political imagination. And there were various signs of this, there was a kind of obvious one which the many activists, the many people who are politically enthusiastic can very easily see into the future, how things could go horribly wrong, could see ecological disaster, climate catastrophe, and so on. Which in many ways is a good thing, but very much harder to imagine or describe almost any kind of social progress, what would be a significantly better way of organizing welfare, or democracy, or health, or education. I observed that we have a huge capacity now for technological imagination. Vast sums of money spent on think tanks and conferences, looking at smart homes or smart cities or AI and so on, but almost nothing comparable in terms of serious work thinking about how our future society or economy could be run, rather than just the hardware. Politics—it's very striking. On the one hand, how many leaders now talk about going back to make America great again, or France or Britain or China or India. The last US election was a contest between two old men who haven’t really said very much about where they would want the world to be in a generation or two from now. I have increasingly felt that this sort of failure of imagination was fueling in a very subtle way a sort of fatalism—a sense that actually the world won't get better. Just as in our own individual lives, if we can't see something good on the horizon, something which might be better for us a year, five years down the line, it's quite hard to be happy and thriving. I think there's something equivalent for societies and the whole world. What I did in the book is partly researching the past of social and political imagination. And there'll be many ways in which people tried to look ahead; they did it through writing utopias, and there are hundreds, if not 1000s, of utopian writings from feminist utopias of the 15th century through to the great 19th century ones, like Bella , which was, I think, at the time the second best selling author ever in the US. There were attempts to create model communities, model towns, model organizations. There's the role of generative ideas. And one of the things I point out in the book is that often quite generic ideas like human rights or a circular economy may be a bit vague at first, but they then spawn lots of other ideas which become useful and change the world. And a large part of the book is about methods: what are the methods we could be using now to get better at thoughtful, rigorous imagination of the future a generation or two from now? How do you use methods, often from creativity and design, to expand your menu of options, you can then interrogate each of those, many of them might not be attractive, but at least to cultivate the habit towards the muscle of thinking creatively ahead. I look at the role of universities in that, I look at the role of political parties, which at times in history have played a big role in imagination, but have largely vacated it in much of the world. And also the role of places—how to create museums, galleries, physical places where people can come together to imagine into the future. And if nothing else, I hope the book will spark at least a bit of a debate on the question: Do we have a problem? Maybe some people will say we don't have a problem. Some people may say, well, actually, imagination is always bad, it leads to terrible results, and many of the blueprints in the last century, and many of the utopias did have horrible results. And one of the arguments I make is that now, we need to combine imagination with experiments. So you don't impose a fully formed blueprint on a city or a society; you try it out in a much more organic, experimental way. And others may say actually, technology is the answer to everything and we don't have social imagination because we don't need it. We can fix everything with a new anti-aging drug or some fantastic ecology, which will sequester carbon and so on. As I say, I think all of those will be wrong, but at least hopefully that will get a debate going. JPPE Do you look at a sort of comparative analysis of case studies from different countries? Or is the structure of the book more idea based? Mulgan It’s ideas. Basically, there were lots of references to real examples, either from history or from the present. And one of the parts of the book which is a bit more like comparative political analysis is trying to compare the dominant political imaginaries of the next 20 or 30 years globally. What are they? And I argue probably the most powerful ones or the strongest ones are nationalist techno authoritarian ones, particularly China, Xi Jinping thought, but in a different way the BJP’s to visions of the future in India. Putin doesn't really have one in Russia. But he and Erdoğan are other examples. And I argue that this is a very powerful semi-imaginary which actually is rather vague about the future but tries to tie together, in some ways, quite traditional authoritarian nationalism with high technologies. It's very 19th century Prussian militarism. I look at different imaginaries of the Green Movement and some of the frictions and issues in deep and less deep ecological thought. I look at what might happen to liberalism, a revived neoliberalism, and different strands of conservatism. But essentially, that is an attempt at a comparative analysis of both current and future imaginaries. JPPE Do you think digital technologies detract from or contribute to radical political imaginations? What are the different ways that they could contribute or detract? And in what way should they be conceptualized and used to the benefit of imagination? Mulgan So I've got quite a background in digital technology—my PhD is in telecoms and I've probably been immersed in all these things. And my answer is essentially “both and.” So sometimes thinking about things digitally can be very useful because as happened to retailing, or banking, or relationships, all sorts of things, if you look at it through a digital lens, you often deconstruct what's going on. And then you can remake it in a completely different way. So you end up with Amazon, not with, you know, high street shops or with match.com rather than people meeting in bars. And in that sense, actually, digital technology is quite useful for social imagination. And any imagination of where democracy might be in 50 years time has to have a substantial digital element. And those places like Taiwan and Iceland are reinventing democracy. The US still seems to be stuck in an 18th century model of democracy. We don't quite understand why, but that's another story. Digital is part of that, but if you only think in a digital way, as so much of the movement around smart cities, smart data, and smart homes did, you usually end up with results which are not very pleasant for humans to live in or which lose all sorts of dimensions of the present. And I think this was a big failure of the internet, where there was some incredibly naive techno optimism about how on its own the internet would spread democracy, equality, removal, corporations, etc. And often the exact opposite happened. And that tells us there was a major intellectual failure amongst the sort of Silicon Valley thinkers who simply didn't understand what they were part of. And that's why thinking simultaneously with a social lens and a technological lens is vital for the next 50 or 100 years. JPPE What’s the difference between social and political imagination? How do they coincide and interact? Mulgan I think they overlap with each other. There isn't a straightforward boundary line. By politics we tend to mean the things which politicians end up talking about put into their programs, maybe pass laws about in Congress or Parliament or the Bundestag. And that is the world of politics, which often does include or has at times included powerful visions of where society might head. There are many examples of where that happens outside politics much more through social movements and daily life. And people are getting on with social innovation and were ignoring the political realm. And often things start off social and then become political, so many ecological ideas, like the idea of a circular economy and radical recycling or veganism, you know, these tended to begin very much with social movements, and much, much later, became politicized, became an issue for laws and elections and programs and carbon taxes and so on. So one of the things I try to look at in the book is this dynamic between the social and the political, and then back into the social. For example, when you pass new laws on equality they in turn then affect the norms within every organization, ultimately, maybe back to the household and the family too. JPPE You speak about the tapering off of visions of the future. There seems to be a desire for change within the social world but very few productive outlets to channel this desire. How do you foresee this changing over time and how would you wish it to change to spark future action? Mulgan I think one answer to that lies with institutions and what role they play, especially powerful institutions can either encourage this sort of work or discourage it. So take universities. I've been doing a parallel strand of work, looking at why it is that in universities, and particularly in social science, the sort of exploratory design work, thinking ahead work, has largely disappeared from most universities all over the world. It's disappeared partly for good reasons, as people have become more data driven and more empirical, and partly because a lot of the radicals moved into a safe space of critique, rather than proposal. That was one of the weird things which happened to Marxism in universities in the last 20 or 40 years. It moved out of real active politics into academic critique. And founders haven't rewarded it because they've tended to reward deepening work within disciplines, whereas exploratory creative work has spread across multiple disciplines. And in a paper I published last year in Germany, I tried to set out in more detail what a probe of exploratory social sciences would be; what it would look like for the universities to have significant interdisciplinary teams working on the design options of a zero carbon economy or a radically transformed mental health system. And that's what I hope universities could do. At the moment they have almost no role in this and it’s incredible in a way. There's so much brain power in universities, and they don't play an active role. JPPE What would it take for them to do that? Mulgan Leadership. Money. You have to have a debate, you have to believe there's a problem. People at universities acknowledge there is a problem needing to be solved. So one of my purposes is at least a debate about that. And then political parties. I mean, the political parties in much the world have rather atrophied, hollowed out, hardened. And often it's the new political parties who are more creative than the old ones, which dominate your country and my country and some others. But if you were inventing a political party now, it would probably have much more of its core purpose being to organize a dialogue with the public about options for the future, about ideas. Instead, they tend to be captured by interest groups. They just work on winning elections or their money goes into election fighting rather than thinking. They’ve lost the capability of having broad open dialogues as opposed to campaigning, and so on. And it's interesting. Some of the newer parties have experimented with much more interesting methods of social dialogue like the Five Star Movement in Italy, Podemos in Spain, and there are quite a few others. I wouldn't say they've got there. But a political party which aspires to run a country should be owning part of this conversation about the options for the future. I think cities can do it. Good mayors often do have the resources to bring the whole of a city into a discussion about its physical future. So for example, just now we've just finished a really interesting session with a group of cities. A project I coordinate looks at what can be done over the next five or 10 years for cities to really prioritize population level mental health. And that's something which, you know, much of the public thinks is kind of obvious, that they should be doing that. And yet, politics lags far behind and nearly all the money is still in physical health, and hospitals and things like that. And very few political parties would feel comfortable actually even talking about mental health as a priority. They’re stuck in an anachronistic way of seeing the world. JPPE When did you first become invested in the power of political imagination and creative imagination? And how did you first identify the lack of the imagination that you see now? Mulgan I don't know, I suppose in different ways I’d probably be part of this. I've had a career which has partly been working in governments top-down, and I was part of some quite good exercises of political leaders trying to spark this. So Tony Blair, who has both strengths and weaknesses, but did at various times try to encourage big public conversations about the future and future priorities. I worked for an Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who did a huge exercise, getting the whole country thinking 15, 20 years ahead on climate change and pensions and water, and then bringing 1000 people into parliament to talk about the results. So I have seen how good leaders can do this from the top down. And from the bottom up, lots of grassroots organizations, social innovation projects, I've automatically tried to think radically about the future. But I guess since the financial crisis in particular, I think horizons have shrunk right in amongst leaders, but also amongst NGOs, social movement organizations, they'd be more in case of trying to survive. And that's happened alongside this growing sense of imminent ecological catastrophe. And these have all contributed to squeezing out the capacity to imagine radically. JPPE So does it require different methods of funding so they can move past survival mode? Mulgan I think there's certainly a big role for philanthropy. Your country has enormous amounts of spare money in philanthropy, but almost none of it goes into this. There are some good reasons for that, obviously, philanthropy tends to come from the beneficiaries of the old system, so they're never likely to be very radical in challenging it. I still think a little bit more effort on the part of the Fords and Rockefellers and Hewletts would have paid off because this isn't very expensive. But who else is going to create the space for people to think, to look ahead, to range a bit more widely? And I’ve spent most of my life on much more short term practical, pragmatic problem solving. But we all need some sense of the bigger picture, what that's leading towards, to help make sense of the actions in the present. And that's what's missing. And I would say in the US, politics, philanthropy, and higher education have all essentially failed their societal role in that respect. JPPE So as you said, it requires opening the debate so that people know that there's a problem. What are the steps after that? Mulgan Well then I think it's about organizing and funding and orchestrating the more detailed work, which needs to be done. And I do use the analogy with art or film or writing. Everyone can take part in it a little bit. We can all make our movies on Tiktok and so on. But actually, if you want really good films, it's actually quite hard, it's quite skilled, it's quite professional. It requires quite a lot of people. Or for a good Netflix TV series. And it’s the same for social imagination. You can start off with sparks and some of it can be very open and participatory. But if you are going to do a detailed thinking through how to regulate or organize a netzero economy that requires a highly specialized knowledge, interrogation, and argument, and so on. That's what universities should be doing. I work with a lot of governments around the world, you know, 10 to 15 at any one point. And if they're looking at a new policy area, you sort of assume there must be off the shelf, lots of lots of options, which they could consider. Let's say a new kind of universal basic income is one, which I've been a bit involved in, and is much talked about in much of the world. And there are quite a lot of pilots now of UBIs, but the quality of the work of it is still very thin. And if you are a government wanting to introduce one, actually, you will have to do most of the work designing it, thinking through its impact. There is not a menu of options you can draw down. And the same is true with almost any field. Let's say bringing the circular economy principles to fashion or whatever, the legwork and hard labor has not been done to prepare the options for others to draw on. And this is also true at a global level. The UN was set up in the 1940s, benefitting from lots of hard work, which had been done imagining what a UN could be in the dark years of the 30s. I've been doing work recently on what could be new global governance arrangements, if conditions became more favorable. There's nothing out there in terms of well thought through options. There's lots of good description, lots of good analysis, lots of good critique of all that's wrong with the UN. But it's as if the people who are the experts feel too nervous to ever put their names to a proposal, which someone else might shoot down. So we have this sort of bizarre deficit of looking ahead, whereas in other fields, like in sciences, or the life sciences or AI, lots of people are paid to think speculatively to design possible new genomic treatments or new algorithms. And the imbalance between a world of science and tech, which was too good looking ahead, and the world of the social and the political, which has given up on it, I think it's really become a serious problem.

THE BROWN CENTER FOR PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, AND ECONOMICS The JPPE is supported by the Center for PPE, an interdisciplinary research center at Brown University. The JPPE is run by undergraduate student members of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) Society, a scholarship organization founded by the Political Theory Project in the fall of 2016. The PPE Society aims to discover and unite Brown University students who share a desire to understand how societies may become better places for their citizens to live and flourish. The PPE Society is both a scholarship and learning opportunity for students at Brown to investigate social science and political philosophy while engaging with other similarly dedicated students, faculty and visiting researchers. You can learn more about the Center for PPE and the PPE Society here: Learn More

Eleanor Ruscitti God Save the Fish: The Abyss of Electoral Politics in Trade Talks—a Brexit Case Study Eleanor Ruscitti “The EU is continuing to make demands that are incompatible with our independence... we cannot accept a deal that doesn’t leave us in control of our own laws or waters” ~ Boris Johnson on December 20, 2020 (1-2). Abstract During the “exit negotiations” between the United Kingdom (UK) and the European Union (EU), the relatively economically insignificant fishing industry received a disproportionate share of not just UK media attention, but global press as well; not to mention an array of political machinations, which almost halted a free trade agreement between two of the world’s largest trading partners. This evaluation seeks to understand why such disproportional influence existed. Why were both the EU and the UK coming to blows over something as seemingly innocuous as fishing, and willing to risk the most significant trade agreement in recent European history? Existing subject matter literature cites history and symbolism as the main factors that brought fishing into the limelight, almost killing a multi-billion-dollar trade deal between these two primary trade partners. While this paper concurs with existing analysis, it finds further illumination in the murky waters of electoral politics. It argues that the Conservative Party brought fishing to the trade talk surface to demonstrate that they were protecting a disenfranchised industry while aiming to convey the benefits of Brexit to maintain votes and prevent Scottish secession. More broadly, this paper sheds light on the potential ramifications that domestic politicians have on free trade agreements, especially in this new global populist era where the leverage of the disenfranchised is key; an affirmation of the American colloquial- ism that “all politics is local” (3). I: Introduction A Fishy Paradox From many perspectives, most of the Brexit drama did not make sense. From an economic point of view, it made more sense for the United Kingdom (UK) to remain in the European Union (EU) to keep access to the European Single Market (Single Market) and their largest and longest trading partners, especially in an era of increasing globalization. However, even though the vast majority of expert opinions concluded that leaving the EU would be economically disastrous for the UK, in the summer of 2016, its citizens voted to leave. Brexit was not just about economics, though. It was a reaction of nostalgia and entrenchment vis-à-vis a world that was rapidly becoming more interconnected with the EU leading the way. As the offshoring of lower productivity sectors of the economy and the development of more technologically advanced goods and services providers sailed ahead, once-thriving industries were no longer key to the economy. These changes left many in the UK workforce feeling stranded in an unnavigable wake of market disruption, while Brussels charted a course toward ever-increasing globalization. The disenfranchised felt as though they were under the thumb of Brussels, having to abide by laws that they believed were unfavorable to the UK. A rather sentimental notion of sovereignty and the call for “taking back control” resonated within certain portions of the British populace. Their goal was to withdraw from their largest economic market to regain full regulatory control yet maintain access to the Single Market via a free trade deal that represented over 40 percent of its exports (4). When the time came to negotiate this free trade deal, economic reasoning took a back seat, again. As the final days of the deal approached, most of the negotiations had been settled. However, over a dinner of pumpkin soup, scallops, and steamed turbot with mashed potatoes (a not-so-subtle nod to the feud) UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and EU President of the Commission Ursula von der Leyen almost derailed the entire deal for the seemingly economically insignificant fishing industry (5). Johnson left the dinner asserting that “very large gaps remain between the two sides (regarding a fishing deal) and it is still unclear whether these can be bridged.” Von der Leyen said that “we understand each other’s positions. But [we] remain far apart” (6). With only 15 days left to seal the deal, and no consensus on fishing in sight, many were left confused and frustrated. The fishing industry employs roughly 12,000 workers out of a UK workforce of over 33 million (excluding the processing industry, which employs a larger portion); represents 0.1 percent of British domestic output; 0.2 percent of EU GDP; and accounts for just 0.8 percent of total EU-UK trade (7, 8, 9, 10). It produces a little more than £1 billion of the total £300 billion worth of UK exports. It seemed that the UK was effectively putting at risk over 99 percent of its trade with the EU to defend an industry that accounted for a mere fraction of the world’s sixth-largest economy. Even Harrods in London contributes more to the British economy (11). Many questioned why the British government was prepared to risk the most important trade negotiations in recent British history over an industry that barely even touches the economic needle, let alone moves it. Literature Review Academics and journalists alike, such as Professor Anand Menon (12), Jeremy Phillipson (13), Sophia Kopela (14), and Stijn Billiet (15) tried to address the paradox, but the vast majority failed to account for the genesis of the paradox by failing to consider the role of elections and electoral politics. Professor Menon argued that the British government’s focus on the repatriation of fishing rights was instrumentally relevant because it was symbolic and represented a commitment to the “left behind.” Menon asserted that the media’s amplification of the issue brought it to relevance, and in a sense, forced Johnson to act (16, 17). Other scholars, such as Craig McAngus, Christopher Huggins, and John Connolly concluded that since fishing was one of the most Europeanized policies for the UK, it would receive the most attention throughout the trade talks (18, 19). On par with the rest of Brexit, the answer lies in convoluted domestic politics rather than economic reasoning. As mentioned in previous analyses, the fishing industry was perceived as a symbol for the wider movement fueling Brexit: “taking back control” and revitalizing a domestic industry that was lost under the heel of the EU boot. Politicians focused on it in order to create an image that the government was helping the citizens, and particularly, the disenfranchised (20). The cause for this might not be just because of the media’s influence, as per Menon’s analysis, but rather because of a synergistically strong confluence of the Scottish fishing lobby, an upcoming Scottish general election, and the Conservative party’s political agenda. II: Why Do Politicians Protect and Amplify Certain Industries in Free- Trade Agreements? Theoretical Frameworks: Lobbying Influence and the Self-Serving Politician There are a multitude of theories regarding the significance of certain industries in trade talks, often finding answers in lobby groups and politicians’ electoral objectives. Typically, democratically elected/appointed officials ultimately determine trade agreements. As theorized by Robert Putnam in 1988, the politics of trade agreements are often a two-level game in which public sector officials/politicians are simultaneously in negotiations at both the international and the domestic levels (21). Putnam assessed that domestic groups pressure the officials to adopt favorable policies and, in turn, these officials seek to amplify their power by developing relationships with these groups who offer support via votes or campaign contributions (22). Politicians then go to the international level and seek to maximize their ability to satisfy domestic pressures while balancing the needs of their international partners (23). Following Putnam’s two-level game theory, Gene Grossman and Elhanan Helpman introduced special-interest politics into the analysis, analyzing profit-maximizing lobbying groups. They found that, “lobbies seek to curry favor with politicians who covet their financial support... seeking to maximize the aggregate welfare of the lobby groups’ members” (24). As the politician’s objective is to maximize their own political welfare––which often relies on having a large number of contributions––they champion the policy of those who donate the most. In other words, those who donate the most have purchased the most access to influence during trade talks. Sometimes, though, the most influence comes from industries that do not have deep pockets. In 1982, Arye Hillman assessed why politicians put their support behind declining industries that have little special-interest money and/or little economic or voting influence (25). Hillman found that politicians protect and promote declining industries for self-interest motives to maximize political support, rather than for altruistic ideals, as the industry will still typically decline even with protection (26). However, a strong influence of a declining industry may not solely manifest from a politician’s political agenda. In “Entry and Asymmetric Lobbying: Why Governments Pick Losers”, Richard Baldwin and Frederic Robert-Nicoud use Grossman and Helpman’s 1994 pressure group approach to conclude that while government policy is influenced by pressure groups that employ expensive lobby- ing tactics, losers (such as declining industries) lobby more diligently through less expensive means (27). They concluded that it is not just the government that picks the losers, but rather it is also the losers that pick the government (28). The Fishing Industry as a “Loser” Lobbyist It is helpful to use Grossman and Helpman’s campaign finance lobbying, Hillman’s self-serving/re-election interests, and Baldwin’s and Robert-Nicoud loser lobbying framework to contextualize the fishing paradox. To begin, one must view the fishing industry as a lobbyist and Johnson as a political welfare maximizer. However, the fishing industry is not the lobbyist illustrated by Grossman and Helpman. After analyzing over 7,000 donations to both Conservative Party and Unionist Party between 2016-2020, the Scottish Fishing Federation and the National Federation of Fishermen did not appear to make meaningful contributions to the party. Several material contributions came from the fishing towns, yet such donations did not correlate with the amount of influence achieved. From 2016-2020, of the £169,449,385 donated to both parties, only £275,950 came from relevant coastal towns––roughly 0.163 percent (29). It is a bit of a conundrum, as according to Grossman and Helpman, the more robust sectors that donate the most would receive the highest levels of government support. When applying Baldwin and Robert-Nicod’s theory, though, it becomes clear that the fishers were not campaign contribution lobbyists, rather they were “loser” lobbyists who were loud and deliberate. They saw the Brexit movement as their policy opportunity and harnessed their symbolic nature to make themselves quite relevant in final trade talks. Concurrently, Johnson acted as a political welfare maximizer. When applying Hillman’s theory, the declining fishing community became relevant to the Conservatives, who hoped to maximize political support for electoral gains, re-election, and legacy. The newly formed Johnson administration needed to amplify an easy-to-understand industry that resonated with Brexit supporters and exemplified regained sovereignty. But it is often overlooked that the Conservatives also needed an industry that could help maintain the Tory Scottish Parliament seats and form a bulwark against the growing post-Brexit Scottish independence movement. The industry that conveniently and succinctly represented these values was the Scottish fishing industry. To see how this fits together, the story of Brexit and the fishing industry should be traced. First, we will examine the path to Brexit and the ways in which fishing––particularly the Scottish fisher––was influential from the beginning. Then we will scrutinize the trade talks and the political machinations of each actor. We will see that the political endgames of politicians are apparent in trade talks and domestic electoral gains often materially influence their tack as they adjust for the ever-changing political winds. III: A Deep-Seated History Part 1: How Did the UK Get to Brexit? An Overview of UK/EU Relationship: A Troubled Beginning As Professors Vivien Schmidt and Jolyon Howorth note, “Brexit was, in many ways, an accident waiting to happen” (30). The UK and the EU always had an am- bivalent relationship––a noncommittal half-in, half-out—in which the UK has been referred to as the “awkward partner” that never really embraced the deeper political, cultural, and ideological ambitions of her partners across the Channel. In the aftermath of WWII, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was created in 1951 to ensure stability across the continent by linking economies. While the UK embraced the idea of a united Europe, she saw herself as a separate entity––not just physically, but culturally as well. She was an island empire on which the sun had never set. But as the empire declined in stature and size during the post-war recovery period, she realized that in order to achieve her global ambitions in the new post-imperial world, she may find herself in a useful position to be the bridge between the US and the new ECSC: the European Economic Community (EEC). After two prior attempts, the UK finally joined in 1973 under Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath (31). However, Euroscepticism reigned from the get-go. Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell argued that a federal Europe would mean the “end of Britain as an independent European state” and promised to hold a referendum if elected (32). Two years later, in 1975, Labour formed a government under Harold Wilson and held the UK’s first EU referendum (33). Although closely divided, the UK would vote “Yes” to a united Europe, with the then-Europhile Conservative leader Margret Thatcher leading the way for the Conservatives, while Labour remained extremely divided over the subject (34). Thatcher’s Europhilism, however, was short-lived. A staunch supporter of the Single Market, Thatcher ultimately changed course due to the contentious Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and its budget contributions (35). She felt that the UK contributed more than its fair share of funding. Rhetoric of losing power and control to Brussels became common in her speeches and while her Eurosceptic agenda and rhetoric would ultimately become her downfall, it planted the seed for a growing anti-Europe movement that divided both parties internally (36). This seed later found its political moment amongst the disenfranchised in 2016 after a Conservative political opportunist called another EU referendum in hopes of bridging a divided Tory Party and securing a re-election win. Divisions within the Tories regarding Europe had been brewing since the Thatcher years, and were proving to be problematic for David Cameron’s upcoming general election as the rise of a relatively new right-wing populist party, the UK Independence Party (UKIP), began siphoning off the Conservative Eurosceptic votes. Hoping to mitigate Tory Europhile defections, Cameron promised an EU membership referendum if re-elected, believing that the party would vote to remain (37). The result was a complete miscalculation as he underestimated just how powerful Euroscepticism had become. The country split into two camps: Leave vs. Remain. The Remain campaign took a negative approach, focusing their argument on the economic consequences of a vote to leave (38). As mentioned, however, Brexit was not about economics and, as such, it did not resonate at the doorstep. The Leave campaigns led by Boris Johnson and former UKIP leader Nigel Farage took a more emotional, visceral approach that resonated well with the disenfranchised who felt that the globally interconnected EU was the source of all their problems. They had seen their employment opportunities evaporate as the industrial sector left the country and viewed the EU as their scapegoat. The campaigns of Vote Leave and Leave.EU tapped into this discontent, arguing to “take back control” of a trade by creating their own trade deals, revitalizing declining industries, and bringing jobs back to Britain (39). The Take Back Control mantra percolated throughout the country and was succinctly exemplified with the vignette of the fishing industry. The fishing industry perfectly embodied the Conservative Leave movement––it was an industry key to the British identity, but was disenfranchised and felt powerless and expendable, and held deep-seated resentment towards Europe. This resentment was a manifestation of an EU policy known as the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) that seeks to conserve fishing stocks and ensure fair competition in European waters by setting catching quotas for European fishing vessels based on 1983 catch activity (40, 41). The EU can determine quotas in each boundary as the policy requires that each member state pool its sovereignty and open its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) to all member states, creating a ‘European Water’ and overriding the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (42). To understand why the British held deep resentment towards this policy, one must understand the fishing wars. Part 2: Fishing Wars To Control or Not to Control, That is the Question As an island nation, Britain has had an obsession with claiming ownership and sovereignty of its waters, at times to the point of belligerency. Fishing has always been key to British identity, especially Scottish identity, which makes it a rather sensitive topic. The tension between the Island and the Continent regarding the open seas dates back to the Anglo-Dutch wars and grew throughout the Anglo-French rivalry and crescendoed with the infamous 1950s-70s Cod Wars where the UK and Iceland faced off over British access to the rich cod waters off the coast of Iceland (43, 44). These violent showdowns repeated throughout multiple decades, with Iceland almost leaving NATO and falling into the Soviet orbit (45). The clash ended with the UK’s long-distance fishing fleets losing access to Iceland’s lucrative fishing grounds followed by a sharp decline in fishing industry revenues. Around the same time, the UK joined the EU and was required to join the contentious CFP. The UK’s fishing industry was wary about entering the CFP and pooling access to its waters, relinquishing control over its EEZ. Academics, politicians, and journalists alike wondered why the Heath government did not try to negotiate an opt-out of the CFP––an action for which the UK is famous––or even negotiate a better deal for the UK (46). The answer circles back to Iceland. When the UK lost its long-distance access to Iceland, there was little inshore activity to replace it as the nation had become so dependent on the white fish from the more northern seas (47). British fishers were not fishing near the British coast. As such, most of the quota rights for inshore fishing went to the French, Dutch, and Danish fishers during the accession negotiations (48). The Resentful Fishers This did not sit well with the fishers, particularly the Scottish fishers, who watched their industry decline just as the EU gained access to UK waters. When asked about Britain’s entrance into the CFP, Scottish fisher Baden Gibson insisted that: “The EU and its fisheries policy have destroyed businesses beyond fishing... If you fish outside of your quota the penalties can be fierce— my worry would be that I would lose my boat and then I would lose everything. I realize that there must be quotas, but it should be fishing organizations who set those quotas” (49). Fishers felt a loss of control and that the government sold them out for access to the Single Market. This was further exacerbated when it came down to ownership of the quotas. Over the years, more and more foreign entities started to own Brit- ish fishing fleets, with 50 percent of all English quotas “owned” by British-flagged ships that were actually Spanish, Dutch, or Icelandic; that is about £160 million worth of England’s fishing quota (50, 51). The feeling of loss of control was palpable. It must be noted that it was not necessarily Brussels causing the decline. Rather, it was overfishing and advances in technology that prevented fishers from achieving previous catching thresholds as well as the aftermath of the Cod Wars that prevented them from fishing in certain areas. Another factor was the rise of multimillion-dollar fishing companies in the UK (52). Nonetheless, British fishers did not see it this way. From their perspective, the correlation was objectively clear: the UK fishing industry thrived before EU membership, but as part of the EU, it died at the hands of the quotas. Reforming the Common Fisheries Policy Calls were made by the fishing industry to reform the CFP, and in 2014, the European Commission tried to do so, putting forth reforms that would increase the labor market mobility of fishers (53). These schemes were criticized as they did not consider the local and cultural factors enough and did not give countries sufficient control over the quota issue. The reforms adjusted the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund and allowed member states to manage 89 percent of it, while the European Commission would manage 11 percent (54). However, that still did not fix the unpopular element of being too distant and top-down with rules dictated by Brussels, far away from the UK and even further from understanding the local fishers’ needs (55). The fishers wanted a greater say in fishery management; they wanted to decentralize the decision-making structures as they felt like bystanders in decisions that impacted them greatly. Part 1: The Referendum Brexit as a Policy Window for Fishers The EU referendum was the fishing industry’s “policy window” under Leave’s rally cry of “Take Back Control.” It was finally time to expel the European vessels from British waters and manage their fish stocks independently. Rather than lobbying via campaign contributions, as Grossman and Helpman’s theory predicts, the fishing industry-aligned more with Baldwin and Robert-Nicoud’s theory of lobbying diligently through less expensive means. In this case, the less expensive means came in the form of a new 21st-century campaign tool: social media. UKIP’s Nigel Farage teamed up with the campaign group Fishing for Leave (FFL) to storm social media and conduct demonstrations, calling for the UK to leave the EU and leave the CFP. To make a public display of discontent and grievances a few days before the referendum, Farage led a 35-boat flotilla of fishers up the Thames, asserting that “today’s flotilla is not a celebration or a party but a full-throttled protest. We want our waters back” (56). He also said that “one thing I can promise you, is that you are about to hear a lot about the fishing industry” (57). They were vociferous lobbyists who would become a key electoral constituency for the Conservatives. The hope, and promise, was that leaving the EU would allow the UK to reclaim fishing dominance and sovereignty over their territorial waters, which would, in turn, see fishing communities thrive again with replenished stock and the return of jobs. On June 26, 2016, the referendum was held, and the UK voted to leave 51 percent to 48 percent. The fishing industry, as predicted, was a firm supporter, especially the Scottish fishers (58). A pre-referendum survey indicated that 92 percent of Scottish fishers intended to vote to leave (59). Fishing communities such as Banff and Buchan voted for Brexit, with around 54 percent voting to leave, but were outnumbered by the rest of Scotland who largely voted to remain (60). They were a small, disenfranchised group within a larger community that found a policy window and representation within the Brexiteers. They would become incredibly important to the Conservatives who needed to keep a seat at the team in Scotland. Part 2: The Trade Talks The Conservative’s Seat at the Scottish Table: The Rise of the Politically Important Scottish Fishers The Scottish fishers were Brexiteers, but that did not necessarily mean they were pro-Tory. After Heath’s historic 1973 betrayal of fishing, Scotland’s northeast fishing community channeled its anger by voting with the pro-independence, social democratic Scottish National Party (SNP) for the following decades. The Tories were treacherous in the eyes of the fishers, best underscored by the 1973 quote from a UK civil servant: “In light of Britain’s wider European interests they, the Scottish fishermen, are expendable” (61). While the Scottish Tories initially lost the community’s trust, gaining it back was easier than one may think as the Scottish fisheries did not ideologically align with the rest of Scotland and the SNP. Leading up to the referendum, Scottish scholar Dr. Craig McAngus conducted a survey of Scottish fishers’ demographic characteristics as well as their political, social, and constitutional attitudes. McAngus found that they were: (1) a unionized industrial working class made up of mostly middle-aged men with standard grade qualifications who value self-sufficiency and sense of freedom to succeed in their profession and take on a libertarian ideology that is skeptical of state intervention; (2) very Eurosceptic, portraying themselves as “victims of an overly bureaucratic and unsympathetic governance regime,” and would lean towards the Conservative Party rather than the Labour Party whose values of collectivism and socialist principles conflicted with their notion of an unsympathetic governance regime; (3) differing from the rest of the Scottish population in that they tended to trust the UK Government more than the Scottish Government, which seems contradictory at first given Heath’s 1973 betrayal for access to the Single Market, however, their support relates to the Scottish independence movement. As the Scottish Government is currently led by the SNP, and as the fishers tend to be more British-unionist, conflicts often arise between the secession-seeking Scottish government and the union-seeking fishing industry. How the British Government Attempted to Divert Fisher’s Support Away from SNP to Scottish Tory via Brexit Scottish independence from the UK has been a divisive topic ever since Scot- land joined the UK in 1707. In a 2014 independence referendum, Scotland voted to remain in the UK, 55 percent to 45 percent, but the debate never settled. Scot- land’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon continued to push for another referendum, rather than receiving additional devolved powers from Westminster (which had been done in the past as a way for Westminster to circumvent Scottish independence). After the Brexit referendum, her calls for independence grew louder than ever as the majority of Scotland voted to remain in the EU––62 percent to 32 percent. Sturgeon argued that it was undemocratic for Scotland to be “dragged out of the EU against its will,” demanding another independence referendum–– indyref2––and then hoping to re-join the EU.62 But, to hold another referendum on Scottish independence, the UK’s Prime Minister must grant formal permission and the newly minted PM Boris Johnson did not support such. Johnson and other supporters of a unified UK argued that the 2014 referendum was a once-in-a-generation opportunity––a phrase Sturgeon campaigned on back in 2014––and asserted that under this reasoning, another referendum should not be held for another 40+ years. On the horizon, however, was the upcoming May 2021 Scottish Parliament election, thus Johnson and his Scottish Tory counterparts were finding themselves in a political pickle. Opinion polls saw a sizable shift from a slight majority of pro-independence voters in 2019 to a solid majority in 2020. Analysts attributed this shift to Brexit, and also to Sturgeon’s handling of the Coronavirus, which many believed had been better than Johnson’s. With polls indicating that the SNP was on course to win an overall majority in the May 2021 Scottish Parliament election, polling expert Sir John Curtice said that the country “seem[ed] headed for a significant clash between the UK and Scottish governments over whether another independence referendum should be held” (63). Conservatives started to worry that if they lost their Scottish Tory seats to the SNP, the Scottish Parliament would be comprised mostly, if not all, of the SNP. Scottish Tories would lose their voice in the Scottish Government, and Westminster would have to grant an independence referendum if asked, or risk being further branded as undemocratic. There was, however, a Brexit-supporting Scottish constituency that could potentially save the Scottish Tories: the Scottish fishers. As mentioned previously, fisheries have been caught between supporting the SNP and the Tories for decades. The fisheries voted SNP in the years after Heath’s “betrayal,” as the then-SNP Leader Alex Salmond sought to bring Scotland out of the CFP (64). During the 2014 independence referendum, Salmond made fishing a material role in the SNP’s campaign, asserting that if independence was gained, fishing would be the #1 national priority and would have direct representation in the EU (65). The issue, however, was that the fishers wanted out of the CFP, not more EU representation, which is what Salmond was campaigning for. As a result, SNP lost a large majority of the fisheries in the 2015 Scottish Parliament election. The hemorrhaging of fishing votes continued when the Brexiteers campaigned to “Take Back Control” during the 2016 EU/UK referendum. The 2017 Scottish Parliament elections saw a loss of fishing votes from SNP to Scottish Conservatives. The Tories increased their hold from one seat in 2015 to 13 in 2017, gaining the northeast fishing community seats as per figure 11 (66, 67). Figure 11 (68) Yellow indicates SNP seats, orange indicates Liberal Democrats, red indicates Labour, and blue indicates Scottish Tory. Brexit was the perfect opportunity for the Conservative Party to regain both the fishers’ trust and seats in the Scottish Parliament. Once they regained that support, they could potentially prevent independence by keeping the vote. The game was not over, though. The SNP made it its goal to regain coastal communities by illustrating that the Tories could not be trusted in looking out for Scotland’s best interests.69 Conservatives then countered by making fishing a key part of the “exit-negotiations.” A Hiccup: When May did not prioritize the Fisheries After the referendum, Cameron stepped down and Theresa May assumed Tory leadership in 2016. May called a snap election in 2017 in hopes of increasing her party’s slim majority in the lower house and having a stronger mandate to negotiate a Brexit deal with the EU. However, due to a resurgent Labour Party, May did not gain a majority and had to form a confidence-and-supply agreement with ten MPs of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) (70). That being said, May did gain some Scottish coastal seats due to the 2017 surge in Scottish Tory support. Suddenly, Scottish fishers––as well as the DUP––became one of the preeminent interest groups for May’s coalition, as they were some of the few who kept her party from anemic minority status. Appeasing them and creating and maintaining trust would be necessary to get her Brexit deal approved and to keep Scottish Parliament seats. May proceeded with her Brexit plans and announced a Fisheries Bill to take back control of British waters and remove fishing quotas after the country with- drew from the EU (71). This pleased the fishers, but as 2017 progressed, the EU countries whose fishing industries were heavily dependent on access to UK waters became worried that access to the waters would be completely severed and that the EU would set an undesirable precedent for its member nations. Denmark claimed it had historical rights to fish in British waters dating back to the 1400s, while other EU countries claimed that the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea stated that countries must respect each other’s “traditional fishing rights”, and the ability to access British waters fell under traditional rights (72). In March of 2018, then-Brexit Secretary David Davis and the EU’s Brexit Negotiator Michel Barnier announced that the UK and the EU had agreed on a Brexit transition deal. However, to achieve the deal, the UK partially conceded its fishing contentions: fisheries would be required to follow the CFP rules until the end of the December 2020 Brexit transition period (73). The UK fishing industry was infuriated. Bertie Armstrong, CEO of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, said, “This falls far short of an acceptable deal. We will leave the EU and leave the CFP, but hand back sovereignty over our seas a few seconds later... Our fishing communities’ fortunes will still be subject to the whim and largesse of the EU for another two years” (74). Again, Nigel Farage protested on a fishing boat floating along the Thames outside of Parliament while chucking dead haddock into the river. SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon took to Twitter hoping to sway the fishers back over to the SNP stating: “This is shaping up to be a massive sellout of the Scottish fishing industry by the Tories” (75). The thirteen Scottish Conservative MPs announced that the deal was like “drink[ing] a pint of cold sick” and assured that they would be prepared to vote against their own party if they did not see a return to full control of British waters as “the EU does not care about Scottish fishermen and neither do the SNP government who wants us to re-join the Common Fisheries Policy and the EU” (76). A sense of betrayal was palpable, and May’s fellow Conservative politicians started to understand that prioritizing fishermen would need to be on their political agenda. May would go on to put forth two other Brexit deals but was met with sound political rejection. In June 2019, she stepped down and Boris Johnson assumed leadership in July. The Hiccup Continues: Johnson Learning to Prioritize Fish With May’s Brexit failure in the rearview mirror, Johnson was keen on steering the UK out of the EU. However, after May’s perceived slight, he found little support amongst the Scottish Conservatives and fishers. In August, Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson resigned. She worried that a Johnson government would boost support for independence, given that his hard-liner Brexit stance stood in complete opposition to the majority opinion of Scotland and the SNP (77). Johnson, however, had a different agenda; one that was keen on maintaining the union and appeasing the fishing industry was one way of doing so. In July 2019, Johnson made his first visit to Scotland and pledged that fishing access would not be sacrificed in the new Brexit deal.78 The Scottish fishers welcomed his rhetoric, with Bertie Armstrong stating, “We have been looking for a straight and direct answer and that’s exactly what we have got... Scottish fishing’s sea of opportunity lies on the other side of Brexit” (79). Additionally, Johnson assured fishers that he would “strengthen the union” and pledged £300 million for boost- ing growth in the devolved nations (Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) as a way to try to counteract critics who said his no-deal strategy would break up the UK (80). Among those critics was Nicola Sturgeon, who branded Johnson as the “last prime minister of the UK” (81). After a series of controversial events in the Fall of 2019––proroguing Parliament and then withdrawing the whip from 21 MPs (effectively expelling them from the party)––Johnson was left with no majority in Parliament and found it impossible to get Brexit legislation through. He enacted the Benn Act to extend the divorce date from October 19th, 2019 to January 31st, 2020, and then called a snap election for December 12th, 2019. While Johnson took a strong stance against Scottish independence, his attention to fishing seemed to wane during the snap election. Johnson did keep Scotland in his sights, but most of his attention was to mainland England, hoping to gain back the English voters who defected to Labour in 2017 (82). He visited Scotland once during the campaign, where he delivered the Scottish Conservative manifesto and claimed that Scotland was “paralyzed” by the SNP. Johnson asserted that “a vote for the Scottish Conservatives is a vote to stop a second independence referendum and to get Brexit done... Only a vote for the Conservatives will stop the SNP’s plans to break up the UK” (83 , 84). However, given that May lost many British votes to Labour in 2017, he also needed to prioritize issues that were of interest to larger voting blocs, such as the NHS, the police, and the British education system. To do so, as is now second nature to many politicians, Johnson harnessed Twitter to connect with constituents. On Twitter, Johnson spoke less about fishing and more about those three campaign stances. In total, Johnson tweeted 62 times regarding his campaign agenda on those issues, while only tweeting about fishing five times and Scotland nine times. Figure 13 (85) Illustrates the number of times Johnson Tweeted about a specific subject: 5 times about fishing; 9 times about Scotland; and 62 times about the NHS, policing, and schooling. With much focus on Johnson’s campaign, fishers in coastal Scottish towns were growing worried that fishing was not his top priority. These fishers became more apprehensive and began questioning Johnson’s true intentions: “There’s a calculation that the fishing industry is making that there’s a heavy risk they will get sold out on the way out of the EU, just like they did on the way in” and that maybe “the SNP might get a better deal for Scottish fishing from the EU” (86) especially since Johnson “changes his mind like the weather” (87). A growing number of fishers were unsure whether Johnson would protect the fishing industry or divert his focus towards other aspects in the UK during the trade talks. Election day came, and while Johnson won the largest Parliamentary majority since Thatcher in 1987, he lost several crucial seats in Scotland, which resulted in a small swing back to the SNP, who won 48 out of 59 seats (88). Although a tabloid journalist, Torcuil Crichton provided some thoughtful insight by noting that Scottish Tory 2017 gains were halved in 2019, and any further “betrayal” of the fish- ing industry “will fuel the independence argument and undermine the principles Brexit was fought on” (89). Suddenly, the importance of Scottish independence began to sink in. Johnson needed to show Scotland the benefits of staying in the UK and that Brexit was good for Scottish communities. The fishing industry was the perfect political tool for this end. Johnson could argue that he was going to secure them a good deal, stand up for the disenfranchised against an “overbearing” Brussels, and bring back the domestic industry. He could argue that the UK’s government was paying attention to Scottish needs and, as such, Scotland should stay in the UK rather than back the independence-preoccupied SNP. It is for this reason that fishing was greatly amplified during the trade talks. The Tories needed to secure the Scottish fishing industry a good deal––the rare Scottish industry that embodied the Brexit movement, had yet to back SNP fully, and were against independence––or else potentially be forced to consider calling an independence referendum. Fishing was the fulcrum for Johnson’s political leverage. The Talks and the Deal With the general election behind him and the risk of Scottish independence at the forefront of his mind, Johnson entered the trade talks as a strong counter to Macron and other EU officials who wanted the status quo ante . The issue has now come full circle, back to the famed scallop and turbot dinner on December 9th, 2020, when Johnson and von der Leyen sat down to hash out the final open issue. Britain demanded 80 percent of the EU’s catch to be returned to the UK, but reduced this to 60 percent as a compromise; the EU countered with 20 percent (90). The UK demanded that this transition would take no longer than three years, while the EU asked for a 14-year transition period, which they then reduced to seven. The EU asked for its fishing vessels to be able to fish in the six-to-twelve-mile zone from the British coastline, but the UK insisted that EU vessels be banned from this zone. Von der Leyen left the dinner saying the two sides remained “far apart” (91). The whole trade deal was on the line, with only a few days to go. Finally, on Christmas Eve, after four-and-a-half years of bitter negotiations and only a week to spare before the UK would crash out of the EU, they came to a deal. The 1,200-page document was passed by MPs on December 30th, 521 to 73, and it goes as follows: The transition will be phased over five and a half years, during which EU vessels will still be able to fish in the UK waters. During the adjustment period, EU quotas will decrease by 15 percent in the first year, and then two and a half percent for the following four years. That means by year five, the UK will regain 25 percent of the current EU catch in British waters; Fish will continue to be traded between the two parties with no tariffs imposed; After the five-year adjustment period is over, the UK and EU will enter annual negotiations to determine the quota of fish that EU vessels are allowed to catch in UK waters (92). Johnson announced the deal while wearing a fish patterned tie and praised it as a great deal in which fishers would see their hauls increase from half of the fish quota in British waters under CFP, to about two-thirds by the end of the adjustment period (93). However, neither the fisheries, the French, nor the other EU nations, saw it this way. A deal had been made, but the saga was far from over. V: Conclusions Summary of Findings While fisheries were the “losers” that lobbied hard to grab the government’s attention initially during the Brexit campaign (much like Baldwin and Robert-Nicoud’s theory), it appears that the Conservatives needed the fishers during the exit negotiations and thus took a hard position on access to UK waters, not for social merit, but rather for their electoral and political gains (much like Hillmen’s theory). Matt Bevington, an analyst with the UK in a Changing Europe, pointed out that Johnson saw fishing as one of the few areas where the government would be able to score a “win” to tout as evidence of Brexit’s success (94). Barrie Deas, CEO of the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organization, said that the fishing industry was a “litmus test’’ for Brexit since we will not know most of the effects of the Brexit deal for many years, but the effects for fishing will be realized immediately (95). The Guardian journalist Daniel Boffey noted that fisheries were important to Johnson as he needed to show some benefit of Brexit to Scottish communities as Sturgeon was ramping up her demands for another independence referendum (96). In a similar vein, Denis Staunton of the Irish Times emphasized that North East Scotland is now essential to Johnson’s electoral constituency and will play an important role in the Scottish independence debate over the next few years (97). However, if he remains unable to please the Scottish fishers, the SNP may snatch up those who feel expendable to the Tories. This will again potentially embolden the independence movement since no politician wants to be known as the last Prime Minister. Lessons Learnt While the deal itself was a “Christmas miracle” to the Tories, in many respects, its aftermath has not been so merry. Johnson was unable to provide the fishing industry the deal that they wanted, and more importantly, that they were expect- ing. While the Scottish Tories matched their 2016 performance in the May 2021 Scottish elections, the fishing debacle still plagues the Johnson government with many lessons to be taught to future politicians (98). Hoping to illustrate the UK government’s commitment to the disenfranchised and their commitment to taking back control from the EU, many promises were made. These promises, however, were not plausible, let alone achievable––especially in regards to the fishing industry. Now, the Scottish independence movement has re-emerged, with the SNP harnessing the fishing failure as another reason for why they should leave the UK. Electoral politics influenced the amplification of the industry during the talks. In so doing, it amplified a delicate social, economic, and political bond that is about to snap. However, the main lessons scholars may glean from this case study is the extreme influence of domestic electoral politics in trade agreements: 1. An industry being economically insignificant does not mean that it will be insignificant in the international arena. Not everything in trade talks distills down to economics. More likely than not, declining domestic industries will be protected in trade talks for political purposes. 2. That is not to say, however, that economics is not influential. Johnson was a champion of the industry throughout the trade talks, but ultimately, he had to secure a deal that would allow European vessels access to UK waters for a limited time in order to salvage a trade relationship. In other words, economic interests were prioritized over politics towards the end of the talks. As Barrie Deas said, “It’s what we always feared... When you get to the endgame in the negotiations it becomes a binary choice and economics prevails over politics. I think that’s what’s happened and it’s really not good news.” Ultimately, for better or for worse, Johnson needed a deal (99). 3. Politicians often pick easily understood industries to get their message across. While much of the fishing industry is quite complex, once dissected, its disenfranchised status is not. Johnson harnessed the underserved with a message centered around one question: “what does Brussels know about potholes in London?” His intent with the fishing industry was to illustrate an example of him protecting locals to show (1) that Brexit can be a success and (2) that he was fighting for the British (and Scottish) industry. Fishing was an industry that many people could understand as it portrayed Brussels as treating them unfairly with “draconian quotas.” It would have been difficult if, for example, Johnson had tried to highlight intellectual property rights; few people would latch on to that due to its highly technical nature. Here, success revolves around clear messaging, which is something the Remain camp struggled to achieve. In the eyes of the Brexiteers, these were local fishers––the heart and soul of the UK, even if they were no longer as economically significant––being taken advantage of by Brussels. Fishers also happened to be politically right-leaning and resided in the “hostile” territory of Scotland. As the world enters a more global epoch, there has been a greater emphasis on interdependence and trans- nationalism, which often glazes over domestic factors. But, as former Speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O’Neill (D-MA) famously quipped: “all politics is local,” or, rather, “all local politics are global,” especially in free-trade agreements. Constituents care more about what is happening on the home front, rather than what is going on in Brussels. They care about how Brussels affects them at home more than being in an economically efficient partnership with the EU. 4. Thus, as Putnam theorized in 1988, international negotiations are a two-level game in which domestic groups pressure the government to adopt favorable policies, as the politicians seek to amplify their power by consulting coalitions of these groups. The politicians then go to the international level and seek to maximize their ability to satisfy domestic pressures while balancing the needs of their international partners. However, the need to get reelected and to preserve legacy presides over the strategy they bring to the negotiation table and the industries they choose to protect. Electoral politics is at the heart of all politics, especially in free trade arrangements. Future Research It has been eight months since this paper was originally completed, and fishing still remains top of the fold. The UK and France are in continuous disputes, threatening sanctions and denying each other licenses to harvest in each other’s seas. To understand this continued conflict, scholars and politicians must look at the EU’s perspective as well as the British perspective. While this paper sought to understand why British politicians amplified the fishing industry during the talks, the UK was not its only amplifier. Just as with the UK, fishing is an economically insignificant industry for the EU overall, yet it continues to be amplified by EU member states. From the EU’s perspective, British waters have fish that are the staple of the European diet: herring, mackerel, sole, and shellfish (100). Herring and mackerel are Denmark’s most popular seafood, and it would be impossible to catch their quota if they could no longer fish in UK waters. This would devastate Denmarks’ industry, culture, and customs. For France, on the other hand, it is more about political weight, similar to what we saw in Scotland with Prime Minister Johnson. As journalist John Lichfield pointed out, “The north of France, around Boulogne, is hugely important for the presidential election in 2022... The regional president... might well be one of Macron’s main rivals at that time, so [Macron] needs to be seen to be supporting what is already a struggling area economically” (101). Additionally, the EU was determined to not set an undesirable precedent. They could not let Britain dictate access to such waters, which could potentially portray the EU as weak to other countries trying the same. This was one of the reasons the EU insisted that the previous level of access to UK waters be maintained, and why Phil Hogan, the EU’s Trade Commissioner, assured Johnson that if he wanted to gain access to EU financial markets, the UK would have to allow EU vessels in British fishing waters (102) Both sides took hardline positions for their constituents, thinking that they were doing their best while also serving their political agendas. Now, though, both British and EU constituents and their businesses are the ones suffering from the fallout of the deal. As stated by Olivier Lepretre, the head of the Hauts-de-France regional fishers association, they want to move on with their lives: “Fishers really don’t care about the politics” anymore, “they just want to work, to go to sea” (103). But, Brexit always was, and still is, a political initiative at its core, and as such, the politics remain. The continued fishing feud illuminates much larger and more profound structural relationship issues that will play out over the next few decades as the two former partners navigate these uncharted waters and tack against the political winds. Endnotes 1 Robert Fisk, “Boris’s Last Push for Brexit Sees Him Kissing Fish and Posing for Selfies as New Poll Gives Leave the Narrowest of Leads,” The Sun (The Sun, June 22, 2016), https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1326026/boriss-last-push-for-brexit-sees-him-kissing-fish-and-posing-for-selfies-in-a-gruelling-final-day-of-campaigning/ . 2 Raf Casert, “EU-UK Trade Talks Floundering over Fish as Cutoff Day Nears,” Associated Press , December 20, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/brexit-europe-global- trade-boris-johnson-europe-94ead6da2c46c87efc51328893cd3590 . 3 Thomas Phillip “Tip” O’Neill. 4 Avery Koop, “Visualizing the UK and EU Trade Relationship,” Visual Capitalist, February 9, 2021, https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-uk-and-eu-trade- relationship/ . 5 Adam Coghlan, “Breaking Bread Over Brexit With Fish in Brussels, a Short Story,” Eater London , December 10, 2020, https://london.eater.com/2020/12/10/22167244/no-deal-brexit-fishing-boris-johnson-ursula-von-der-leven-dinner . 6 Daniel Boffey, “The Brexit Brussels Dinner: Fish and Frank Talk but No One Left Satisfied,” The Guardian, December 10, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/ dec/10/the-brexit-brussels-dinner-fish-and-frank-talk-but-no-one-left-satisfied . 7 Elena Ares et al., “UK Fisheries Statistics,” House of Commons Library, November 23, 2020, https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn02788/ . 8 Reuters Staff, “PM Sold out Fish in Brexit Trade Deal, Fishermen Say,” Reuters, December 26, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-fish/pm-sold-out-fish- in-brexit-trade-deal-fishermen-say-idUSKBN2900KG . 9 Kat Haladus, “Fisheries: An Industry That’s Worth 0.1% of the UK’s GDP Is Holding up the Talks,” UK Customs Solutions, December 23, 2020, https://ukcustomssolutions . co.uk/2020/12/23/fisheries-an-industry-thats-worth-0-1-of-the-uks-gdp-is-holding-up-the- talks/. 10 Matt Bevington, Professor Anand Menon, and Professor Jonathan Portes, “Fishing: Why Is It Such a Tricky Issue in UK-EU Negotiations?” UK in a Changing Europe, November 10, 2020, https://ukandeu.ac.uk/explainers/fishing-why-is-it-such-a-tricky-issue-in-uk-eu-negotiations/ . 11 British Sea Fishing, “Brexit and Britain’s Fisheries,” British Sea Fishing, January 20, 2021, https://britishseafishing.co.uk/brexit-and-britains-fisheries/ . 12 Anand Menon and UK in a Changing Europe Team, “Fisheries and Brexit,” The UK in a Changing Europe , June 2020, https://ukandeu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/ Fisheries-and-Brexit.pdf . 13 Jeremy Phillipson and David Symes, “‘A Sea of Troubles’: Brexit and the Fisheries Question” 90 (2018): pp. 168-173, https://doi.org/10.31230/osf.io/fxnqj . 14 Sophia Kopela, “Historic Fishing Rights in the Law of the Sea and Brexit,” Leiden Journal of International Law 32, no. 4 (2019): pp. 695-713, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0922156519000438 . 15 Stijn Billiet, “Brexit and Fisheries: Fish and Chips Aplenty?” The Political Quarterly 90, no. 4 (2019): pp. 611-619, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923x.12748 . 16 Tom McTague, “Why Britain’s Brexit Mayhem Was Worth It,” The Atlantic (Atlantic Media Company, December 24, 2020), https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/12/brexit-trade-deal-uk-eu/617509/ . 17 Anand Menon and UK in a Changing Europe Team, “Fisheries and Brexit”. 18 Craig McAngus and Christopher Huggins, et al., “The Politics and Governance of UK Fisheries after Brexit.” Political Insight 9, no. 3 (September 2018): 8-11, https://doi.org/10.1177/2041905818796570 . 19 John Connolly et al., “The Governance Capacities of Brexit from a Scottish Perspective: The Case of Fisheries Policy,” Public Policy and Administration , January 2020, https://doi.org/10.1177/0952076720936328 . 20 Matt Bevington, Professor Anand Menon, and Professor Jonathan Portes, “Fishing: Why Is It Such a Tricky Issue in UK-EU Negotiations?” 21 Robert D. Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: the Logic of Two-Level Games.” International Organization 42, no. 3 (1988): 427–60. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2706785 . 22 Corneliu Bjola and Ilan Manor, “In the Long Run,” In the Long Run, July 19, 2018, http://www.inthelongrun.org/criaviews/article/revisiting-putnams-two-level-game-theory- in-the-digital-age-domestic-digita/ . 23 Eugénia da Conceição-Heldt and Patrick A. Mello, “Two-Level Games in Foreign Policy Analysis,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.496 . 24 Gene Grossman and Elhanan Helpman, “Trade Wars and Trade Talks,” Journal of Political Economy 103, no. 4 (1995): pp. 678, https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3450062/Helpman_TradeWars.pdf . 25 Arye L. Hillman, “Declining Industries and Political-Support Protectionist Motives.” The American Economic Review 72, no. 5 (1982): 1180-187. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1812033 . 26 Hilman, 1186. 27 Richard E. Baldwin and Robert-Nicoud, Frédéric, “Entry and asymmetric lobbying: why governments pick losers.” PSPE working papers, March 2007. Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK. 28 Ibid. 29 Data collected by Eleanor Ruscitti via the UK Electoral Commission donation reports from 2016-2020, http://search.electoralcommission.org.ukcurrentPage=1&rows=10&sort=AcceptedDate&order=desc&tab=1&open=filter&et=pp&isIrishSourceYes=true&isIrishSourceNo=true&prePoll= false&postPoll=true®ister=gb®ister=ni&optCols =IsAggregation . 30 Vivien Schmidt and Jolyon Howorth, “Brexit: What Happened? What Is Going to Happen?” Politique Étrangère, no. 4 (2016): pp. 123-138, https://doi.org/10.3917/pe.164.0123 . 31 Ibid, 4. 32 Kevin H. O’Rourke, “A Short History of Brexit: from Brentry to Backstop,” in A Short History of Brexit: from Brentry to Backstop (London: Pelican, 2019), p. 74. 33 James Walsh, “Britain’s 1975 Europe Referendum: What Was It like Last Time?” The Guardian, February 25, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/25/britains-1975-europe-referendum-what-was-it-like-last-time . 34 Ibid. 35 Pan Pylas, “Britain’s EU Journey: When Thatcher Turned All Euroskeptic,” Associated Press, (January23,2020), https://apnews.com/article/64855d1ff67454443db5132bdfb22ea6 . 36 Ibid. 37 Vivien Schmidt and Jolyon Howorth, 7. 38 Ibid, 4. 39 Jorge Martins Rosa and Cristian Jiménez Ruiz, “Reason vs. Emotion in the Brexit Campaign: How Key Political Actors and Their Followers Used Twitter,” First Monday 25, no. 3 (March 2, 2020), https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v25i3.9601 . 40 European Commission, “The Common Fisheries Policy (CFP),” European Commission, 2015, https://ec.europa.eu/fisheries/cfp_en . 41 Andy Forse, Ben Drakeford, and Jonathan Potts, “Fish Fights: Britain Has a Long History of Trading Away Access to Coastal Waters,” The Conversation, March 25, 2019, https://theconversation.com/fish-fights-britain-has-a-long-history-of-trading-away-access- to-coastal-waters-112988 . 42 Convention on the Law of the Sea , New York, 10 December 1982, United Nations Treaty Series, pg. 40. https://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/unclos_e. pdf 43 Thomas Wemyss Fulton, “The Fisheries,” in The Sovereignty of the Sea: an Historical Account of the Claims of England to the Dominion of the British Seas, and of the Evolution of the Territorial Waters; with Special Reference to the Rights of Fishing and the Naval Salute (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1911), pp. 25-57. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/54977/54977- h/54977-h.htm . 44 Keith Johnson, “So Long, and Say Thanks for All the Fish,” Foreign Policy, February 28, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/02/28/fishing-uk-european-union-brexit-trade- talks-cfp/ . 45 Ibid. 46 Dan Roberts, “‘We Have Been Hijacked’: Fishermen Feel Used over Brexit,” The Guardian (Guardian News and Media, March 23, 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/mar/23/we-have-been-hijacked-fishermen-feel-used-over-brexit . 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Serena Kutchinsky, “Is Nigel Farage the Fisherman’s Friend?” Newsweek, June 27, 2016, https://www.newsweek.com/eu-referendum-brexit-fishing-policy-nigel-farage- scotland-snp-473435 . 50 John Litchfield, “Ukip Is Wrong: British Fishing Answers to Westminster Not Brussels,” The Guardian, April 6, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/06/ ukip-british-fishing-westminster-brussels-brexit . 51 Oliver Barnes and Chris Morris, “Brexit Trade Deal: Who Really Owns UK Fishing Quotas?” BBC News, January 1, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/52420116 . 52 Keith Johnson, “So Long, and Say Thanks for All the Fish.” 53 European Commission, “The Common Fisheries Policy (CFP): the essentials of the new CFP,” 2015. 54 Ibid. 55 Craig McAngus, “A Survey of Scottish Fishermen Ahead of Brexit: Political, Social and Constitutional Attitudes,” Maritime Studies 17, no. 1 (2018): pp. 41-54, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40152-018-0090-z . 56 Daniel Boffey, “UK Fishermen May Not Win Waters Back after Brexit, EU Memo Reveals,” The Guardian, February 15, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/15/uk-fishermen-may-not-win-waters-back-after-brexit-eu-memo-reveals . 57 Severin Carrell, “Nigel Farage to Lead pro-Brexit Flotilla up Thames,” The Guardian, June 3, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/03/nigel-farage-pro-brexit- flotilla-thames-eu-referendum-leave-campaign . 58 Chris Morris and Oliver Barnes, “Brexit Trade Deal: What Does It Mean for Fishing?” BBC News, January 20, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/46401558 . 59 Craig McAngus, “A Survey of Scottish Fishermen Ahead of Brexit: Political, Social and Constitutional Attitudes.” 60 The Newsroom, “Scottish Constituency of Banff and Buchan ‘ ̃Voted for Brexit’,” The Scotsman, November 22, 2016, https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/scottish-constituency-banff-and-buchan-voted-brexit-1462018 . 61 Kevin McKenna, “Scotland’s Fishermen Feel a Sickening Sense of Betrayal Yet Again,” The Guardian, March 24, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/ mar/24/scotland-fishermen-betrayal-peterhead-brexit . 62 “Scottish Independence: Will There Be a Second Referendum?” BBC News (BBC, March 22, 2021), https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-50813510 . 63 Ibid. 64 Scotland Correspondent, “SNP Tries to Dump EU Fisheries Policy” (The Times, March 31, 2010), https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/snp-tries-to-dump-eu-fisheries- policy-7b8tnlq3gw5 . 65 Scottish Government, “Scotland’s Future and Scottish Fisheries,” Scottish Government, August 14, 2014, https://www.gov.scot/publications/scotlands-future-scottish-fisheries/pages/2/ . 66 “General Election 2017: Former SNP Leader Alex Salmond Loses Seat,” BBC, June 9, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-40212541 . 67 “General Election 2017: SNP Lose a Third of Seats amid Tory Surge,” BBC News, June 9, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-40192707 . 68 Ibid. 69 “Letters: Tories Could Not Be Trusted to Negotiate in Good Faith in Independence Talks,” HeraldScotland, November 11, 2020, https://www.heraldscotland.com/ news/18864349.letters-tories-not-trusted-negotiate-good-faith-independence-talks/ . 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 72 British Sea Fishing, “Brexit and Britain’s Fisheries.” 73 Ibid. 74 The Newsroom, “Fishing Industry’s Anger as UK and EU Strike Brexit Transition Deal,” The Scotsman, March 19, 2018, https://www.scotsman.com/country-and-farming/ fishing-industrys-anger-uk-and-eu-strike-brexit-transition-deal-318889 . 75 Ibid. 76 Jenni Davidson, “Brexit Deal for Fisheries like ‘A Pint of Cold Sick’, Conservative MP Douglas Ross Says,” Holyrood Website, October 4, 2019, https://www.holyrood.com/news/view,brexit-deal-for-fisheries-like-a-pint-of-cold-sick-conservative-mp-douglas-ross- says_13762.htm . 77 Libby Brooks, “Scottish Tories Still Anxious over Johnson’s Impact on the Union,” The Guardian, July 23, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/23/scottish-tories-still-anxious-over-johnson-impact-on-the-union-independence-ruth-davidson . 78 Tom Peterkin, “Boris Johnson Pledges That Access to Fishing Will Not Be Sacrificed in New Brexit Deal,” Press and Journal, July 30, 2019, https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/politics/scottish-politics/1807666/boris-johnson-pledges-that-access-to-fishing-will-not-be-sacrificed-in-new-brexit-deal/ . 79 Ibid. 80 Rowena Mason and Libby Brooks, “Boris Johnson Heads to Scotland to Deliver £300m Pledge,” The Guardian, July 28, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/28/boris-johnson-heads-to-scotland-to-deliver-300m-pledge . 81 Ibid. 82 Tim Ross, “Boris Johnson’s Tories Abandoned Scotland to Win Their Big Victory,” Bloomberg, December 23, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-23/how-johnson-s-tories-ditched-scotland-to-rule-a-divided-kingdom . 83 “General Election 2019: Boris Johnson Claims Scotland ‘Paralysed’ by SNP,” BBC News, November 26, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2019-50561993 . 84 Reuters Staff, “Boris Johnson to Tell Scotland: Vote Conservative to Stop Independence Bid,” Reuters, November 6, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-election- scotland/boris-johnson-to-tell-scotland-vote-conservative-to-stop-independence-bid-idUSKBN1XG333 . 85 Data collected by Eleanor Ruscitti via Boris Johnson’s Twitter account 86 Alistair Grant and Rohese Devereux Taylor, “Constituency Profile: Fishing for Votes in Scottish Coastal Communities,” HeraldScotland, December 1, 2019, https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/18072191.general-election-2019-fishing-votes-scottish-coastal- communities/ . 87 Ibid. 88 “Results of the 2019 General Election,” BBC News, https://www.bbc.com/news/election/2019/results . 89 Torcuil Crichton, “Why Scottish Fishing Rights Are a Brexit Deal Breaker in EU Trade Talks,” Daily Record, October 15, 2020, https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/.politics/scottish-fishing-rights-brexit-deal-22850163 . 90 British Sea Fishing, “Brexit and Britain’s Fisheries.” 91 Ibid. 92 Chris Morris and Oliver Barnes, “Brexit Trade Deal: What Does It Mean for Fishing?” 93 Harry Taylor, “Kipper Tie: Boris Johnson Sports Fish Symbol in Brexit Message,” The Guardian, December 24, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/dec/24/net-gains-boris-points-up-his-ties-to-the-fishing-industries . 94 Jeremy Kahn, “A Fine Kettle: How Fishing Became the Issue That Could Sink a Post- Brexit U.K.-EU Trade Deal,” Fortune, October 15, 2020, https://fortune.com/2020/10/15/fishing-rights-brexit-u-k-eu-trade-deal/ . 95 Barrie Deas, “Opinion Piece,” NFFO, October 9, 2020, https://nffo.org.uk/news/opinion-piece.html . 96 Daniel Boffey, “Catches, Quotas and Communities: the Key Fisheries Issues at Stake,” The Guardian, October 17, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/oct/17/catches-quotas-and-communities-the-key-fisheries-issues-at-stake . 97 Denis Staunton, “Johnson Covers Brexit Win on Fish to Show He’s ‘Taking Back Control’,” The Irish Times, December 4, 2020, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/johnson-covets-brexit-win-on-fish-to-show-he-s-taking-back-control-1.4426956 . 98 “Scottish Election 2021: Conservative Match Best Scottish Election Results,” BBC News (BBC, May 8, 2021), https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-57042432 . 99 Dan Roberts, “‘We Have Been Hijacked’: Fishermen Feel Used over Brexit.” 100 Laura Hughes, “Brexit: Why Fishing Threatens to Derail EU-UK Trade Talks.” 101 Lucy Williamson, “Brexit: Why France Is Raising the Stakes Over Fishing” (BBC, October 13, 2020), 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Two Forms of Environmental-Political Imagination: Germany, the United States, and the Clean Energy Transition Two Forms of Environmental-Political Imagination Germany, the United States, and the Clean Energy Transition Nathan S. Chael Stanford University Author Fabienne Tarrant Lori Kohen Huayu Wang Connor Riley Editors Spring 2019 Download full text PDF (52 pages) Abstract The United States and Germany have followed markedly different paths thus far in the 21st century in their efforts to reduce emissions from energy production and thereby combat climate change through national policy. I extend Professor Jedediah Purdy’s notion of the “environmental imagination” to discuss the “environmental-political imagination,” or implicit vision of the environment, politics, and how they ought to be approached and structured, latent in each country’s central 21st-century climate policy initiative. I find that a general spirit of individuation and conflict marks the United States’ modern environmental-political imagination, while a general spirit of collective enterprise and continuity marks Germany’s. A parallel series of examples is used in each country to illustrate this, including understandings of economy and environment, particular forms of energy and landscape, and ideas of leadership and agency, and finally some objections are considered. I. Introduction “‘We’re the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it.’ And that’s why I committed the United States to leading the world on this challenge.” [1] – President Barack Obama “Dealing with climate change means facilitating and promoting social and economic change in the best possible way. Germanyʼs Energiewende, or energy transition, is an encouraging example of how that can be done, despite all the challenges its details pose. We intend to continue down this route—with everyone on board, including each individual sector of the economy.” [2] – Dr. Barbara Hendricks, former German Minister for Environment, Nature Conservation, and Nuclear Safety “In a world we can’t help shaping, the question is what we will shape.” [3] – Jedediah Purdy These are, to say the least and state the obvious, complicated political times in both the United States and Germany. From the midst of the complexity and chaos, though, at least one emergent trend stands out: there is a widespread sense that Germany is overtaking at least part of the mantle of global leadership that has characterized the United States’ posture towards the world since the fall of the Soviet Union and before. This phenomenon has been particularly pronounced since the election of President Donald Trump in the US—German Chancellor Angela Merkel has since been pointedly labeled the new “leader of the free world” in numerous news outlets[4]—but is surely reflective of deeper and longer-standing political and ideological currents in both nations. In this essay I wish to trace the legal and philosophical contours of this trend in one particular arena: that of environmental policy, and in particular energy policy. German and American environmental attitudes have, and have long had, marked differences, and these attitudinal differences manifest in a correspondingly deep divergence between the two countries’ environmental laws. A particularly rich and currently relevant pair of examples of this historical disparity can be found in the Clean Power Plan in the United States and the Energiewende, Germany’s 21st-century suite of goals and policies aimed at a transition to a low-carbon economy. These recent federal policy efforts to spur a transition to lower-emission energy sources in each country reveal a distinctive set of underlying contemporary notions about what Americans and Germans take the environment and its value to be—what the legal scholar and historian Jedediah Purdy has called “the environmental imagination”[5]—and, relatedly, what they take the role of law to be relative to the environment. That is, what an appropriate set of energy and environmental policies looks like, what the nation is responsible for in combating environmental problems that affect both its own people and other nations, and what roles its different individual and institutional actors ought to have in creating and advancing those policies. Taken together, following Purdy, I label this set of underlying philosophical views connecting the environment, law, state, and society the “environmental-political imagination” of each nation, and later in the paper will have much more to say about this concept. The structure of the essay is as follows. First, I describe the contents of, and, in a pre-philosophical way, tell the stories of a pair of recent environmental laws/policy initiatives, the Clean Power Plan (CPP) in the United States and the so-called Energiewende, or “energy transition,” in Germany. While this pair merely scratches the surface of German and American environmental law, I show that they constitute a particularly significant set of policies, and comprise a particularly rich contrast for the exploration of the two nations’ dominant ways of understanding the intersection of environment and politics. In the paper’s second section I elaborate upon the concept of the environmental-political imagination and its specific utility here, then argue for a particular characterization of the environmental-political imagination that underpins each country’s contemporary energy policy initiative. The claim at which I arrive comprises the central philosophical contention of the essay: a spirit emphasizing the individuation and conflict of different spheres of activity, landscapes, interests, and agents pervades the 21st-century American environmental-political imagination, while across the same set of diverse aspects, the contemporary German environmental-political imagination is marked by a sharply contrasting and equally pervasive spirit of collectivism and continuity. After arguing for this view, in the essay’s third section I articulate and provide short responses to some potential objections to my argument, attempting to clarify and trace some of its ramifications. Before beginning in earnest, a few notes on the paper’s methodology. First, while German and American environmental law and their underlying imaginative ideologies have rich and compelling histories, rather than sustaining a full historical argument here I confine myself mainly to this century’s developments, using the CPP and recent developments in the Energiewende as contemporary lenses onto deeply historical phenomena for the sake of scope and analytical clarity. Where necessary, however, events deeper in history are discussed; it should simply be kept in mind that in a larger sense all current laws and ideologies are inextricably rooted in historical factors. I shall have more to say later about how we might understand this temporal issue. Second, it will doubtless be noted that establishing unquestionable causal linkages between such concrete phenomena as environmental laws and such slippery, implicit ones as “environmental-political imaginations” is a difficult, nigh impossible, exercise, particularly without the benefit of a full historical account. To do so is not my aim. Instead, this essay is meant to provide a form of rational reconstruction: given the issues and policies in question, how they came into being, and the way Germans and Americans both in and outside government think and talk about them, I aim to give the most plausible and revealing characterization of the underlying logics that root them. Some measure of causality running from these imaginative attitudes to the production of the policies at issue is, I believe, necessarily present (as is some causal connection is from earlier law and policy to these recent attitudes), but the paper makes no attempt to account for all the specific social and institutional factors by which such attitudes are mediated before becoming legally manifest. II. The Clean Power Plan and the Energiewende The issue of climate change driven by anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions into the global atmosphere is fundamentally both an economic and environmental one. Carbon dioxide (CO2), the GHG primarily responsible for increasing global temperatures[6], is emitted in fossil fuel combustion that produces electricity and powers industrial equipment, vehicles, and the many other machines of modern economic activity. The historical causal link between CO2 emissions and economic growth is strong and well-documented[7]. In short, emissions-intensive fuels are the lifeblood of today’s global economy; CO2 emissions, economic production, and climate change thus constitute a tightly linked trio of phenomena, and the United States and Germany are quite similar nations in a host of ways closely related to it. Both are highly industrialized nations with immense economic and emissions output: the US economy is the world’s largest, and Germany’s is fourth largest globally and by far the largest in the European Union (EU)[8]. The US and Germany ranked 13th and 19th in the world, respectively, in per capita GDP in 2015,[9] and 3rd and 8th respectively in per capita CO2 emissions in the same year.[10] The structures of the two economies are strikingly similar: while Germany’s economy is somewhat more reliant on industrial production, both derive about 1% of national GDP from agriculture, between 20 and 30% from industry, and the remaining large majority from the service sector.[11] Beyond these basic economic likenesses, the two federal republics maintain immense bureaucratic apparatuses for research, monitoring, regulation and enforcement related to the environment. Both countries founded federal environmental agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the US and the German Federal Environment Agency (UBA, for its initials in German), in the early 1970s. Both federal-level agencies help set and enforce national-level policy floors that state-level agencies enforce and can augment in their jurisdictions (though, as will be discussed in greater detail, Germany’s federal environment apparatus has expanded significantly since the founding of the UBA).[12] From a distance, then, the two nations appear to share a basic economic and governmental structure relative to environmental issues, with some history in common to boot. Despite social and cultural differences, this might suggest that the United States and Germany would pursue the transition to low-carbon economies based on clean energy along similar pathways. Yet the two nations have in recent years diverged drastically in their federal policy efforts to facilitate this transition. The CPP and Energiewende constitute the central components of this divergence. Though they cannot capture all there is to say on the issue, they provide a striking contrast that will allow for interrogation to its heart. For a brief examination of the facts of each, I turn first to the US and then to Germany. A. The Clean Power Plan The CPP emerged from a context of hesitation and failure on the part of the US government to regulate GHG emissions. In 2007, the Supreme Court in Massachusetts v. EPA ruled that the EPA had the authority and duty, if it found CO2 to be a driver of climate change, to regulate CO2 emissions and thereby combat climate change under the Clean Air Act.[13] The decision, while empowering the EPA to promulgate the rule codifying the CPP eight years later, was actually a defeat for it at the time: the Bush-era EPA did not wish to regulate CO2 emissions, and argued in the case that the Clean Air Act did not cover them. Two years later, legislative efforts to regulate emissions through a “cap-and-trade” scheme similar to the EU’s, wherein a legal limit of GHG emissions is set and emitters can buy and sell permits to emit beneath that cap,[14] failed when the American Clean Energy and Security Act (also known as the Waxman-Markey Bill) passed the House but was never brought to a vote in the Senate. The deadening impact this had on federal climate action, early in Obama’s first term with Democratic majorities in both legislative chambers, was palpable: in Purdy’s view, “when Waxman-Markey failed, a whole generation of reformist thinking went with it.”[15] Frustrated by legislative stagnation, President Obama later directed the EPA to formulate a rule regulating GHG emissions in the power sector.[16] This rule ultimately became the Clean Power Plan, an EPA regulation designed to decrease power-sector CO2 emissions by 32% by 2030, relative to 2005 levels, by instituting emissions guidelines for fossil fuel-fired power plants and directing states to create and implement their own such standards.[17] About 40% of US CO2 emissions came from the power sector in 2005,[18] so other things equal the CPP alone would cut total US emissions over 12% between 2005 and 2030. This would be the largest legally-mandated emissions reduction in US history, and, accordingly, upon its announcement President Obama labeled the CPP “the single most important step America has ever taken in the fight against climate change.”[19] However, backlash to the CPP from industry and political groups was immediate and intense. Also, before the rule could take effect, the Supreme Court issued an order blocking its entry into force until all litigation challenging it was complete.[20] Then, after President Trump took office, he ordered the EPA to review it, and an EPA proposal to repeal it was soon unveiled.[21] While the CPP remains technically alive as of this writing in August 2018, its repeal is expected to be officially complete soon. When that happens, the rule that the Harvard Environmental Law Program has called “the crown jewel of America’s international climate commitments”[22] will be dead before it ever came alive. The CPP was designed to reduce CO2 emissions predominantly by decreasing the use of coal-fired power plants, which have high emissions intensity relative to other energy sources.[23] Market forces, coincidentally, have recently made a major impact in the direction intended by the CPP, as a dramatic shift in energy prices caused by cheap natural gas usage from shale sources has taken place. US CO2 emissions rose steeply from 1990 to 2005, when shale-sourced natural gas hit the market,[24] and have dropped 12% since then.[25] Still, bracketing this fortunate trend, the overall picture of US climate progress is less rosy: annual US GHG emissions remain about 2% greater than they were in 1990.[26] In the absence of any prospect of federal action to aggressively cut emissions, and in light of President Trump’s 2017 decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, many cities, states, and private enterprises have taken matters into their own hands and pledged to enforce their own emissions cuts.[27] B. The Energiewende The idea of Energiewende , or “energy transition,” in Germany goes back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when environmentalist groups opposed to nuclear energy and fossil fuels called for a transformation of Germany’s energy sources in the wake of nuclear plant construction and the 1973 and 1979 oil crises.[28] However, the term did not describe a substantive policy initiative until the turn of the millennium, when Germany’s governing coalition of the Green Party and the center-left Social Democrats began to take widespread action to promote a transition to new forms of energy production. Since the passage of the first Renewable Energy Sources Act in 2000, Energiewende has become shorthand for a vast array of goals and timetables for renewable energy production and emissions cuts, research reports supporting these goals and timetables, and legal requirements enforcing them.[29] The action of the Energiewende is not localized to one federal ministry or even branch of government. Instead, its regulations spring from multiple sources: administratively, the Federal Environment Agency (UBA), the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, and Nuclear Safety (BMU), and the Federal Ministry for Energy and Economic Affairs (BMWi) all play a part in setting and realizing its goals. The chancellor and legislative branch are heavily involved in Energiewende policy creation as well. The key reports and policy components of the Energiewende are as follows. 2000’s Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) guaranteed a twenty-year period of high prices for electricity from renewable sources sold into the grid,[30] and was updated in 2004, 2009, 2012, 2014, and 2017 to increase the law’s renewables targets and adjust its pricing mechanisms.[31] 2007’s Integrated Energy and Climate Programme, also known as the Meseberg decision, approved a package of fourteen new laws and amendments to provide a policy basis for the doubling of Germany’s emissions reductions targets for 2020 from 20 to 40%, compared to 1990 levels.[32] A long-term plan for Germany’s use of various sources of energy in different sectors was approved in 2010 as a cornerstone of the Energiewende ,[33] and in 2014 and 2016 the federal cabinet approved long-term climate action plans for 2020 and 2050, respectively.[34] In addition to CO2 reductions and renewables increases, a central and heavily publicized component of the Energiewende is its move to abolish nuclear energy production in Germany. After the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, in which a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of Japan triggered a tsunami which caused a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, the German government under intense public pressure announced plans to immediately cease operations of eight of its oldest nuclear power plants, with all remaining nuclear plants to be closed by 2022.[35] The Energiewende , for all its progress, has been enormously expensive. Much of the cost of the heavy renewables subsidies has been passed onto consumers: a renewables surcharge on utilities bills has raised the average household’s monthly fee by 50% since 2007.[36] Moreover, the decade-long sprint to close the nation’s nuclear plants necessitates a costly rapid increase in the use of other sources, since Germany has long sourced a large portion of its power supply from nuclear energy.[37] Even beyond costs caused by solar subsidies and cuts to nuclear energy, the Energiewende today faces other challenges: for instance, due to recent rapid economic and population growth, German CO2 emissions reductions have stagnated since 2014 and the country will therefore likely miss its 2020 target.[38] The fact remains, though, that through a concerted policy effort Germany has cut its total CO2 emissions over 26% from its levels in 1990 (the key baseline year for emissions reductions in international climate policy). In absolute terms, it has cut emissions more than any other EU nation since then,[39] and since the passage of the EEG in 2000 it has sextupled its electric power production from renewables, mainly wind and solar, to a full 36% of national supply in 2017.[40] This is an enormous figure by global standards. The Energiewende , though costly and facing obstacles, has made impressive strides. Thus we have two modern, industrialized, immensely productive nations, expected to be regional and global leaders on a variety of issues, with markedly different policy responses to the climate and energy problem: one with a climate policy crafted, immediately challenged, and quickly repealed upon a change of government, and the other making imperfect but steady progress. Furthermore, despite the two countries’ basic similarities, few today would be surprised by this stark contrast. It is generally understood that Germany, to use the jargon of energy policy circles, is “ambitious on climate,” while the United States is not. For the remainder of this paper, I aim to use the facts of these two policy initiatives and their development in order to interrogate this general understanding rather than take it for granted, and thereby go a level or two deeper into the human reasons that might explain why it, and certain facts adjacent to it, hold. Such major differences in the two nations’ contemporary laws on energy and climate provide important loci for insights into the imaginative and ideological characteristics of these nations with respect to politics, law, and the environment. Since these policies mandate (or, in the case of the CPP, attempted to mandate) how they, as states and societies, must respond to climate change, such differences provide comparative lenses onto how Germany and the United States view their relationships to their own populations and other nations that climate change will harm, and to the natural world which provides the resource basis for their economic production and which they in turn affect through greenhouse gas emissions. As Purdy puts it, “Law is a circuit between imagination and the material world”[41]; the laws that exist came about through processes expressing an underlying imagination, and can be expected through the realization of what they require to influence the imagination of the future. Examining this pair of policy initiatives, then, what imaginative structures underlying German and American environmental and political life could help account for this vast difference? III. The Contemporary German and American Environmental-Political Imaginations via the CPP and the Energiewende Before laying out dominant features of the two nations’ environmental-political imaginations, I must briefly elaborate upon the concept of the environmental-political imagination itself, and clarify how it relates to Purdy’s concept of the environmental imagination. Neither concept refers directly to the explicit ideological statements parties make in their environmental platforms, nor theories of the true, the good, or the just in tracts on environmental or political philosophy; as Purdy says, “Imagination is less precise, less worked out, more inclusive than ideas, and it belongs to people in their lives, not philosophers working out doctrines. Imagination is a way of seeing, a pattern of how things must be.”[42] It might be thought of as taking place on the mental level prior to ideology, or as ideology’s raw material. It has to do with the way people, individually and in institutions, think and make assumptions about what exists in nature and the human world, how those things are organized, what is valuable about them, and what ought to be done with them, here in particular with respect to climate and energy, and the collective decision-making proper to the political sphere. It is an implicit, blurry set of notions, perhaps internally contradictory, largely submerged or subconscious, that acts as inputs in the formation of laws and policies that then make explicit what may and may not be done. I borrow this framing of “imagination” from Purdy, but employ it in the discussion of somewhat different material from what is referred to by his concept of the “environmental imagination.” As Purdy uses it, the environmental imagination refers primarily, though not exclusively, to how people understand and act upon the environment at the level of landscape, rather than atmosphere and climate.[43] While Purdy acknowledges that, in the future, different nations or regions might develop their own “ethics and politics of climate change,”[44] he does not examine in a descriptive sense how such different environmental-political imaginations are already at work in different places. My analysis here is meant to fill this gap, to focus on the particular environmental, economic, and political issue of climate change and explore how the US and Germany are in fact seeing and acting upon it by using Purdy’s framing of the environmental imagination as a conceptual starting point. Purdy’s political focus is mainly on how people’s imaginative notions of the environment work their way into political life, since decisions about how to approach and use the environment are made in the political sphere. I wish to inquire further about Americans’ and Germans’ imaginative notions of politics itself: their notions and assumptions about what politics is like, how government ought to be organized and decisions made, and what we owe to others inside and outside the polity. Thus the imagination discussed here is itself both environmental and political. Also, since I shall discuss not only how people imagine the climate or the atmosphere but also how their imaginative notions of the environment—generally, of nature overall—affect their nations’ action on climate specifically, “environmental-political” is more appropriate than “climate-political.” The term thus seemed to be the best fit for a capacious idea that extends Purdy’s notion in a logical way. A. The 21st-Century American Environmental Imagination The contemporary American environmental-political imagination, as seen through the story of the Clean Power Plan, can best be characterized by a sensibility of individuation and conflict. By a sensibility of “individuation,” I mean that there exists a pervasive imaginative stress on the sharp divisions among different problems, parties, and conceptual categories of environment and politics, rather than on their continuities; particularly emphasized is the split between the environmental and the economic spheres. Normatively, there is a corresponding imaginative insistence that starkly individualized approaches to such disjoint issues must be appropriate. By a spirit of “conflict,” I mean that these individuated issues, categories, and parties are often imagined as necessarily at odds with one another: there is a powerful sense that trade-off and adversarial relations are inherent to them and to climate change in particular, and that such conflict cannot be overcome by any sense of reconciliation or unification. Individuation is the more fundamental of the two descriptors here, frequently accompanied with an adversarial tone, since two ideas, issues, outcomes, actors, and so on can only be viewed as conflicting if they are first given sharp individuating boundaries. To illustrate this, I marshal a range of evidence from the CPP and beyond to investigate three aspects of the United States’ environmental-political landscape: its view of the relationship between the categories of the “economic” and the “environmental”; its understanding of particular American landscapes and coal, a particularly significant form of energy; and its latent conception of leadership and agency on climate action. A1. Environment and Economy The American environmental-political imagination contains, first and foremost, an insistence upon a sharp distinction between the economic and environmental spheres. “Economic” and “environmental” are not understood as merely two ways in which to view a larger human-natural system, two modes of its measurement that can be usefully distinguished, but instead as two ontologically distinct categories which in practice ought, so far as possible, to be governed by different procedures and norms. In the context of the CPP, this can be initially seen from the law’s institutional backdrop, the structure of which reflects a sharp conceptual disconnect between economy and environment. President Obama instructed the EPA, and the EPA alone, to prepare what became the CPP.[45] It is true that the EPA was created during a time in American history when recognition of human-environmental interconnection was ascendant,[46] and aids human safety through its insurance of clean air and water, but the EPA is explicitly dedicated to environmental protection alone rather than some larger joint goal of environmental-economic harmony. The implicit assumption in much of its work is that the environment is distinct from the economy and other human spheres and will need to be guarded against them. Some EPA officials have even suggested that the EPA has done its job of ensuring clean air and water too well, such that many Americans lose sight of ways in which economic production impacts the environment.[47] Conversely, the US Department of Commerce, the cabinet ministry that proclaims to be tasked with just “one overarching goal: Helping the American Economy Grow”[48] (emphasis in the original), mentions no environmental, ecological, or sustainability concerns in any of its five strategic pillars that support its central aim. Thus in the executive branch’s structure, the concepts of environment and economy are thoroughly and formally separated. The Department of Energy (DOE) might be expected to mediate the two, but it has a strong defense and pure research bent: at once handling nuclear weapons research, nuclear energy research and operations, and clean and fossil energy research. These specifics of bureaucratic organization may seem somewhat arbitrary, but they dictate both how federal agencies’ fields of action are defined and approached and how official discourse regarding those fields is expressed in public. I submit that both of these have significant consequences for how Americans perceive environmental, economic, and energy issues and their nation’s ways of handling those issues. In the context of this division of labor, President Obama’s executive assignment of the CPP’s preparation to the EPA alone appears symbolic of where climate change fits into the American environmental-political imagination, representing the official assignment of US action on climate change to the environmental sphere alone rather than the economic one. The huge backlash against the CPP illustrates the conflictual, not merely individuating, nature of this aspect of the environmental-political imagination:[49] many perceived the CPP as a conferral of environmental benefits and therefore also a sentence of concomitant economic sacrifice and degradation. A host of challenges were immediately raised against the proposed law, and the ensuing political warfare was intense.[50] This is deeply ironic in light of the fact that the government’s own study of the Clean Power Plan indicated that, in fact, due to long-term increases in energy efficiency, savings on climate adaptation costs, and savings on health expenditures due to reducing vast quantities of harmful fumes like sulfur dioxide in the air, it would likely have saved the US billions per year by 2030 relative to the status quo.[51] Much has been made of the idea that organizations like fossil fuel companies, many of which stand directly to lose from a transition to low-emission energy sources and lobbied hard against the CPP,[52] are the real villains preventing America’s energy transition. Coal and oil companies certainly lobbied hard against the CPP and may have played a large role in spreading the notion that emissions reductions, like environmentally beneficial policies generally, necessarily conflict with economic benefits. However, it was not merely these companies that voiced their concerns: amid both an outpouring of support for and backlash against the proposed rule, the EPA received over 4.3 million comments on it in six months.[53] Much has also been made of the deep partisan divide on belief in and concern about climate change itself,[54] which tracks the two parties’ divergent emphasis on action to protect the environment and action to aid the economy. This divide was clearly visible in the battle over the CPP, for instance, when the 11 Senate Republicans of the Environment and Public Works Committee issued a letter in support of repealing the CPP in 2017 that made no mention of the environment or climate change. That letter mentioned only “the pervasive, negative effects [the CPP] would have had on Americans across the country. The CPP would have driven up energy prices, eliminated American jobs, and hurt local communities that depend on coal.”[55] Importantly, though, the imagined conflict between economic and environmental benefits on climate change policy cannot be merely a result of American partisanship: that Democrats and Republicans predictably gravitated to their sides of that conflict on the Clean Power Plan means that the idea of the environmental-economic conflict itself was already generally accepted, and action to counteract climate change has simply been imaginatively sorted mainly into the pro-environment rather than pro-economy category (this is not to say, however, that both parties are exactly equally narrow-minded in their understanding of climate change). The imagined disconnection and conflict between the two spheres is thus fertile ground for, rather than a simple output of, increased partisan division. Also, while I will not examine the American imagination of markets in depth here, there seems to be a notable similarity between the way Americans notionally separate the economy and the environment and the well-recognized way they notionally separate markets and government intervention in the economy. It seems that in America, pro-environment action is imagined as government interference into the workings of the market, and for that reason is anti-economic. This is despite the fact that in practice governments always set the rules of the market in the first place, and that in many cases, like the CPP, government action would increase overall economic welfare in the context of the market’s failure to internalize all costs. That the CPP’s emissions reductions would actually save America money and relieve it of immense human suffering in the long term might have saved it in another time or place, but could not in the contemporary United States. A2. Coal and Landscape Beyond the pronounced economic-environmental distinction, another form of individuation prominent in the American environmental-political imagination and visible in the narrative of the CPP is the uniqueness assigned to the landscape of America’s coal mining country, along with an associated imaginative privileging of coal miners themselves and their imagined conflict with nature to extract its energy. This reflects a more general American notion that a sharp definitional line ought to be drawn between particular landscapes, and between them and humankind, a notion easily recognizable in American lore and law historically; one example of this is the Wilderness Act of 1964, which provided for protected, isolated areas that would remain “untrammeled by man” and would each keep their “primeval character” in spite of an expanding, modernizing population.[56] However, in the realm of energy production, a somewhat different individuating mood is at work than in wilderness protection, one that associates specific energy resources with specific landscapes and imagines a zero-sum conflict for primacy between them. The CPP would have achieved its emissions reductions mainly through cuts in the use of coal-fired power plants.[57] As the letter from the Republicans of the Senate Committee for Environment and Public Works illustrates, a key source of opposition to the CPP was a sentiment that the nation’s jobs in coal production must be politically protected. As with the CPP cost-benefit analysis indicating that in the long term the plan would actually have been economically profitable, here too there is a deep and ironic seed of irrationality; just over 160,000 Americans work in coal production, less than half of the number involved in the fledgling solar industry, which the CPP would have benefited,[58] and coal production has already steeply declined because of market forces alone, with cheap natural gas largely supplanting it since 2005.[59] Simple interest-group politics are always, of course, a factor, and support for coal jobs as a public position is due in large part to the rhetoric of President Trump, who has thrust coal production incessantly into the political arena, making it a more partisan issue and implicitly highlighting its racial associations (and, though not discussed extensively here, race is yet another sphere of deep divisions in the American environmental-political imagination, as, for instance, the work of the environmental justice movement has sought to show).[60] However, as Republicans and Democrats seized upon rather than created an imagined fundamental conflict between the economic and environmental spheres, President Trump seized upon rather than created the American glorification of the coal industry and its imagined battle with forms of energy hostile to it. Many Americans view coal miners as an interest group with a special claim to reverence, in some sense especially American, their connection to coal country’s lifeways and landscape that is morally and aesthetically unimpeachable even as they level its mountains and plumb its depths for the dirtiest fossil fuel available. Our version of fascination with and elevation of coal is uniquely American. Millions of Americans outside of coal country are able to glorify coal production imaginatively, thanks in part to the very fact that they have never been to coal country, because coal is closely associated with one of America’s many distinct, individuated landscapes, cultures, and forms of productive connection to the environment. Oil is certainly imaginatively American, in the sense that it can make one rich quickly. But no other source of energy evokes the sort of hardscrabble, manful battle with nature that coal does, up in the mountains and away from the friendly confines of civilization. Actual coal production, of course, is much less attractive than it is imagined to be in its symbolic overcoming of an unfriendly nature: as Purdy notes, “mountaintop-removal mining dynamites hills and hollows into a flat, treeless terrain and buries many hundreds of miles of Appalachian streams.”[61] But politically, huge swaths of the country lionize it for its imaginative associations, and even those who resist this celebration must engage with and seek to erode that picture of it. The point is not that no Americans recognize that burning coal pollutes the atmosphere intensely and that relatively few Americans actually make their living in its industry; it is that the fact that the US has been collectively unable to privilege other goals, such as combating climate change through the CPP, over its glorification of the unique landscape and culture of coal bespeaks a deep temperamental inclination toward the particular and the adversarial in the way the nation imagines what ways of relating to the environment ought to be honored and preserved. Coal also plays a role in the notion of the US as particular and individuated itself because of the role it plays in contributing to US energy independence. The US, despite what political advertisements advocating drilling in yet another remote wilderness might have you believe, is highly energy-independent—on net importing just 7% of its total energy use.[62] This fact provides one strut undergirding the spirit of individuation latent in how the nation views itself globally on climate change. In keeping with its degree of energy independence, there is little sense that the country is truly indebted to other nations in the energy arena. A logic therefore prevails that, politically, it is the United States’ right to individuate itself in the international discourse on climate change. This is true even prior to Donald Trump’s explicit protectionism and withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, an ultimate act of individuation; the resonance of his “America First” message, despite its multiple valences, can at least partially be attributed to a widespread sentiment that America is not necessarily dependent on the rest of the globe and can therefore act on its own terms in international affairs. Accordingly, when it is not refusing to participate on a particular issue, it is seen by much of its own population and government as the proper global leader on that issue. This is true of America’s action on climate change through the Clean Power Plan, and I therefore turn now to sketching the particular ideal of American leadership on climate change manifest in the law’s progression. This ideal is glory-seeking and exceptionalist, placing the US on an imagined pedestal above the other nations attempting to reduce emissions. A3. Leadership and Agency While setting about repealing the CPP, the Trump administration has made an extravagant claim about American leadership on climate change: that, because it cut emissions more than any other nation in 2017, it is therefore “leading the world” on addressing climate change overall.[63] These claims are transparently based on bad-faith: the US is the world’s second-largest emitter, far ahead of third place and only behind China that has coal-fired its way to yearly emissions increases since 2000,[64] so any proportionally nontrivial American emissions cut in 2017 was likely to be the world’s largest in absolute terms that year. Moreover, this “world’s largest” title is just one year old, and is due basically entirely to market forces making it increasingly uneconomical to use coal[65] even as the Trump administration attempts to prop it up through the repeal of the CPP. Nonetheless, Trump’s administration is not the only one in the CPP era to loudly proclaim American climate and energy leadership when the full facts of the situation did not support it. As noted in the paper’s epigraph, Obama claimed upon announcement of the CPP that he was “[committing] the United States to lead the world on this issue.”[66] In hindsight, given Trump’s cancellation of the CPP and withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement, Obama’s idealistic portrayal of the CPP as a legal and political commitment to US climate leadership may look like little more than a cruel joke of history, a genuine and dignified gesture of America’s desire to lead for the greater good twisted into a dark irony by a shift in the political winds. Even at the time, it made little sense in light of how much had been accomplished in other portions of the developed world: by 2015, Germany had 15 years of experience with renewable energy tariffs, had set 2020 climate targets, and the whole EU had agreed on 2030 targets with a decade of emissions trading experience behind it.[67] Obama’s insistence on American leadership despite this mountain of evidence indicating that the US was far from a position to lead on emissions reductions is therefore revealing. He was certainly aware of how truly far behind America was in 2015 on climate action, but singular American leadership was nonetheless a central thrust of his pitch of the CPP to the American people. Obama’s rhetoric reflects an American sensibility that, on environmental issues like all others, the US must be unique, particular, special, glorious. This sense of entitlement to climate leadership on the global stage manifests today not in widespread federal government action, but in the individual person of the president. The unilateral actions of Presidents Obama and Trump on the CPP—Obama singly directing the EPA to create it, Trump singly directing the EPA to review and replace it—express, despite their different circumstances, a sense of deserved presidential individuality: that is, a right to define America’s international climate leadership in one’s own way regardless of its previous instantiations. Beyond making for less stable policy, this feature of contemporary American climate politics has the effect of being, if not anti-democratic, only minimally democratic: whichever section of the population elected the last president gets to determine policy on climate and energy, regardless of later public opinion[68] and congressional intervention aside. Any major climate action requires governmental leadership, but the current American version, with its current structure of top-down leadership, leaves little room for individual Americans to play a major role in a clean energy transition. They are simply not viewed as important actors in this context. Their support is not needed, and political leaders do not think to call upon them to help in direct action on climate and energy. Even when Obama did connect environmental concerns, economic ones, and ordinary Americans in his rhetoric on the CPP, he argued merely that it would help keep energy “reliable and affordable for American businesses and families,”[69] which is not exactly a moving call to purposeful collective action on an issue of immense national and global importance. Meanwhile, while millions of Americans, mainly along partisan lines, recognize climate change as a serious problem and some individuals among them have achieved success in discussing it an environmental, economic, and political issue,[70] there has been no grassroots climate movement that has been successful in shifting the national conversation overall or forcing government action. Obama’s unilateral move to force action in a government gridlocked along party lines is ample evidence of this point. A true change in the American popular consciousness analogous to, say, what followed Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring seems out of reach on climate in this moment. Ironically, then, the general pattern of individuation of, and emphasis upon the political import of, distinct institutional actors, relevant landscapes, and concepts of different human and environmental spheres in the American environmental-political imagination fails to elevate the individual himself or herself. Thus a particularly executive-focused version of what is often labeled “American exceptionalism” plays a prominent role in the American environmental-political imagination of climate, as seen through the story of the CPP. But an idea of American exceptionalism is not the fundamental category in that imagination; instead, it fits into its larger spirit of partitioning and antagonism among different notional elements, a sense that—despite the idea that climate change ought to be siloed in the environmental sphere and ought to have no claim on activities outside it—the United States must stand alone at the head of the world’s climate change-battling ranks. This imagination is thus both particular to the environmental-political realm and simultaneously reflective of well-recognized aspects and assumptions of American cultural life. Perhaps nothing captures this better than that the US’s spirit of partition and individuation is not an admission of limitation in each partitioned sphere, whether it be the realm of international affairs, executive leadership, the economic sphere, the environmental, or one of the many landscapes Americans insist upon as particularly special. Instead, this partition bespeaks the idea that by conceptually and legally separating each from the other, the US can grasp the infinite in each; it needs not face limitation; it can have its cake and eat it too. This truth of the environmental-political imagination holds now but is profoundly historically rooted: as Purdy notes, “American democracy had taken shape in historically unique exemption from the basic problem of modern and democratic politics: the problem of managing conflicting interests and values in a world of relative scarcity.”[71] That foundational thread is still clearly visible today. B. The German 21st-Century Environmental Imagination In a deep contrast to its American counterpart, the essential spirit of the contemporary German environmental-political imagination, as viewed through the lens of the Energiewende , can be described by a spirit of continuity and collectivism. The German environmental-political imagination is marked by a sensibility that highlights the ways that humans and the environment are interconnected, believes that all sectors of the human population can (indeed, can only) progress by stewarding nature responsibly, and responds with a persistent, determined concentration upon collectively undertaken gradual reforms designed to benefit domestic society, provide leadership to global society, and preserve nature all at once. In some sense, this notion is similar to the ecological form of the American environmental imagination that Purdy describes, dominant in the latter part of the 20th century,[72] but it is more expansive: it does not merely attempt to capture a fact about how the natural world and humankind are necessarily continuous with each other, but extends also to how different sectors of the human population are interdependent, both inside and outside Germany, and is charged with a forward-looking normative temperament that emphasizes social solidarity in collective action both across society and across time. In order to parallel the American case, I again explore how the economic and environmental spheres are imagined to relate to one another, how culturally important forms of energy and landscape play into prevailing beliefs about how the Energiewende ought to be managed politically, and how leadership on reducing emissions is viewed. As in the American case, critical interpretation of the discourse and structure of government provides the primary evidence base, but a range of other sources, like political party platforms to public opinion polling, supports this characterization as well. B1. Environment and Economy The way the Energiewende is discussed by its prominent advocates, policy leaders, and involved government ministries generally integrates humanity and nature, conceptually fusing notions of what benefits the German economy and what benefits the climate and environment. It evinces a recognition of the interconnectedness of human and environmental systems and an ethic of responsible stewardship of both simultaneously, with neither given fundamental priority, even as it eschews the tone of more traditionally environmentalist rhetoric emphasizing a profound spiritual interconnectedness of man and nature. For example, the very name of 2007’s Integrated Climate and Energy Action Programme, even as it heads a highly technical package of legislation that lays out specific binding mechanisms for Germany’s transition to clean energy, suggests continuity between the natural climate system and humanity’s economic system. The government’s announcement of this package of legislation makes explicit the perspective of unified economic and environmental goals that the name suggests: “The German government's guiding principles for energy policy remain the three objectives of security of supply, economic efficiency and environmental protection.”[73] In the government’s view, these objectives, while they can be usefully distinguished, are not in a deeper sense truly distinct and competitive, with ever-unavoidable trade-offs that must be weighed and decided. If in some cases trade-offs are present, they are not allowed to distract from the larger continuity of the economic and environmental spheres; individuation and competition do not constitute an imaginative focus. Instead, economic ends and climate action are understood as mutually reinforcing: “Efficient climate protection modernises the economy and society.”[74] This language of modernization is telling: in the German environmental-political imagination, human and environmental interconnectedness does not demand the abandonment of current technology or a return, even temporarily, to a pre-industrial way of being, as the American romantic imagination might have it.[75] Instead, humanity can become more modern even as it effectively stewards nature, and along with economic-environmental interconnectedness there is a continuity between today’s Germans and future generations, to whom Germans owe fair treatment. [76] The name of 2010’s Energy Concept for an Environmentally Sound, Reliable, and Affordable Energy Supply (henceforth simply Energy Concept) similarly weaves together economic and environmental goals. The Energy Concept describes a plan to attempt to achieve both, arguing that emissions reductions are not just helpful but fundamental for German economic success, and proclaiming that “a high level of energy security, effective environmental and climate protection and the provision of an economically viable energy supply are necessary for Germany to remain a competitive industrial base in the long term”[77] (emphasis mine). The government’s Climate Action Programme 2020 claims that “Germany benefits from its pioneering role in climate change mitigation. The technical, cultural and social innovations it entails create added value especially for small and medium-sized companies.”[78] Such examples of federal agencies proclaiming the economic benefits of climate change-combating emissions reductions are, in short, abound. However, notably, despite the extensive discussions of the Energiewende ’s potential benefits for the German economy in government publications, none appear to assert economic health as the fundamental reason for why the Energiewende is worthwhile. The vision is instead one of a healthy, collective balance of economic and environmental goals that are irreducibly worthy and in some ways inextricable. Parallel to how American federal agencies institutionally embed the imaginative view of economy and environment as sharply individuated seen in the narrative of the CPP, the German institutional setup reflects a perception of them as integrated, with neither given explicit priority over the other. For example, rather than having a single agency for environmental protection to which CO2 emissions regulations are assigned, in Germany three agencies split the bulk of the Energiewende : the Federal Environment Agency (UBA), the Federal Ministry for Environment, Nature Conservation, and Nuclear Safety (BMU), and the Federal Ministry for Energy and Economic Affairs (BMWi). Although divisions between these bureaucracies are helpful for defining which organization focuses on which aspect of the Energiewende, there is clear continuity in the categories and the goals relative to which emissions, sustainable development, and climate are discussed across agencies, as the quotations from multiple agencies in the reports cited above illustrate. The Energy Concept, for instance, was prepared jointly by the BMU and BMWi. The economy is not entirely treated as linked to the environment—there is also a ministry for economic cooperation and development, and of course one for finance[79]—but the BMWi’s deep involvement in the Energiewende shows that on energy issues the economy is not seen as a removed and independent entity to be managed apart from its inescapable linkage points with the natural world, nor is the environment to be managed without due consultation of economic experts. The institutional realization of these viewpoints came early in the Energiewende era, with departmental reorganization in 2005. Also, constitutionally, the German system is conceptually friendlier to the objective of environmental protection than the American one, and has become even more so in recent history. For example, since 1949 the Grundgesetz (GG), Germany’s Constitution, has provided for the “protection of the natural foundations of life and animals” by executive, legislative, and judicial action, with explicit reference to the nation’s responsibility to future generations.[80] A round of GG reform was completed in 2006, granting the federal government more powers in environmental policymaking.[81] German constitutional tradition also allows for the subordination of private property to environmentally protective uses on the basis of social welfare and human interconnectedness: “The potential obligation to ‘sacrifice’ [one’s] property rights to public needs derives from the concept of a ‘situational commitment of the property’ that follows from the view of man as an individual who is dependent on society.”[82] Thus it appears that a German perspective of environmental and economic solidarity is deeply built into the German legal and political consciousness,[83] with neither sphere deserving of absolute priority, and the legal foundations of this view have evolved alongside the Energiewende overall. By contrast, in the absence of explicit constitutional discussion of how nature is to be safeguarded, in the US environmental protection has been defined primarily with reference to and in implicit subordination to the economy: the major US environmental laws derive their constitutional power from the Commerce Clause’s permission for the regulation of interstate commerce.[84] In addition to the foundational structure of the German government that evinces a prevailing integrative imagination of the environment, society, and how they should be legally approached in the Energiewende , several other popular sources suggest a similar conceptualization. One is the ways political parties express themselves in their bids for citizen support. That the Green Party has been influential since the beginning of the Energiewende , and governed in a coalition with the Social Democrats, is a powerful statement of a popular German belief that environmental considerations should be built into political decision-making. Even more revealing, though, is the stance of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU),[85] Angela Merkel’s pro-business, center-right party. While the Republicans in the US have understood 21st-century pro-business conservatism to require general opposition to new environmental protections, the CDU has since 1978 included an environmental pillar alongside its three core party pillars focusing on economic growth. The phrase they used when adding this pillar was “quality-oriented growth,”[86] conveying the notion that proper economic progress and proper environmental stewardship are intertwined. That year’s platform included the following statement articulating how the party viewed the connection between freedom and responsibility, and the social interconnectedness between generations: “The conservation of our life support system is part of the responsible liberty. He who now irresponsibly exploits this system and alters the environmental relationship damages the solidarity between generations.”[87] In 1989, the CDU advocated a tax on CO2 emissions in keeping with an explicitly religious desire to properly care for Creation.[88] All this—which would sound confidently liberal, if not outright radical in the United States—stemmed from Germany’s main conservative party, which has been the one constant in a series of coalitions overseeing the Energiewende from the German Parliament since 2005. Thus, while highly visible in the policy prescriptions of the Energiewende since the turn of the century, the interconnected German imagination I describe has its roots in long-held popular understandings of what nature is and is for, how economic growth ought to be understood, and how citizens of different social stations and ages bear responsibilities to one another. B2. Nuclear, Coal, and Landscape Like as with the passage of and response to the CPP, particular sources of energy and their associations with culture and landscape have figured prominently in the story of the Energiewende . In Germany, both nuclear energy and coal have been hotly debated. Nuclear energy has been at the center of discussion because of a tension between its convenient lack of emissions and popular sentiment against it, and coal for the exact opposite reasons: its high emissions and historical association with German identity. Unlike the executive-led course reversal in the American case constituted by the CPP repeal, however, the German response to these difficulties has been to alter its path to the Energiewende ’s original goal of emissions reductions by phasing out nuclear energy and reducing the use of coal.[89] In doing so, Germany has collectively displayed a persistence and willingness to sacrifice for the sake of the demands it believes follow from its interconnectedness with nature and with other nations. The abolition of nuclear energy in particular illustrates the political strength of German emphasis on interconnectedness, in multiple senses beyond the previously discussed environmental-economic linkage. Strong anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany dates back decades. In the 1970s and early 1980s, local activist movements sprang up to oppose the construction of nuclear power plants on the basis of concerns about pollution of beloved local landscapes like the Saxony wine country. These movements occurred alongside a spirit of grassroots opposition to a view of the military, the nuclear industry, and a too-powerful state as noxious bedfellows.[90] In fact, the original use of the term“Energie-Wende” came in the title of a pamphlet imagining “Growth and Prosperity without Oil and Uranium.”[91] In 1986, the Chernobyl disaster occurred in nearby Ukraine, increasing fears of nuclear energy and support for the anti-nuclear Green Party.[92] More recently, in 2000 the parliamentary coalition of the Greens and Social Democrats passed a law planning the gradual phase-out of nuclear energy.[93]However, Angela Merkel’s CDU reversed this decision when it swept into power in 2009, arguing that, as a zero-emissions energy source, nuclear power would be valuable for achieving the Energiewende’s emissions reductions targets as a “bridging technology” that would “[pave] the way for the age of renewable energy” by acting as a buffer against both high fossil fuel emissions and high renewables costs.[94] Thus there were two schools of thought: one Green, activist, and anti-nuclear, in favor of nuclear phase-out for the purposes of environmental friendliness and more localized energy production, the other in favor of nuclear energy with the an established and pragmatic consideration of the costs of the Energiewende , and pro-nuclear, at least for the near future. Then, in 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster hit Japan. Days afterward, Angela Merkel gave a speech announcing that Germany would be immediately closing eight nuclear plants and would shutter the rest by 2022. Given that roughly 30% of German electricity was nuclear-powered at the start of the millennium,[95] and that nuclear energy had been reinvigorated by Merkel’s initial rise, such rapid closure represented a sudden and radical shift. On its face, such a strong German reaction to a Japanese disaster thousands of miles away seems surprising. Fundamentally, however, this German response to Fukushima was about an imagination of international interconnectedness, the reawakened ability of the population and government to imagine a similar disaster happening in Germany. As Merkel put it, “In Fukushima we have to take note that even in a high-tech country like Japan”—and thus a country like Germany—“the risks of nuclear energy cannot be controlled safely.”[96] Ironically, the factors to blame for Fukushima, which were a magnitude 9.0 earthquake at sea and a resultant tsunami crashing into nuclear plants on the shore of the open ocean, are not comparable risk factors for Germany, something Merkel even acknowledged.[97] But that was not the point, nor was it the point that Germany produced far less nuclear energy than some other advanced high-tech nations, like France and the US, which did not move to shutter their plants after Fukushima. The point was that Germans viewed their own destiny as remarkably bound up with the rest of the world’s, to the extent that a nuclear catastrophe in east Asia meant a whole nation’s nuclear supply in west-central Europe must be shut off. This rapid phase-out of a well-established, zero-emissions fuel source makes achieving the near-term emissions cuts targets of the Energiewende difficult, and doing so cost-effectively even more so.[98] But, at least as of 2015, opposition to nuclear energy remained high, with one poll showing 81% of Germans still in outright opposition to it.[99] Germany’s environmental-political imagination thus has its headstrong elements. That the nuclear phase-out is discussed as central to the Energiewende even though the phase-out makes the central Energiewende goal of fast, hefty emissions cuts much more difficult indicates that a larger integrative vision of how Germany should relate to its neighbors and to the environment drives both denuclearization and decarbonization. Coal, another energy source with a potent imaginative valence of landscape and environment in Germany, was also discussed at the coining of the term Energiewende in the early 1980s. However, unlike nuclear energy, the use of coal was celebrated rather than attacked. Since coal is a particularly “dirty” fuel, in that it emits more CO2 per unit of heat energy produced than other common fossil fuels,[100] such celebration may seem puzzling now, in the context of an Energiewende focused on reducing emissions. However, at the time, the goal of reduced emissions was less clarified, and instead coal was promoted because of its particularly German flavor. The use of heimische Kohle, or “domestic coal,” in place of oil was promoted, where heimische is a version of “domestic” that carries particular warm connotations of the German homeland. Germany has long gotten, and still gets, a huge proportion of its electric power from its vast coal reserves. It remains the world’s largest producer of lignite, a particularly inefficient and dirty form of coal.[101] But, unlike in the US, where the current government has dubiously pitched its replacement for the CPP as a savior for the coal industry, despite American coal’s uneconomically high cost relative to natural gas,[102] Germany has shown itself to be willing to move away from coal despite its historic connotations, its current potential utility in an energy transition complicated by the nuclear phase-out, and its home sourcing in a nation largely dependent on Russia for other fossil fuels. But the emissions reductions logic is clear: as the country’s 2050 Climate Action Plan states, “It will only be possible to meet the climate targets if coal-fired electricity production is gradually reduced.”[103] Accordingly, the country has formed an executive commission to oversee the phase-out of coal, and to ensure it is done in an inclusive way that will allow for a transition for its former workers and regions.[104] What explains this willingness to leave coal behind? I contend that, imaginatively, this readiness stems from an inward-facing sense of continuity and collectivism that complements the outward-facing form that motivated the nuclear phase-out decision after Fukushima. Unlike in the US, where coal is associated with one specific, romanticized landscape and culture over any other, in Germany heimische Kohle is not romanticized to the same extent. This is not to say the German coal industry has not battled the Energiewende, but it lacks the comparative political support of the US industry, and the resulting political mood is far different. Today, amid the effort to forge a new, more modern national energy identity, the old ideal of self-reliance from national coal production has lost its sway as Germans generally prefer to see a modern country unified in the face of climate change, a collective pursuing a responsible Energiewende. They celebrate the connections between landscape and society other ways, like in the country’s fifteen recently established UNESCO biosphere reserves which celebrate a balanced relationship of nature and humankind, and its many nature parks that preserve cultural, historical, and environmental sites together.[105] Germans have become quite confident on this issue: as Rainer Baake, a deputy minister of the BMWi, said bluntly in an interview with The New York Times when asked about high energy costs, “The energy transformation in Germany will be carried out by two main sources—those are wind and solar.”[106] B3. Leadership and Agency Leadership on the energy transition in Germany has long had a public face with deep experience on environmental issues: As Germany’s minister for the environment, Angela Merkel (sometimes called the “Climate Chancellor”)[107] presided over the first-ever UN conference on climate change, held in Berlin in 1994.[108] However, that Germany happened to elect an experienced former environmental minister as chancellor for the best part of the century’s first two decades is far from the whole story of the idea of leadership in the Energiewende. This section more deeply examine the components of leadership and agency in Germany’s environmental-political imagination: who it sees as responsible for taking action, what latitude leading agents have to change the course of existing initiatives, the nature of Germany’s participation on environmental issues in the international sphere, and the values that implicitly drive these understandings. It argues that a collectivist view of leadership focused on reciprocity and persistence prevails, in which each sector of German society (particularly individual citizens) is both empowered and expected to take action that furthers the Energiewende. The federal government is respected in its role as overseer of the Energiewende, but is expected to provide a fair deal from which all will benefit as a result. Internationally, Germany imagines itself as an environmental first mover that leads by example, its internal collective action a display of good-faith responsibility that ought to spur trust and reciprocity in the larger collective of nations. As in the United States, an important portion of Germany’s direction on climate and energy policy comes from the top. Chancellor Merkel has acquired a reputation as a forceful climate hawk, and, as much of this essay’s sourcing thus far has shown, hierarchical federal ministries set a great deal of Energiewende policy. But the way figures at the top discuss the action of the Energiewende makes clear that they conceive of it as necessarily a collective endeavor. Merkel, when announcing Germany’s retreat from nuclear energy, put it this way: “All of us, government and opposition, federal, state and local governments, society as a whole, every single one of us, all of us, if we do it properly, can combine ethical responsibility with economic success in this future project. This is our shared responsibility.”[109] Dr. Barbara Hendricks, then head of the BMU, wrote in her foreword to the 2020 Climate Action Programme that “All of us—all areas of industry and all individuals—have to step up to the plate.”[110] One way this collective spirit manifests is in the federalist relationship between the central government and the Länder, the German states. Whereas the CPP’s direction of each state to develop its own scheme for CO2 emissions reductions set off near-immediate battles in court about whether this fragmented approach constituted “bread-and-butter federalism” or gross federal overreach, the German chancellor and minister for energy and economic affairs meet twice yearly with the heads of all of the sixteen Länder to discuss Energiewende policy implementation and enjoy a close and generally functional, if not frictionless, relationship.[112] A rhetorical approach framing reciprocal collective participation as necessary for a successful Energiewende prevails especially strongly with respect to individual Germans. As one BMU report puts it, “Particularly here [in the Energiewende ] it is therefore important to create opportunities for the public to get involved and to support people in becoming aware of their scope for action...Climate action depends far more than any other policy area on the active involvement of as many people as possible.”[113] The government says that rather than asking individuals to sacrifice their own time and resources to reduce emissions, it will provide opportunities for citizen participation such that they themselves benefit.[114] Furthermore, the government has pledged to cut its own emissions to demonstrate its own responsibility and commitment to the cause.[115] Its statements of support for a ground-up Energiewende have, so far, been more than just so much grassroots talk: a cornerstone incentive of the push for emissions cuts has been the Renewable Energy Sources Act’s high federally subsidized prices, guaranteed for renewable energy sold to the grid by small-scale producers like individuals, households, and local co-ops.[116] Early in the century, the government promoted the adoption of small-scale photovoltaic (PV) solar installations with the so-called “100,000 Roofs” initiative, which provided government loans for people to buy rooftop solar systems. Germans have responded by engaging: by 2003, the program was successfully completed,[117] and by the end of 2017 there were 1.6 million PV installations nationwide,[118] with over 40% of total renewable capacity owned by citizens.[119] Much of this subsidizing has aided rural areas in particular, with farmers coming to own a greatly disproportionate percentage of PV installations and the generally conservative farmers’ association pushing the CDU to greater support of the Energiewende .[120] The mere thought of today’s rural, conservative Americans strongly supporting federal climate change policy illustrates both how vast the gulf is between Germany and the US on this issue and how powerful subsidies can be. For the most part, then, the German population does not aid its country’s climate policy as a sacrifice: it does so while gaining generous federally-designed benefits. But this profitability is part of the nation’s imagination of climate change as an integrated social-environmental problem that offers the opportunity to progress and modernize. The Energiewende is not fully democratic, per se, since the executive branch of the federal government from the beginning has played a strong role in setting its policies, but it has become truly collective in its implementation and its expansion of renewable energy enjoys 95% popular support.[121] Thus, in its rhetoric and action, Germany has to a significant extent successfully cast climate change not merely as an international political issue but as a collective German one, and as an opportunity to be addressed by the fulfillment of a social contract. Everyone must do their part, and accordingly, the benefits will be reaped by all. Unlike the autocratic “picking [of] winners and losers”[122] which the CPP was imagined to be by many in the US, the Energiewende is an “an investment in our own future.”[123] The understanding of this investment transcends the merely financial. For instance, the environment ministry stresses the need not just for technical research and development, but social and cultural research to increase understanding of “how people perceive climate change, what consequences it has for their lives, and...how all sections of the population can be included and social acceptance fostered.”[124] This sort of holistic environmental-political idea—linking often-separated human categories like “social,” “cultural,” and “economic” into a continuous whole addressing the state of the public under the banner of the issue of climate change—is, as we have seen, quintessentially modern German. If the Energiewende is supposed to be an endeavor which involves all sectors of society and is positively viewed by both the government and the public—the first and third of Hegel’s three spheres of consciousness in ethical life[125]—where does that leave German businesses, the key element in Hegel’s second sphere of civil society? How do economic actors understand this initiative that has cost so much? For one, the high level of popular support, combined with consistent governmental action, guarantees that German businesses—though they might not be automatically inclined to accommodate the demands of the Energiewende—have little choice but to make the best of it and adapt, as they are squeezed from above and below. This is particularly true of energy companies: as one former utilities executive put it, the Energiewende is “an irreversible process now.”[126] The country’s two largest power companies have both in recent years split in two, with one company emerging dedicated to traditional fuels and one to renewables.[127] Germany’s environmental-political imagination as realized in the Energiewende is thus not a utopian one, where achievement of the large social transition demanded by sharp emissions reductions arises from simple good will and is painless for all. However, given the demanding goal, what is required is clear: as the 2020 climate plan put it, “The energy industry is the sector with the highest greenhouse gas emissions and the greatest technical and economic potential for reduction.”[128] But while certain big businesses may not be happy, others are, as smaller companies dedicated to the production, installation, equipment, and maintenance of renewable energy technology have sprung up and the Energiewende has gained the support of industry groups like the German Confederation of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises.[129] Plus, the collectivist temperament of the Energiewende extends to the hurt businesses: The government has pledged to work, including at EU level, to create job opportunities in regions most affected by the switch to renewables.[130] The dominant German conception of political leadership on environment outside its own borders is close to the imagination just described inside them. The federal government claims and demonstrates responsible leadership by example, acknowledging its interdependence with other nations without which a major dent cannot be made in international environmental issues like climate change, then expects them to follow suit just as it expects its own citizens and private enterprises to contribute to the Energiewende . This ideal of leadership, as read through Germany’s public statements and actions, is recognizable on both the European stage and the global stage. At the European level, Germany casts itself as a proudly trustworthy friend acting in solidarity for the larger collective European cause of which it is a part, willing to take on heavy burdens to encourage action by others. In the BMU’s words, “Germany’s climate policy is embedded in European and international agreements and legal obligations. Germany has always been a reliable partner in international and European climate policy.”[131] Since the early 2000s, it has shown leadership multiple significant times in the EU. First, following the publication of the Stern Report on the Economics of Climate Change in 2006, which argued that the worst effects of climate change could still be prevented with rapid and concerted action,[132] Germany led the EU during its Presidency of the Council of the European Union to its landmark 20-20-20 targets, which committed the EU as a whole to 20% reductions in CO2 emissions, 20% of power from renewable energy, and 20% increased energy efficiency levels by 2020.[133] Shortly after, in 2007, it passed major Energiewende legislation doubling these EU baseline commitments, pledging to cut its own CO2 emissions 40% by 2020.[134] For the most part, the EU has followed suit. As of August 2018, it is on track to meet its 20-20-20 commitment,[135] and several EU countries have now caught up to Germany in terms of emissions cuts and renewables production.[136] To exactly what extent these positive changes would have occurred without Germany taking leadership on the issue through the Energiewende is impossible to say, but its leadership has been immensely publicized and other nations have both followed in its footsteps and learned from its mistakes. Germany’s actions on the global stage in the 21st century have also evinced an imagination of itself as a responsible actor seeking to initiate a reciprocal exchange of actions rather than to gain credit for its own glory. The aforementioned 2007 decision to cut CO2 emissions 40% by 2020, the “Meseberg decision,” also immediately preceded the 2007 UN Climate Change Conference (COP13) in Bali. The government’s statement on the legislation proclaimed, By implementing the key elements adopted in Meseberg, Germany is demonstrating that climate protection can be implemented in all sectors in an economically viable way. With Meseberg we are moving away from the attitude in international climate policy of “you first” towards “this is what I’m doing, what about you?” This is the only way to break the deadlock in international negotiations.[137] The negotiations at COP13 in Bali ultimately achieved somewhat underwhelming results,[138] in part due to strong US objections to a proposal by developing countries. However, Germany’s 21st-century form of climate leadership by example has been durable and persistent despite international mediocrity: seven years after Bali, it put forth a new and more ambitious emissions reductions plan ahead of the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, which finally produced a (limited) international breakthrough in the form of the landmark Paris Agreement. Recycling their argument from the domestic context that emissions reductions and renewable power are crucial for economic modernization, ahead of Paris, Germany wrote that “Germany can, and must, play a key role internationally and must demonstrate that taking climate action in an industrialised country does work and, in fact, is crucial for any economy that wants to be competitive in the 21st century.”[139] While climate change is today’s signal international environmental issue, it is not the case that Germany’s sharp international environmental-political desire for responsible, reciprocal action is limited to climate and energy. There is a broader environmental conceptual connectivity, a common language for understanding environmental issues that must be politically approached, at work. For instance, in the context of biodiversity preservation, one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals,[140] a prominent German environmental NGO argued, “only if we in Germany take the lead and preserve...habitats from destruction, will we also be able to expect such conservation ideas to take root in poorer countries.”[141] A likely important factor contributing to this keen perception of international interdependence and leadership on environmental issues in Germany is its position in the center of Europe, caught as the most important nation in a terrestrial geographic web of dense population, commerce, borders, and laws. This position plays a part in both cross-border environmental issues that Germany must aid in solving, and issues of energy dependence: Germany depends on nearby, oil-rich, unfriendly Russia for 40% of its oil imports[142] and a significant quantity of natural gas to boot, a position that increasing its supply of renewables through the Energiewende aims to help it escape. The last feature of leadership and agency as understood in the modern continuous, collectivist German environmental-political imagination that I shall discuss here is its leaders’ respect for the temporal continuity of policy. This is well exemplified in the logical coherence of Energiewende policy since the turn of the millennium. Successive German central governments, for the most part, do not feel empowered or motivated to craft a climate and energy policy that is entirely their own. Instead, they adjust old policies and craft innovative ones atop an established structure that keeps the original fundamental goals intact, bespeaking a respect for prior action and an effective norm that holds it unacceptable to simply throw out the work of previous governments and attempt to start over. This pattern is a temporal corollary to the emphasis on social solidarity and collective action discussed so far that characterizes German environmental leadership. This persistent, collective gradualism is visible in the official discourse of the Energiewende : most laws, policy announcements, and statements by political leaders include provisions for frequent recalibration of the policies designed to cut emissions and increase renewables use.[143] For instance, the government in 2007 assured people at the outset of its doubling of emissions cuts targets that, in the event of ineffectiveness or cost-inefficiency in the design of the policy, its mechanisms would be redesigned.[144] Such assurances are often accompanied by exhortatory language about the value of determination and staying the course. For instance, from the minister of the BMU’s foreword to the 2020 Climate Action Programme: “Germanyʼs Energiewende , or energy transition, is an encouraging example...despite all the challenges its details pose. We intend to continue down this route—with everyone on board, including each individual sector of the economy.”[145] As in the case of its domestic inclusion and international leadership, this ambitious talk has generally in the Energiewende been convincingly backed by action. The sheer volume of legislation passed each year to update and fine-tune the Energiewende , usually in the direction of greater policy ambition, is a testament to a deep-seated incrementalist perseverance. The repeated revisiting of the 2000 Renewable Energy Sources Act is a good example of this. New versions of the act have been passed five times since its original passage, in order to update its pricing mechanisms and the rates of its energy subsidies in light of new evidence and emissions reductions progress, but the core structure has remained in place.[146] This is undoubtedly thanks in part to the way it and other Energiewende policies have intentionally involved and benefited individual citizens, such that reversing it would be fatally unpopular, but updating it remains popularly accepted. This patience of the German environmental-imagination when it comes to leadership and effective action also guarantees that beneficial policy experiments are encouraged, and the government can learn from its mistakes. For instance, after a successful experimental cross-border wind energy auction with Denmark, Germany laid plans to expand its cross-border renewables connectivity within Europe.[147] Such experimentation and improvement within a broader continuity rarely occurs in a modern US environmental-political context defined largely by the desire of each administration to craft its own signature policies on key issues like energy. In the US, more typical than a rhetoric of adjustment, gradual improvement, and persistence are words like “repeal,” “rule unconstitutional,” and “replace.”[148] This pendulum effect on climate and energy policy in the US reflects an environment of partisan hostility, certainly, but also a vision of environmental politics as a zero-sum game played between individuated competing parties. Moreover, the German imagination of temporal continuity and gradual adjustment of laws dovetails with a conceptual continuity of environmental outcomes, which is the opposite of the American case. In contemporary Germany, the climate problem, along with environmental problems generally, tends not to be framed as a binary with either an outcome of glorious victory or devastating failure depending on which of competing policies is selected. Instead, a more realist, incremental perspective prevails: better environmental outcomes can be achieved on a spectrum of possible outcomes by improving the design and implementation of laws. As a BMU dossier explaining Germany’s climate policies put it, “Climate change cannot be reversed...Nevertheless, it is still possible to slow down climate change and limit its impacts on humans and the environment.”[149] Words like “fighting” climate change, rather than “solving” it or “defeating” it, are common.[150] Accordingly, Germany has not just emissions reductions plans, but an official strategy for adaptation to climate change.[151] The US, where action on climate change tends to be framed as either part of a once-and-for-all climate solution or a total failure, has no such plan. There is no place in American environmental-political rhetoric for a reasoned gradualism, even an urgent one: as Obama put it, ours is “the last generation”[152] that can do something about climate change, and that “doing something” is cast usually as “solving” climate change, or failing to do so.[153] Rather than climate change becoming progressively worse the less each generation acts to prevent it, in this imagination the generation of today becomes “the last generation” that can act, the glorious individual agent who either succeeds or fails. The desire in the US political imagination for glorious leadership by a particular individual or group is not limited to competing parties or economic interests, then, but extends over time: America particularizes the present. In Germany, by contrast, persistence, gradualism, and the principle of “fairness between generations”[154] deeply influences the German moral and political compass and produces an approach to policy better suited to the problem of CO2 emissions itself: needful of sustained cuts over time and productive of a problem that can get a bit worse when policy is a bit less effective. To conclude this section: in the German environmental-political imagination, climate change is an issue of collective responsibility on which Germany ought to lead in a persistent, patient, and reciprocal way, both domestically and internationally, with participation from the top to the bottom of society and benefit for all involved. Endnotes [1] Barack Obama, “Remarks Announcing the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan - DCPD-201500546” (Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration, August 3, 2015), https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/DCPD-201500546. https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/DCPD-201500546 Obama. [2] Barbara Hendricks, Foreword, in “The German Government’s Climate Action Programme 2020 - Cabinet Decision of 3 December 2014” (Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB), December 3, 2014). [3] Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015), 3. [4] See, e.g., Suzanne Moore, “Angela Merkel Shows How the Leader of the Free World Should Act | Suzanne Moore,” The Guardian , May 29, 2017, sec. Opinion, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/29/angela-merkel-leader-free-world-donald-trump . [5] Purdy, After Nature , 6. [7] For a general global analysis, see Douglas Holtz-Eakin & Thomas M. Selden, Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Thomas M. Selden, “Stoking the Fires? CO2 Emissions and Economic Growth,” Journal of Public Economics 57 , no. 1 (May 1995): 85-101. For an early economic analysis linking CO2, growth, and climate, see William D. Nordhaus, William D. Nordhaus, “Economic Growth and Climate: The Carbon Dioxide Problem,” The American Economic Review , no. 1 (1977): 341. For an examination of several industrialized nations, including the US and Germany, that provides empirical evidence against the theoretical notion in environmental economics that beyond a certain level of development, emissions and growth vary inversely, see S.M. de Bruyn et al, Economic Growth and Emissions: Reconsidering the Empirical Basis of Environmental Kuznets Curves , 25 Ecological Econ. 161-175 (1998). For an analysis focused on China, see S.S. Wang et al., “CO2 Emissions, Energy Consumption and Economic Growth in China: A Panel Data Analysis,” Energy Policy 39 (September 1, 2011): 4870–75, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2011.06.032 . [8] “GDP (Current US$) | Data” (World Bank, 2018), https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP. CD?year_high_desc=true. [9] “GDP per Capita, PPP (Current International $) | Data” (World Bank, 2018), https://data.worldbank.org/ indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?end=2015&start=1960&year_high_desc=true. [10] “Each Country’s Share of CO2 Emissions,” Union of Concerned Scientists, October 11, 2018, https://www . ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/science/each-countrys-share-of-co2.html. [11] “The World Factbook,” Central Intelligence Agency, 2016, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/theworld-factbook/. [12] United States Environmental Protection Agency, “Our Mission and What We Do,” Overviews and Factsheets, US EPA, January 29, 2013, https://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/our-mission-and-what-we-do; “About Us,” Umweltbundesamt, September 6, 2013, http://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/the-uba/about-us. For a lay overview of the EPA’s history and functions, see Robinson Meyer, “How the U.S. Protects the Environment, From Nixon to Trump,” The Atlantic, March 29, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/how-the-epa-andus-environmental-law-works-a-civics-guide-pruitt-trump/521001/. [13] Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 05–1120 (Roberts Court April 2, 2007). [14] “EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS),” Climate Action - European Commission, accessed January 2, 2019, https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en. [15] Meyer, “How the U.S. Protects the Environment.” [16] “The Clean Power Plan: EPA Interprets the Clean Air Act to Allow Regulation of Carbon Dioxide Emissions from Existing Power Plants.,” Harvard Law Review 1152 129, no. 4 (February 2016), https://harvardlawreview. org/2016/02/the-clean-power-plan/. [17] Environmental Protection Agency, “Carbon Pollution Emission Guidelines for Existing Stationary Sources: Electric Utility Generating Units | 80 FR 64661” (Federal Register, December 22, 2015), https://www. federalregister.gov/documents/2015/10/23/2015-22842/carbon-pollution-emission-guidelines-for-existingstationary-sources-electric-utility-generating. [18] United States Environmental Protection Agency, “Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990-2016,” Reports and Assessments, US EPA, January 30, 2018, https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventoryus-greenhouse-gas-emissions-and-sinks-1990-2016. [19] Barack Obama, “Remarks Announcing the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan.” [20] Robinson Meyer and Matt Ford, “A Major Blow to Obama’s Climate-Change Plan,” The Atlantic, February 9, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/02/supreme-court-clean-power/462093/. [21] 40 C.F.R. §60. [22] “Clean Power Plan / Carbon Pollution Emission Guidelines - Environmental & Energy Law Program,” Harvard Law School, September 27, 2017, https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/2017/09/clean-power-plan-carbonpollution-emission-guidelines/. [23] United States Environmental Protection Agency, “FACT SHEET: Clean Power Plan Overview,” Overviews and Factsheets, accessed January 3, 2019, fact-sheet-clean-power-plan-overview.html. [24] Robert Rapier, “Yes, The U.S. Leads All Countries In Reducing Carbon Emissions,” Forbes, accessed January 3, 2019, [25] US EPA, “Carbon Pollution Emission Guidelines,” ES-6. [26] United States Environmental Protection Agency, “Sources of Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” Overviews and Factsheets, US EPA, December 29, 2015, https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions. [27] See, e.g., Hiroko Tabuchi and Henry Fountain, “Bucking Trump, These Cities, States and Companies Commit to Paris Accord,” The New York Times, January 20, 2018, sec. Climate, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/climate/american-cities-climate-standards.html. [28] Hardy Graupner, “What Exactly Is Germany’s ‘Energiewende’?” DW.COM, January 22, 2013, https://www.dw.com/en/what-exactly-is-germanys-energiewende/a-16540762. [29] “Sunny, Windy, Costly and Dirty,” The Economist, January 18, 2014, https://www.economist.com/europe/2014/01/18/sunny-windy-costly-and-dirty. [30] “Renewable Energy Sources Act (Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz EEG),” International Energy Agency, 2000, https://www.iea.org/policiesandmeasures/pams/germany/name-21702-en.php. [31] BMWi - Federal Ministry for Economics Affairs and Energy, “Renewable Energy,” 2018, https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/EN/Dossier/renewable-energy.html. [32] See generally Federal Ministry for Environment, Nature Conservation, and Nuclear Safety (BMU), “The Integrated Energy and Climate Programme of the German Government,” 2007. [33] See generally Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology and Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, “Energy Concept for an Environmentally Sound, Reliable and Affordable Energy Supply,” September 28, 2010. [34] See generally “The German Government’s Climate Action Programme 2020 - Cabinet Decision of 3 December 2014” BMU, December 3, 2014; BMU, “Climate Action Plan 2050 – Germany’s Long-Term Emission Development Strategy,” 2016, https://www.bmu.de/en/topics/climate-energy/climate/national-climate-policy/greenhouse-gas-neutral-germany-2050/. [35] Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, “The Federal Government’s Energy Concept of 2010 and the Transformation of the Energy System of 2011,” 2011. [36] Jeffrey Ball, “Germany’s High-Priced Energy Revolution,” Fortune, March 14, 2017, http://fortune.com/2017/03/14/germany-renewable-clean-energy-solar/. [37] Kerstine Appunn, “The History behind Germany’s Nuclear Phase-Out,” Clean Energy Wire, January 2, 2018, https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/history-behind-germanys-nuclear-phase-out. [38] See e.g., Sören Amelang, “Germany on Track to Widely Miss 2020 Climate Target – Government,” Clean Energy Wire, June 13, 2018, https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-track-widely-miss-2020-climatetarget-government. [39] Eurostat, “Greenhouse Gas Emission Statistics - Emission Inventories,” June 2018, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Greenhouse_gas_emission_statistics_-_emission_inventories. [40] BMWi, “Renewable Energy,” 2018. [50] See, e.g., Environmental Protection Agency, “Electric Utility Generating Units: Repealing the Clean Power Plan: Proposal,” Policies and Guidance, US EPA, October 4, 2017, https://www.epa.gov/stationary-sourcesair-pollution/electric-utility-generating-units-repealing-clean-power-plan-0; Robinson Meyer, “How Obama Could Lose His Big Climate Case,” The Atlantic, September 29, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/09/obama-clean-power-plan-dc-circuit-legal/502115/. [51] OAR US EPA, “Clean Power Plan Final Rule – Regulatory Impact Analysis,” Reports and Assessments, October 23, 2015, /cleanpowerplan/clean-power-plan-final-rule-regulatory-impact-analysis, 3-23. [52] See, e.g., sections on ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy, and Southern Company in “Who’s Fighting the Clean Power Plan and EPA Action on Climate Change?” Union of Concerned Scientists, https://www.ucsusa.org/globalwarming/fightmisinformation/whos-fighting-clean-power-plan-and-epa-action-climate. [53] OAR US EPA, “FACT SHEET: Clean Power Plan By The Numbers,” Overviews and Factsheets, accessed January 3, 2019, fact-sheet-clean-power-plan-numbers.html. [54] See, e.g., Megan Brenan and Lydia Saad, “Global Warming Concern Steady Despite Some Partisan Shifts,” Gallup.com, March 28, 2018, https://news.gallup.com/poll/231530/global-warming-concern-steady-despitepartisan-shifts.aspx. [55] “EPW Republicans Send Letter to EPA in Support of Clean Power Plan Repeal,” U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, January 12, 2018, https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2018/1/epwrepublicans-send-letter-to-epa-in. [56] Purdy, After Nature, 190. [57] US EPA, supra note 21. [58] Department of Energy, “2017 U.S. Energy and Employment Report,” January 2017, 29. [59] DOE, “U.S. Energy and Employment Report,” 21. [60] For a theoretical overview of environmental justice and its critical discussion of race, see David Schlosberg, “Theorising Environmental Justice: The Expanding Sphere of a Discourse,” Environmental Politics 22, no. 1 (February 1, 2013): 37–55, https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2013.755387); For information about the high proportion of black Americans living near a coal-fired power plant, see “Environmental Racism in America: An Overview of the Environmental Justice Movement and the Role of Race in Environmental Policies,” Goldman Environmental Foundation, June 24, 2015, https://www.goldmanprize.org/blog/environmental-racism-inamerica-an-overview-of-the-environmental-justice-movement-and-the-role-of-race-in-environmental-policies/; By contrast, for statistics showing employment in the coal industry to be disproportionately white, see United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employed Persons by Detailed Industry, Sex, Race, and Hispanic or Latino Ethnicity,” 2018, https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat18.htm. [61] Purdy, After Nature, 30. [62] International Energy Agency, “Energy Imports, Net (% of Energy Use) | Data” (The World Bank, 2015), https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.IMP.CONS.ZS?locations=US&year_high_desc=false. [63] Nicole Lewis, “Fact Checker: EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s Claim That the U.S. Is ‘Leading the World’ in ‘C02 Footprint’ Reductions,” The Washington Post, October 23, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/10/23/epa-administrator-scott-pruitts-claim-the-u-s-is-leading-the-world-in-c02-footprintreductions/?utm_term=.57dfb8ccf34b. [64] Jan Ivar Korsbakken, Robbie Andrew, and Glen Peters, “Guest Post: China’s CO2 Emissions Grew Less than Expected in 2017,” Carbon Brief, March 8, 2018, https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-chinas-co2-emissionsgrew-less-expected-2017. [65] Benjamin Storrow, “Trump’s ‘Affordable Clean Energy’ Plan Won’t Save Coal,” Scientific American, August 21, 2018, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trumps-affordable-clean-energy-plan-wont-save-coal/. [66] Obama, “Remarks Announcing the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan." [67] The European Commission, “EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS).” [68] It seems notable here that for the entire period between Obama’s direction of the EPA to craft the CPP in 2013 and his announcement of the final rule in 2015, his approval rating stayed beneath 50%; see Gallup, “Presidential Approval Ratings -- Barack Obama,” Gallup.com, accessed January 4, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/116479/Barack-Obama-Presidential-Job-Approval.aspx. [69] The White House Office of the Press Secretary, “Presidential Memorandum -- Power Sector Carbon Pollution Standards,” whitehouse.gov, June 25, 2013, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/06/25/presidential-memorandum-power-sector-carbon-pollution-standards. [70] See e.g., Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). [71] Purdy, After Nature, 34. [73] BMU, supra note 15, at 2. [74] Id., at 1. [75] See, e.g., Purdy, After Nature, 24. [76] BMU and BMWi, “Energy Concept for an Environmentally Sound, Reliable and Affordable Energy Supply,” 4. [77] BMU and BMWi, “Energy Concept for an Environmentally Sound, Reliable and Affordable Energy Supply,” 5. [78] BMU, “The German Government’s Climate Action Programme 2020 - 2014” 18. [79] “The German Federal Government,” deutschland.de, January 23, 2018, https://www.deutschland.de/en/ topic/politics/the-german-federal-government. [80] “Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany - Article 20a [Protection of Natural Foundations of Life and Animals]” (Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection and Federal Office of Justice), accessed January 4, 2019, https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.html#p0119. [81] “The German Environmental Constitutional Law,” Umweltbundesamt, January 29, 2016, http://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/the-german-environmental-constitutional-law. [82] Monika Neumann, “The Environmental Law System of the Federal Republic of Germany,” Annual Survey of International & Comparative Law 3, no. 1 (1996): 69–110. [83] Jonathan Cannon, Environment in the Balance (Harvard University Press, 2015), http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674736788. [84] Arlan Gerald Wine, “Enforcement Controversy Under the Clean Air Act: State Sovereignty and the Commerce Clause,” Transportation Law Journal 8 (1976): 383–400. [85] See, e.g., Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 05–1120; wherein the Bush-era EPA opposed regulation of CO2 emissions. [86] Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, “History of Environmental Policy in Germany: CDU Perspectives 1958–2015,”n.d.,https://www.kas.de/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=57153b6c-1ac9-6dd4-4048-b7e8732ba709&groupId=252038. [87] Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, “History of Environmental Policy in Germany,” 2 [88] Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, “History of Environmental Policy in Germany,” 22. [89] For discussion of coal, see BMU, “Climate Action Plan 2050 – Germany’s Long-Term Emission Development Strategy”; for discussion of the abolition of nuclear energy see “German Chancellor Merkel on Energy Nuclear Policy, Jun 9 2011 | Video | C-SPAN.Org” (C-SPAN 3, June 9, 2011), https://www.c-span.org/video/?300059-1/german-chancellor-merkel-energy-nuclear-policy. [90] Paul Hockenos, “The History of the Energiewende,” Clean Energy Wire, June 12, 2015, https://www.cleanenergywire.org/dossiers/history-energiewende. [91] Hockenos, “The History of the Energiewende.” [92] Hockenos, “The History of the Energiewende.” [93] Ball, “Germany’s High-Priced Energy Revolution.” [94] BMU and BMWi, “Energy Concept for an Environmentally Sound, Reliable and Affordable Energy Supply,” 15. [95] Appunn, “The History behind Germany’s Nuclear Phase-Out." [96] “German Chancellor Merkel on Energy Nuclear Policy, Jun 9 2011 | Video | C-SPAN.Org.” [97] “German Chancellor Merkel on Energy Nuclear Policy, Jun 9 2011 | Video | C-SPAN.Org.” [98] See, e.g., Kenneth Bruninx et al., “Impact of the German Nuclear Phase-out on Europe’s Electricity Generation—A Comprehensive Study,” Energy Policy 60 (September 1, 2013): 251–61, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.05.026; Hardy Graupner, “What Exactly Is Germany’s ‘Energiewende’?,” DW.COM, January 22, 2013, https://www.dw.com/en/what-exactly-is-germanys-energiewende/a-16540762. [99] Poll by Emnid, cited in “4 Jahre Nach Fukushima: Große Mehrheit Für Energiewende - Politik Inland - Bild. De,” Bild, March 14, 2015, https://www.bild.de/politik/inland/atomausstieg/4-jahre-nach-fukushima-grossemehrheit-fuer-energiewende-40148648.bild.html. [100] B.D. Hong and E.R. Slatick, “Emissions Factors for Coal,” Quarterly Coal Report January-April 1994, 1994, 1–8. [101] Kerstine Appunn, “Coal in Germany,” Clean Energy Wire, October 29, 2014, https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/coal-germany. [102] Jessica Wentz, “6 Important Points About the ‘Affordable Clean Energy Rule,’” State of the Planet | Earth Institute | Sabin Center for Climate Change Law (blog), August 22, 2018, https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/08/22/affordable-clean-energy-rule/. [103] BMU, supra note 34, at 35. [104] Benjamin Wehrmann, “Germany’s Coal Exit Commission,” Clean Energy Wire, May 31, 2018, https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-coal-exit-commission. [105] “Nature Protection and Biodiversity - National Responses (Germany),” SOER 2010 Common environmental theme (Deprecated), European Environment Agency, accessed January 5, 2019, https://www.eea.europa.eu/soer/countries/de/nature-protection-and-biodiversity-national. [106] Melissa Eddy, “German Energy Push Runs Into Problems,” The New York Times, December 20, 2017, sec. Business, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/business/energy-environment/german-energy-push-runsinto-problems.html. [107] Ellen Thalman and Julian Wettengel, “The Story of ‘Climate Chancellor’ Angela Merkel,” Clean Energy Wire, November 26, 2015, https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/making-climate-chancellor-angelamerkel. [108] Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, “History of Environmental Policy in Germany,” 30. [109] “German Chancellor Merkel on Energy Nuclear Policy, Jun 9 2011 | Video | C-SPAN.Org.” [110] BMU, “The German Government’s Climate Action Programme 2020,” 6. [111] See Meyer, “How Obama Could Lose His Big Climate Case.” [112] BMWi, Monitoring and Steering the Energy Transition (2018), https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/EN/Dossier/energy-transition.html. [113] BMU, supra note 34, at 12. [114] See, e.g., BMU, “The Integrated Energy and Climate Programme,” 2; 13. [115] BMU, “The Integrated Energy and Climate Programme,” 63. [116] Alexander Franke and Energiewende Team, “How Winning over Rural Constituents Changed the Political Discussions on Renewables in Germany,” Energy Transition (blog), November 18, 2014, https://energytransition.org/2014/11/german-fit-helped-making-energiewende-non-partisan/. [117] Gerhard Stryi-Hipp, “THE EFFECTS OF THE GERMAN RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES ACT (EEG) ON MARKET, TECHNICAL AND INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT,” 2004, https://doi.org/10.13140/2.1.1444.6404, 1. [118] BMWi, “Renewable Energy,” 2018. [119] Craig Morris, “Share of German Citizen Renewable Energy Shrinking,” Energy Transition (blog), February 7, 2018, https://energytransition.org/2018/02/share-of-german-citizen-renewable-energy-shrinking/. [120] Franke et al, “How Winning over Rural Constituents Changed the Political Discussions on Renewables.” [121] David Meyer, “95% of Germans Support Green Energy Subsidies Despite Their High Price,” Fortune, August 8, 2017, http://fortune.com/2017/08/08/germans-renewable-energy-energiewende-subsidies/. Just as remarkably, 56% of Germans said their average annual electricity bill surcharge of around 240 euros was either reasonable or too low. [122] Former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, quoted in “Scott Pruitt Signs a Measure to Repeal the Clean Power Plan,” The Economist, October 10, 2017, https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2017/10/10/scottpruitt-signs-a-measure-to-repeal-the-clean-power-plan. [123] BMU supra note 29; see also, e.g., BMU, “The Integrated Energy and Climate Programme,” 14: (“it is therefore...their own interest”). [124] BMU, “The Integrated Energy and Climate Programme,” 65. 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In this essay, I engage with G.A. Cohen’s argument by analogy that proletarians are individually free. I grant that Cohen’s analogy successfully represents the world. I disagree, however, with his conclusion, and use Philip Pettit’s conception of freedom as non-domination to demonstrate that proleta The Individual Unfreedom of the Proletarian Cal Fawell University of Chicago Author Marko Winedt Hanci Lei Neil Sehgal Matthew Dowling Editors Spring 2019 Abstract In this essay, I engage with G.A. Cohen’s argument by analogy that proletarians are individually free. I grant that Cohen’s analogy successfully represents the world. I disagree, however, with his conclusion, and use Philip Pettit’s conception of freedom as non-domination to demonstrate that proletarians are individually unfree. Specifically, I argue that even though fewer proletarians leave the proletariat than possibly could, they are nonetheless “dominated”—and thus, each is individually unfree. This essay grants the accuracy of Cohen’s analogy, and from this assumption draws the conclusion that proletarians are individually unfree. In drawing this conclusion, this essay follows the style of modus ponens. It first argues for the conditional: if Pettit’s notion of freedom holds, then the conclusion Cohen draws must fail. It then argues that Pettit’s notion holds, showing that it accurately captures our intuitions on the subject. In arguing for the conditional, this essay contends that Pettit’s criteria for unfreedom are satisfied for each individual proletarian. In arguing for the antecedent, it demonstrates a number of intuitive considerations which support Pettit’s conception of freedom. From this, it concludes that each character in the room of Cohen’s analogy is unfree. Combined with the original hypothetical stance that Cohen’s analogy accurately relates to the world, it follows that proletarians are individually unfree. Download full text PDF (12 pages) In The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom , G.A. Cohen addresses the status of wage-earners whose only available resource is their potential to work for a salary; they are unable to produce the necessities of life themselves. These people are known as proletarians; the class of all such proletarians is known as the proletariat. Cohen begins with the view that since only a few proletarians are able to advance from the proletariat, proletarians—taken as a whole—are forced to sell their labor power. He denies, however, that this conflicts with his claim that “most proletarians are not forced to sell their labor power,” justifying this denial with an analogy: Ten people are placed in a room the only exit from which is a huge and heavy locked door. At various distances from each lies a single heavy key. Whoever picks up this key—and each is physically able, with varying degrees of effort, to do so—and takes it to the door will find, after considerable self-application, a way to open the door and leave the room. But if he does so he alone will be able to leave it. Photoelectric devices installed by a jailer ensure that it will open only just enough to permit one exit. Then it will close, and no one inside the room will be able to open it again.[1] The structure of this analogy is relatively simple. A group of people are imprisoned, all are initially able to escape, but ultimately only one is allowed to do so. He draws out the significance of this analogy by saying that: Whomever we select, it is true of the other nine that not one of them is going to try to get the key. Therefore it is true of the selected person that he is free to obtain the key, and to use it. He is therefore not forced to remain in the room. But all this is true of whomever we select. Therefore it is true of each person that he is not forced to remain in the room, even though necessarily at least nine will remain in the room, and in fact all will.[2] Here, Cohen alludes to the crucial assumption that whoever attempts to exit the room will not be interfered with from this task by the other occupants (elsewhere: “…each is free to use [the means of egress], since, ex hypothesi, no one would block his way”[3]). Cohen uses this analogy to argue that every individual in the proletariat is free to leave it. He neatly introduces this line of thought by saying that “there are more exits from the British proletariat than there are workers trying to leave it. Therefore, British workers are individually free to leave the proletariat.”[4] He calls this “argument 7.” Analogously: just as any chosen member of the room is able and free to leave it, Cohen believes that this same freedom applies to any—and therefore every—member of the proletariat. Yet, Cohen understands that “there is a great deal of unfreedom in their situation.”[5] He invents a term for this unfreedom, naming it “collective unfreedom,” which describes the case in which “not more that one can exercise the liberty they all have.”[6] Cohen uses this device to explain our intuitions about the unfreedom of this situation, ultimately claiming that “there are very few exits from the British proletariat and there are very many workers in it. Therefore, British workers are collectively unfree to leave the proletariat.”[7] He calls this “argument 8.” Cohen means to hold argument 7 (that proletarians are individually free) and argument 8 (that proletarians are collectively unfree) together in a state of non-contradiction in order to satisfy our intuitions about freedom on both collective and individual levels. It is the aim of this essay to show that, on the contrary, argument 7 fails. To do this, Philip Pettit’s conception of liberty as non-domination is enlisted. In short, Pettit holds that X dominates Y if X has the capacity to interfere on an arbitrary basis in certain choices that Y is in a position to make. There are three components to Pettit’s view of domination: one is dominating if they have (a) a capacity to interfere, (b) on an arbitrary basis, (c) in certain decisions another is able to make. Critically, domination is an inherently potential characterization of unfreedom. It is the capacity for a certain kind of interference, not the interference itself. With respect to (a), the capacity to interfere, Pettit claims that this interference must be intentional and must worsen the other’s situation. He claims as much when he says that “when I interfere I make things worse for you, not better. And the worsening that interference involves always has to be more or less intentional in character: it cannot occur by accident.”[8] Thus, in situations where only accidental or positive interference is possible, it violates Pettit’s view to say that there is domination. In describing how a choice situation may be worsened, Pettit provides three variables: options, expected payoffs, and outcomes. Understanding the idea of worsening options is pretty straightforward—Pettit explains this as “changing [for the worse] the range of options available.”[9] For our purposes, the elimination of options fits this criterion. By “worsening the expected payoffs,” Pettit means the attachment of punishment to a certain course of action in order to discourage it. By “worsening the outcomes,” Pettit means attaching punishment to a course of action that has already occurred in order to negatively affect the actual payoffs. Pettit qualifies (b), the condition of arbitrariness, by studying the relative locations of the agent deciding and the person affected (“the other”). He understands an act to be arbitrary if “it is subject just to the arbitrium, the decision or judgment, of the agent,” and moreover, that the action is done “without reference to the interests, or the opinions, of those affected.”[10] In other words, an arbitrary action is one which denies the status of the affected party as a meaningful human being by disregarding their wants and needs. On the other hand, Pettit sees non-arbitrary decisions as those which track, or take into account, the preferences and welfare of the people liable to interference. Pettit explains (c), or “certain decisions the other is able to make,” as a way of compartmentalizing different domains of freedom and domination. He says that the most salient aspect of this clause “is that it mentions certain choices, not all choices. This highlights the fact that someone may dominate another in a certain domain of choice, in a certain sphere or aspect or period of their life, without doing so in all.”[11] In other words, the other can be dominated at work while free in the home, or vice versa; the other can be dominated politically or socially, but not in their decisions of which music to listen to, etc. Pettit holds that domination—and therefore, freedom—can vary in extent, intensity, and across different domains. Domination can be in the form of absolute power over another in many critical domains, limited ability to interfere in largely inconsequential domains, and everything in-between. The intensity of domination varies along both of these dimensions, and though Pettit fails to give an explicit framework for determining an order of severity, he acknowledges, at the very least, that loose hierarchies exist. It is critical to understand that Pettit’s conception of domination is such that interference does not need to be actual in order for there to be unfreedom. At the heart of this view is the fact that the mere ability to interfere engenders unfreedom through domination. He writes that: The possession by someone of dominating power over another—in whatever degree—does not require that the person who enjoys such power actually interferes...it does not require even that the person who enjoys that power is inclined in the slightest measure towards such interference. What constitutes domination is the fact that in some respect the power-bearer has the capacity to interfere arbitrarily, even if they are never going to do so.[12] Here, Pettit explains that unfreedom can occur even without actual interference. Not only does he believe this, but also that unfreedom can occur even where actual interference seems very unlikely. He strongly emphasizes that the mere ability of arbitrary interference, however “small” that interference may be, causes a proportional amount of unfreedom. It is now possible to apply Pettit’s view to Cohen’s analogy. In Pettit’s view, any one person in the room is dominated by any other person in the room. This is true because each person has the relevant capacity to interfere in the relevant way with every other person. Suppose we initially select one person from the hypothetical room, as Cohen does. It is true that they have the capacity to interfere in the relevant sense—intentionally and harmfully. This person could choose to leave the room, thus rendering every other inhabitant finally trapped. In Pettit’s terminology, this certainly worsens their choices, since it removes their choice to leave the room. It is especially clear that this is a worsening of their choices when one recalls that the room stands for the proletariat, and exiting it stands for ascending to a higher class. It is further possible that this person could make their exit in order to intentionally worsen the lives of the other occupants. There is nothing stopping the person from growing resentful of their peers, and seeking to harm them by leaving the room for the sake of finally imprisoning them. Even if this sounds unlikely, it is important to remember that “what constitutes domination is the fact that in some respect the power-bearer has the capacity to interfere arbitrarily, even if they are never going to do so.”[13] Domination is not a question of probability, but rather capacity. Thus, by having the ability to leave the room, the selected person has the ability to intentionally interfere in the lives of the others for the worse. Second, this person may perpetuate this act on a totally arbitrary basis. Nothing forces the person to track the interests of the other occupants of the room when deciding whether or not to leave. They are free to make their decision to leave without any regard for the wants or needs of the others, and can reason purely from their own preferences and needs. Thus, the selected person has the capacity to interfere arbitrarily. Finally, their interference is, indeed, in “certain choices that the others are willing to make.” It is a real decision whether or not the others choose to leave the room. The capacity to arbitrarily interfere centers on this very locus of choice, and thus meets the third criteria for domination. Therefore, the selected person has the capacity to interfere—on an arbitrary basis—in certain choices that the others are in a position to make. But this is just the definition of domination—thus, the selected person dominates the others, which means that each of the others is in a position of domination. In Pettit’s view, this amounts to saying that each of the people in the room is unfree. But as Cohen writes, all this is true of “whomever we select.”[14] Thus, each person in the room dominates all the others, which means every person in the room is in a position of domination. Therefore, every person in the room is individually unfree. This conclusion is the negation of Cohen’s in his “argument 7.” It is worth briefly noting that Pettit generally formulates the dominating relationship between persons. He says that “while a dominated agent, ultimately, will always have to be an individual person or persons, domination may often be targeted on a group or on a corporate agent: it will constitute domination of individual people but in a collective identity or capacity or aspiration.”[15] Thus, the fact that the chosen agent is able to arbitrarily interfere in the same particular domain of choice for multiple other people does not mean it is not domination. A more serious objection to the claim that each person in the room is dominated and therefore unfree, however, is the thought that reciprocal domination over an identical domain of choice is impossible. It seems, prima facie, that because each person is dominating all the others just as much as the others dominate them, all have the same choice options; since the idea of domination seems to intuitively rely on asymmetrical relationships, it would seem that the idea of reciprocal domination is internally inconsistent. This worry may be mitigated in a number of ways. First, it is important to keep in mind the precise definition of domination: X dominates Y if X has the capacity to interfere, on an arbitrary basis, in certain choices Y is in a position to make. There is nothing in this definition which logically excludes it from being a reflexive two-place relation. The intuitive connection with asymmetry can be explained by the fact that the capacity for arbitrary interference is often made possible by asymmetries such as wealth, power, status, and others. Though this is the case, Pettit explicitly mentions that reciprocal power to interfere may be used as a strategy for achieving non-domination. He mentions two possibilities: defense and deterrent. He writes that “the strategy of reciprocal power is to make the resources of dominator and dominated more equal so that, ideally, a previously dominated person can come to defend themselves against any interference on the part of the dominator.”[16] In other words, the dominated party would be able to use their resources to counter the arbitrary interference of the other, and thus, this very possibility would eliminate the capacity of arbitrary interference and dissolve the dominating relation. However, it is not clear how this defensive interference would be possible in Cohen’s analogy, since he assumes that if one tried to leave, “no one would block his way,” and once the original person left the room, no one else could leave in order to finally imprison them.[17] By the very nature of this particular kind of interference, defensive interference—within Cohen’s analogy—is impossible. Pettit himself admits that the “ideal” of defensive interference will rarely materialize. Instead, he discusses retaliation as a second way of using reciprocal power to reduce domination. He says that the dominated agent may be able “at least to threaten any interference with punishment and to impose punishment on actual interferers.”[18] Cohen’s analogy, however, does not speak to such retaliatory interference. Given that the others would be locked in the room, it is hard to see how they would be able to affect the escaped person. Here, though, the analogy breaks down, since there is nothing necessarily physically separating someone who “recently exited the room” (e.g., joined the corporate workforce, or gained control of a company) from the wrath (e.g., physical attack) of their previous fellows. Still, it is not the original situation of reciprocal domination which engenders the possibility of retaliation. The relevant kind of domination—that is, leaving the room and trapping the rest—does not enable retaliation. Ultimately, then, this response has no bearing on the claim that the reciprocal domination must be self-annihilating, since it is not in virtue of this that retaliation is possible. For example, suppose that A and B work in a factory. A hates B, and so A decides to harm B by getting promoted to become the owner of the factory—eliminating B’s ability to do so. B cannot retaliate by also coming to own the factory. The job has been filled; the “room” has been “exited.” Yet, B can destroy A’s property, harass A’s person, or even threaten A’s life. This retaliation does not stem from the original position of reciprocal domination. Thus, Pettit’s only two ways that reciprocal domination might eliminate itself do not find application in Cohen’s scenario. We may safely conclude, then, that all the people in the room are dominated by at least one (and in fact all) of the others, which just means—in Pettit’s view—that each person in the room is individually unfree. It will now be the aim of this essay to motivate Pettit’s view independently from its application to Cohen’s argument. I shall do this by arguing that, even on the negative view of liberty, it is intuitively desirable to expand the horizon of freedom from mere non-interference to non-domination in Pettit’s sense. To begin with, certain kinds of obvious unfreedoms cannot be recognized as such under a negative conception of liberty which only recognizes interference as unfreedom. For instance, consider a slave whose master has not exercised their capacity to arbitrarily interfere in the slave’s life for the worse, and gives no indication that they ever will. Obviously, the slave is unfree, for the slave is a slave. Pettit remarks that: The observation that there can be domination without interference connects with the theme highlighted in the last chapter, that slavery and unfreedom is consistent with non-interference: that it can be realized in the presence of a master or authority who is beneficent, and even benevolent.[19] In other words, the example of the slave under a benevolent (non-interfering) master shows first that a strictly negative view of liberty fails to account for this obvious instance of unfreedom. The strength of Pettit’s view lies in the fact that the reasons we conclude this slave to be unfree are simply that the criteria of domination are met—and this shows the intuitive strength of his view. In elucidating these intuitions, Pettit quotes Richard Price as saying that “individuals in private life, while held under the power of masters, cannot be denominated free, however equitably and kindly they may be treated.”[20] Like Pettit, Price focuses on the persons “under the power of masters,” though not actively interfered with. Being under the power of another, in Price’s sense, certainly seems to imply the master’s capacity to arbitrarily interfere. Analyzing the unfreedom of the slave leads Price to conclude that it is this capacity to be arbitrarily interfered with which engenders unfreedom. Pettit himself characterizes domination as leading to this kind of slavish relationship. In domination, he says, “the powerless are at the mercy of the powerful and not on equal terms. The master-slave scenario will materialize, and the asymmetry between the two sides will become a communicative as well as an objective reality.”[21] Pettit also finds examples of this intuition in Machiavelli and Montesquieu. Machiavelli describes the power of a free community as “the power of enjoying freely his possessions without any anxiety, of feeling no fear for the honor of his women and his children, of not being afraid for himself,” and Montesquieu defines liberty as the “tranquility of spirit which comes from the opinion each one has of his security, and in order for him to have this liberty the government must be such that one citizen cannot fear another citizen.”[22] In both characterizations of freedom, the common denominator is that when the conditions of domination are met—that is, when one has to “bow and scrape,” appease their dominator, and maintain “eternal discretion”—there is personal unfreedom (and vice versa). In other words, it is strongly intuitive to claim “freedom if and only if non-domination.” What Pettit’s definition does is make this intuition explicit. Pettit’s view is further strengthened by accounting for the intuition that a state of freedom should foment equality among the agents by whom it is enjoyed. Pettit often alludes to this intuition by showing the converse: in a dominating relationship, the individuals are not able to look each other in the eye. The dominated person may only assert their equality on the pain of being interfered with, which is to say, they cannot. Similarly, the dominating agent’s power suggests a condescending mindset. More to the point, it seems that domination dehumanizes the dominated, while non-domination forces the would-be dominator to see the other as a person. Pettit says that in a state of non-domination, You do not have to live either in fear of that other, then, or in deference to them. The non-interference you enjoy at the hands of others is not enjoyed by their grace and you do not live at their mercy. You are a somebody in relation to them, not a nobody. You are a person in your own legal and social right.[23] Here, Pettit argues that when one is free from domination, one secures one’s personhood. By this argument, Pettit seeks to directly align non-domination with freedom, as opposed to appealing to the converse, as above. Non-domination seems to imply fundamental equality and restores the relationship to that which holds between equal persons, instead of that which holds between master and slave. Because non-domination shares this intuitive property of freedom, and because of the (above) strong intuitions that the conditions for freedom are those of non-domination, Pettit’s view of freedom of non-domination ought to be accepted. Finally, it should be noticed that the intuitive support for Pettit’s conception of freedom does not trivially apply to the people in Cohen’s analogical room. Since the people in this room are on equal standing, it may seem like there is no room for the master-slave relationship to emerge, that people will be able to meet each other in the eye, and that there can be no degradation of personhood as there is when the domination is truly one-sided. A thought experiment will make clear how the intuitive strength of Pettit’s view holds, even in contexts like Cohen’s analogy in which there is reciprocal inter-domination. Imagine the following situation: persons A, B, and C are in the room. Person A wishes to have an affair with person C and afterwards leave the room. However, person B is jealous of this, and plans to leave the room as soon as the affair commences—if it does—in order to forever imprison A, denying A’s ultimate wish for escape. B makes this known to A. Now, A must appease B by not having an affair with C in order to fulfill their ultimate wish to leave the room. Thus, B dominates A, as A is unable to exercise their individual freedom: in order to exit the room, A must “bow and scrape” to B’s preferences. The mere fact that A also dominates B does not mean that A does not acutely feel the unfreedom of their domination by B. A cannot look B in the eye, because B stands between A and A’s desires. B’s whim determines the fate of A’s life. That A may leave the room, forever trapping B and C, does not negate this fact. All this thought experiment seeks to demonstrate is that the intuitions which locate freedom with non-domination are still present in Cohen’s analogy. Succinctly, these intuitions are first that someone is free if they are able to exercise their freedoms without the approval of another, and unfree if not (which is equivalent to defining freedom as non-domination). This is exactly the case in the analogy of the room: person A is unable to exercise their freedoms because they lack the approval of person B. Backtracking for a moment, the second intuition is that freedom as non-domination accords with the intuition that freedom produces equality. The inverse, that unfreedom induces inequality, also holds in Cohen’s room: precisely because of the possibility of situations such as the above thought experiment, the people in the room will be unable to look each other in the eye. Since this is the inverse, it is hardly a rigorous proof; however, even the inverse demonstrates a correlation between equality and non-domination which certainly does not malign the suggestion that they are equivalent. Suppose instead that the people in the room were individually free, as Cohen claims. Then they would enjoy equality amongst themselves, according to the rule: if there is freedom, then there is equality. When Cohen speaks of the possibility of solidarity among the members of the room—for instance, those who want to rise, not out of the proletariat, but with the proletariat—he asserts the possibility of the consequent, implying the situation is one of genuine freedom. However, two considerations must be noticed. First, the above thought experiment is meant to show that this possibility is nontrivial, and must be argued for. As the experiment shows, there is also a great possibility that there is profound inequality—an inability to “look each other in the eye”—amongst the members of the room. Insofar as this denies the consequent, it speaks to the possibility of the original situation being one of unfreedom. Second, it is important to remember that even if Cohen were able to succeed in proving the possibility of equality amongst the members of the room, it would be fallacious to conclude from this that they were free. Therefore, both of the original intuitions which support Pettit’s particular notion of freedom (respectively, the potentiality of interference and the relationship between freedom and equality) remain relevant to Cohen’s analogy of the room. Since these intuitions remain intact, Pettit’s concepts should still be held in the analogy of the room. Thus the individuals in Cohen’s analogy are individually unfree. Before concluding, it is worth noting that Cohen modifies his analogy in the same paper: in the modified analogy, exactly two people may leave the room. However, this modification leaves the above arguments unaffected. Indeed, as long as there are fewer exits than people in the proletariat, nothing changes. This is because the above arguments remain unchanged if we select two people at random, treat them as a single agent, and then in a similar manner proceed to show that the others are dominated by them, concluding that since they were chosen at random, all are dominated. Pettit has no problem with this kind of strategy, saying that “while a dominating party will always be an agent…it may be a personal or corporate or collective agent: this, as in the tyranny of the majority, where the domination is never the function of a single individual’s power.”[24] Thus, considering the dominating agent as an arbitrary group of people (the exact count of which equals the number of exits from the proletariat) rather than a single individual does not threaten any of the above conclusions. In conclusion, this essay first demonstrated that on Pettit’s view of freedom as non-domination, Cohen’s analogical backing for “argument 7” fails to prove that any proletarian is individually unfree. This is precisely because in this analogy, every person in the room is individually dominated. Assuming, with Cohen, that this analogy accurately represents reality, it is useful to step out of the analogy and towards what it depicts: Cohen begins by saying that there are more exits from the proletariat than proletarians leaving, and thus that any proletarian is individually free to leave the proletariat. Pettit’s view, however, shows how proletarians can hardly be said to enjoy freedom, since they are constantly threatened with losing it based on the arbitrary whims of their peers. Thus, holding Pettit’s view entails rejecting Cohen’s. This essay then argued for the intuitive strength of Pettit’s view, showing first that Pettit’s formulation of freedom matches with common, intuitive formulations, and then showing how the claim that ‘freedom is non-domination’ accurately tracks our intuitions about the relationship between equality and freedom. From this, in the style of modus ponens, it follows that the people in the room are individually unfree. Once again stepping out of the analogy, it follows that proletarians are each and all individually unfree. Endnotes [1] Cohen, G. A. “The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 12, no. 1 (1983): 9. [2] Cohen, “Proletarian Unfreedom,” 10. [3] Cohen, “Proletarian Unfreedom,” 10. [4] Cohen, “Proletarian Unfreedom,” 13. [5] Cohen, “Proletarian Unfreedom,” 11. [6] Cohen, “Proletarian Unfreedom,” 11. [7] Cohen, “Proletarian Unfreedom,” 14. [8] Pettit, Philip. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), 52. [9] Pettit, Republicanism, 53. [10] Pettit, Republicanism, 55. [11] Pettit, Republicanism, 58. [12] Pettit, Republicanism, 63. [13] Pettit, Republicanism, 63. [14] Cohen, “Proletarian Unfreedom,” 10 [15] Pettit, Republicanism, 52. [16] Pettit, Republicanism, 67. [17] Cohen, “Proletarian Unfreedom,” 10. [18] Pettit, Republicanism, 67. [19] Pettit, Republicanism, 64. [20] Pettit, Republicanism, 64. [21] Pettit, Republicanism, 61. [22] Pettit, Republicanism, 71. [23] Pettit, Republicanism, 71. [24] Pettit, Republicanism, 52. Bibliography Cohen, G. A. 1983. “The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 12 (1): 3–33. Pettit, Philip. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford Univ. Press, 2010.

Staff ~ Vol. VII | Issue I Editorial Board Aimee Zheng William Loughridge Manaal Saadaat Mason Zhang, Hansae Lee Benjamin Levy, Zachary Freer Maggie Jiang, Manaal Saadaat Editor-in-Chief Content Director Marketing Director Philosophy Section Director Politics Section Director Economics Section Director Content Team Philosophy Section Editors Hansae Lee Steve Nam Alexander Gerasimchuk Matthew Wong Theodore Young Gabriel Gonzalez Coco Zhu Nahye Lee Koda Li Fatima Avila Politics Section Editors Arjun Ray Faith Li Malcolm Furman Meruka Vyas Fatima Avila Emerson Rhodes Lachlan Edwards Aditi Bhattacharjya Sophie Rukin Economics Section Editors Meruka Vyas Aditi Bhattacharjya Max Robinson Vittorio Nazzi Arjun Ray Lachlan Edwards Matthew Wong Arthur Shamgunov Operations Team Marketing Associates Claire Kim-Narita Nadya Tan Designers Julian Croonenberghs Neil Xu Founders Julian D. Jacobs '19 Daniel Shemano '19

Kyu-hyun Jo Cause, Causation, and Multiplicity: A Critique of E. H. Carr’s “Causation in History” Kyu-hyun Jo Abstract This paper will assess three central components of Edward Carr’s lecture ‘’Causation in History’’ in What is History? First, Carr does not show causation’s real function of distinguishing between various types of history; the kinds of causes a historian employs describes the nature of their historical inquiry. Second, Carr’s notion of “accidental causes” is oxymoronic because accidents are unpredictable for any historical actor. There is no logic to explain why unexpected accidents had to happen for historical actors from their viewpoint. Therefore, its contrast with ‘’rational causes’’ is misleading. Finally, however important causes are in formulating historical interpretations, causes do not determine a historian’s interpretation. 1. An Outline of the Main Arguments The explanation of causes in historical phenomena—explaining how historical events occurred by examining and describing the reasons behind their occurrence—is perhaps the signature hallmark of History as a Social Science. Yet, how does a historian know what a cause is and how should he or she explain the cause? This paper will provide a critique of Edward Carr’s methodology in his lecture “Causation in History,’’ collected in his seminal book, What is History? I will first assess Carr’s discussion of determinism, then discuss his distinction between accidental and rational causes, and finally, analyze how examples function throughout the lecture to highlight his arguments. From such examination, I will emphasize the function of historical causality within Carr’s framing of History as a scientific process. After examining Carr’s logic on historical causality, I will conclude with three main arguments. First, while Carr shows the necessity of causal explanations in historical analyses, he does not crucially show that the real importance of causes in historical explanation lies in their power to determine subdivisions in fields of historical research. Second, Carr’s distinction between “accidental causes’’ and “rational causes’’ is misleading because “accidental causes’’ is an oxymoronic concept. Accidents occur unpredictably and unexpectedly from a historical actor’s perspective, and it is impossible to accurately judge why an accident had to occur, unless a historical actor involved in an accident should miraculously resuscitate to directly inform the historian of the accident’s details. Moreover, if the fundamental purpose of a historical cause is to provide a logical explanation to the occurrence of historical phenomena, Carr, in conceiving “accidental’’ as an opposing concept to “rational,’’ is basically comparing illogical and logical causation in history. However, if “illogical’’ means “that which cannot be explained logically,’’ then it is questionable how an “illogical cause’’ is actually an explanatory cause. It is possible to explain that an accident became an accident, even if it is much harder to determine why an accident exactly occurred. Insofar as there is an explanation, however unsatisfactory the quality of the explanation may be, explaining how an accident came to be called as such, still qualifies as being logical, or having the capability to be explained with reasonable statements. In other words, the contrast between accidental and rational causes in historical explanation is misconstrued because “accidental causes’’ is an oxymoronic concept. Finally, while Carr may be correct in emphasizing the importance of causes in historical interpretation, he is mistaken in assuming that causes alone dictate the structure and content of historical analysis. The search for historical causes is only necessary for the sake of providing diverse angles of historical analyses; historical causes are not so important to exclusively determine and decide the entire content of a historian’s interpretation. It is the historian’s liberty to interpret facts about an event and then determine what the important causes of an event may be, but historical causes alone do not possess the great power to determine the direction of the historian’s interpretation. Rather, it is interdisciplinary historical analysis, which provides a rationale, a justification for why certain causes have better explanatory causes for a certain historical event than others, which ultimately in- forms the direction of a historian’s logic. The art of performing meticulous and exact historical interpretations involves adopting interdisciplinary methods, and only after the invocation of interdisciplinary methods to provide a rationale for establishing a hierarchy between causes can a historian perform interpretations. 2. A Brief Literature Review and the Significance of “Causation in History” A close analysis and an examination of Carr’s conception of causality and his ideas is necessary because there has yet to be a systematic study of Carr’s “Causation in History.” The majority of the secondary literature on What is His- tory? are book reviews that concentrates on commenting on the book’s overall structure and its main argument that History is a dialogue between the past and the present. This literature either mentions Carr’s discussion of historical causality solely in relation to his main argument, or ignores it altogether (1). For example, in the most recent comprehensive discussion of philosophies of History and historiography, the author closely analyzes Robin Collingwood’s emphasis on human ac- tions as the subject of historical inquiry is closely analyzed as a conditional theory for historical causation. Though Carr was a major critic of Collingwood’s views of History in general, neither Carr’s “Causation in History” as an independent work nor What is History? is given sufficient attention (2). Critical studies of Carr’s ideas regarding History have concentrated on his pursuit of objectivity and positivism, or his conceptualization of History as a study of causes. Ann Frazier (1976) argues against an absolute positivist view of History. She asserts that insofar as a historical narrative is a “reconstruction from present experience of what might have happened in the past,” it is impossible to absolutely determine what “actually happened in the past” (3). In other words, Carr’s vision for an objective and a pure History devoted to verifying past events with exactitude is untenable and impossible to realize. Geoffrey Partington (1979) criticized Carr’s “moral positivism and moral futurism” in favor of replacing them with relativism to better account for differences in time and place in which a historical event occurred when making a historical judgment (4). Most recently, Ann Talbot (2009), while comparing Carr’s view of chance and necessity with that of Leon Trotsky, concluded, “History is no longer a study of causality but is determined by the propensities of the historian” (5). In short, the secondary literature has engaged with various aspects of Carr’s view of History and concentrated on how historians write about the past and how recent interpretations of History have abandoned Carr’s concern for causality. However, the secondary literature, in particular Talbot, does not explain why Carr’s search for the role of causality in the writing of History is outdated, missing the central value of “Causality in History” as Carr’s most definitive statement on what History is as a science, for it is in this lecture where a truly scientific and methodical answer to the title of Carr’s book actually appears. A critical examination of Carr’s conception of historical causality is necessary to show why it is outdated or, as I noted earlier, there are three major deficiencies in Carr’s logic about historical causality. In “Causation in History” Carr develops the most methodological and structural argument about the nature of historical causality and criticism against historical determinism, which taken collectively, is actually devoted to explaining why History is a science, rather than explaining causality’s place in History for its own sake. Carr’s views about causality in History are essentially concerned with how causality functions in History to give its scientific character, not whether History’s entire academic identity is simply a study of causation. It is in this particular lecture where Carr’s understanding of History as a science in terms of approaches and methodology is most clearly expressed and where a genuinely structural analysis of History as a science—how historical causation reflects the scientific nature and essence of History—is most lucidly given. In short, this particular lecture deserves a close analysis because it explains why and how History functions as a science: by ordering facts through causality to transform historical fact into historical knowledge. How History becomes under- stood as History to a historian is perhaps the best method to know how history be- comes transformed into professional History. This paper intends to highlight the importance of causation within the question, “What is History?,” later evaluating Carr’s ability to frame historical inquiry as a scientific process through causation and causality. 3. Carr’s Main Ideas on Historical Causality Carr opens his discussion about historical causation with the observation that the historian “commonly assigns several causes to the same event’’ (6). However, the historian is bound by “a professional impulse to reduce it to order, to establish some hierarchy of causes which would fix their relation to one another’’ to decide which cause should be “the ultimate cause, the cause of all causes’’ (7). In other words, Carr believes that a multiplicity of causes serves a secondary function of letting the historian rationally prioritize a single cause that produced an event. From this discussion of the historian’s need to identify an order to historical causes, Carr argues that “historical determinism’’ and “chance in history’’ are “red herrings’’ which obstruct the logical flow of historical causation and proceeds to show how they are not part of a proper historical logic. “Historical determinism’’ is “the belief that everything has a cause or causes, and could not have happened differently unless something in the cause or causes had also been different’’ (8). In other words, “historical determinism’’ assumes that the occurrence of every phenomenon in life is dependent on a single cause unique to that particular phenomenon such that even the slightest alteration in the cause would necessarily produce a different phenomenon. However, Carr sees “historical determinism” as both unsatisfactory and un- realistic because it does not recognize the unpredictable vicissitudes of human behavior and actions According to Carr, the choices people make defy strict classification as either a matter of free will or logical determinism. He believes that various forms of human behavior and actions can arise from both free will and determined causes, arguing that historians are flexible in understanding human actions to arise from both sources (9). From this reasoning, Carr does not entertain the view that historical events occur “inevitably,’’ unless “inevitably’’ is qualified to mean that antecedent causes would have to be different for an event’s outcome to be radically different from what was expected (10). Since Carr is uncomfortable with the notion that historical events occur in a vacuum, it is unsurprising that he also finds explanations relying on “chance’’ or “accidents’’ unsatisfactory. Not only are accidents unexplainable through “historical determinism,’’ but accidents are also causal interruptions to a string of events which a historian wishes to investigate. In other words, the occurrence of an accident is not a license with which a historian can argue that there was no clear cause for an event to occur; an accident is merely an obstacle preventing the historian from focusing on a chain of causality which clearly awaited the historian’s discovery. Of course, Carr is aware that it might be possible for accidents and chance events to happen in history, for such occurrences are not only minor, but are continually compensated by other accidents or chance events, and “chance” might be a “character of individuals’’ (11). In other words, the randomness of accidents is possible because an accident is by nature an unexpected event and the forms in which it may occur are varied and diverse, and may be influenced by the unpredictable variety of personalities of every individual. Yet, Carr finds these apologetic defenses of accidents and chance events unsatisfying because accidents and chance events are often “seriously exaggerated,’’ or perceived to “accelerate or retard’’ historical progress, a sentiment which Carr dismisses as mere “juggling with words’’ (12). Moreover, he thinks that “chance events’’ are “natural occurrences’’ which complement each other is merely an euphemism to claim that there are events in life we cannot comprehend. Carr believes that those who use accidents in their theories have granted themselves the undeserved liberty to excuse themselves from the tedious business of rigorously investigating causes of an event. Such a person, in Carr’s view, is “intellectually lazy’’ or possesses “low intellectual vitality’’ (13). In other words, because accidents are also induced via human activity and actions, Carr does not believe that accidents truly occur unexpectedly or without any causation. Insofar as accidents can be caused by some faults in human personality or will, these faults, however inherently various, deserve to be studied as causes behind the accidents they create. The historian must observe and analyze accidents just as he or she would investigate any other “normal’’ political, social, or cultural event and ponder on why the accident occurred or whether it could have been avoided or prevented at all. So how does a historian pay proper attention to historical causes and formulate a causal relationship between historical facts? For Carr, it begins with the realization that there is little to distinguish between “historical’’ and “unhistorical’’ facts such that it is always possible for the latter to become the former (14). For example, someone living in 1066 and directly witnessing the Battle of Hastings might record that the battle “is taking place,” but once a historian agrees with the witness who claims that it was important that the battle occurred, the historian preserves the fact that the battle occurred in the past and has historical importance by simply stating the same fact in the past tense: “The Battle of Hastings clearly occurred in 1066.” Yet, the murkiness of the distinction does not mean that all causes are to be treated equally, for Carr believes that there are “rational’’ and “accidental’’ causes. The former can be applied to diverse countries, eras, and conditions, which warrants generalizations. By contrast, “accidental’’ causes, which have to be specifically devoted to explaining how an accident as a particular event in a specific time, location, and circumstances, cannot be generalized. An accident occurs under particular conditions and is fundamentally a result derived only from the particular conditions and therefore “teach us no lessons and lead to no conclusions’’ (15). In other words, rationality for Carr is synonymous with generality, while “accidental’’ causes are limited in their generality because they can only be comprehended only within the specific contexts they had occurred. The more important point is that “rational causes’’ have purposes borne from human motivations, whereas “accidental causes’’ do not have an objective. With that said, such a distinction does not mean “accidental causes’’ can be dismissed. Regardless of the type of cause, Carr believes that insofar as historians are expected to make interpretations about them, they are issuing value judgments, and causality is “bound up with interpretation,’’ for the act of assigning causes is itself a judgment. Moreover, because history is a purveyor of tradition, history is obligated to be a record of “past habits and lessons of the past’’ for future generations (16). Due to the arbitrary and selective nature of historical time, Carr concludes by arguing that historians must habitually ask “whither’’ along with “why?’’ (17). The audience for whom the historian writes is as important as personal and private reasons for which the historian writes history. Carr believes that the historian’s search for causation necessarily implies a search for an ultimate cause which can clearly answer why a phenomenon occurred, and insofar as a historian is searching for the ultimate cause, “historical determinism’’ is unsatisfactory because it disregards the importance of multiple causality in ac- counting for the unexpected and unpredictable nature of historical events. Carr also finds the treatment of “chance’’ or “accidental causes’’ as synonymous with “no causation’’ as unsatisfactory, because they are just masking a historian’s laziness or unwillingness to scrutinize historical events very closely to find a logical causation between them. Finally, regardless of whether a cause is “rational”—has the ability to be generalized—or is “accidental’’—happens by pure chance or as an outcome of unexpected events—distinctions between them are not very important because causality in general must inform a historian’s interpretation, which, in turn, is a form of value judgment. The possibility of a “subjective’’ causality is not an excuse to not treat “accidental causes’’ or “rational causes’’ unequally, for the division of time, which is the basic element of a historian’s thinking, is a subjective category which is bound to change depending on the nature of a “future’’ a historian is interested in addressing. As long as the future is subject to change, so will the perception of “past’’ and “present,’’ which is why a historian must be well aware of the purpose for which he or she desires to write history and the audience for whom the historian wishes a work to have a lasting influence. Logic is important to maximize the delivery of rhetorical clarity, for it is the essence of an argument’s organization. Yet, because logic is a general description of a reasoning’s supposed trajectory, logic needs to be supplemented with proper examples to illustrate and convince others that the trajectory is an accurate and rational one. This section has shown how Carr’s logic about historical causation could probably be considered rational; the next section will examine and analyze Carr’s use of examples to determine whether there is sufficient rhetorical strength in the logic to convince the reader that the logic is traveling on its proper and designated route. 4. Carr’s Use of Examples and Their Logical Compatibility with His Main Points This section evaluates Carr’s usage of historical examples in illustrating his main themes and arguments, offering a critique about the propriety of the examples in relation to the points they are making. In particular, it will concentrate on Carr’s examples drawn from the Russian Revolution and the accident of Robinson. This section will conclude that while his use of these examples is sound because he effectively illustrates the importance of unpredictability in historical causation to a historian’s thought process, the Revolution and the accident of Robinson do not greatly support Carr’s main theoretical argument because they do not show how and why a particular hierarchy of causes is necessary for one example but not the other. Carr uses episodes from the Russian Revolution to illustrate his opposition to historical determinism. There are several problems with Carr’s use of the Russian Revolution as an example to counter the assumptions of historical determinism. Fundamentally, the example does not show how Carr would be able to choose his “ultimate’’ cause behind the Revolution’s origins. While it is clear that multiple causes must be considered to establish the complexity of the event and there- by highlight its importance, Carr does not show how a hierarchy of causes can be derived from a consideration of multiple causes. What he actually wishes to show by discussing the Russian Revolution is that “historical determinism” is not a proper historical logic because it essentially engages in counterfactual reasoning, which is not germane to the historian’s critical aim of determining the past as it is. Against historical determinism’s charge that a historian may not consider other alternatives while focusing too much on one cause, Carr argues that supposing that Stolypin had completed the agrarian reform or that the Bolsheviks did not win the Russian Revolution are not relevant to historical determinism, for the determinist would simply look for causes other than ones which actually occurred to argue that different causes would have different outcomes. Hence, Carr suggests that the suppositions have “nothing to do with history,’’ because counterfactual assertions cannot be proven with any certainty with documented evidence and are non-historical (18). The problem is that Carr never really identifies the precise kind of historical interpretation for which his example from the Russian Revolution is meant to offer support. If the suppositions he made are not “historical,’’ then the real question is, which suppositions should be deemed “historical?’’ Refutation by negation does not necessarily lead to clarity; it only serves as a proof of what an opposing argument cannot be, rather than proving the essence of the opposing argument. More- over, because the basic theoretical argument against “historical determinism’’ is that historical events have multiple causes and do not occur in a vacuum, Carr’s example should have shown how a genuine historical argument can be fruitful by considering multiple causes. After all, the real problem Carr has with “historical determinism’’ is that it assumes that historical events were bound to happen with- out any particular value ascribed to the events’ circumstantial causes. Since Carr is uncomfortable with the unscientific and unhistorical nature of the philosophy, it would have logically made more sense for him to show how historical logic operates in a coherent and powerful manner such that it could not be easily dismissed by proponents of historical determinism. Hence, it would have sufficed to show how causation and causes operate in a historical analysis rather than a proving how “historical determinism’’ has a faulty logic, since the fact that there is a deficiency in an opposing logic does not necessarily imply that an alternative logic must be better simply because it does not have that deficiency. The other problem with Carr’s use of the Russian Revolution is his assumption that the supposed currency of the Russian Revolution as a “modern historical’’ problem has greater importance than “older’’ events such as the Norman Con- quest or the American Revolution. Carr believes that there is a greater desire to remember “options’’ still available for a more recently concluded historical event than much older ones. Carr claims that the expression of diverse passions from non-historians makes it hard for them to accept conclusions of a historian who merely recounts an event as it happened (19). Carr does seem to show why “historical determinism’’ is popular, but his analogy does not necessarily prove why “historical determinism’’ is an unhistorical logic. All events eventually get forgotten to certain degrees in which some facts are going to be better known than others, but it is primarily a historian’s scholarly curiosity which determines the importance of a historical event. Since every historian must have different reasons for believing that a historical event is important, the only impediment with regard to time would be the availability or lack of primary sources rather than a poverty of a historian’s imagination or will to realize innovation. “Older’’ events were once “modern’’ and therefore, importance is inherently a subjective standard which arises from the question of how well individuals remember events. People do remember events which are closer to their immediate memories better than older ones in terms of general details, but squabbling over how alternative causes behind an event might have changed the actual outcome is not necessarily the only reason for which a “modern event’’ must be remembered better than an older event. Christopher Columbus died believing that he had discovered “India” instead of the Caribbean, but the fact that the person might engage in a “historically deterministic’’ debate about how the course of history might have been different had Columbus really landed in North America does not necessarily mean that the person would not engage in historical determinism about other historical events, especially if the person has a passionate interest about them. Chronological distance has no definite correlation with interest because the latter is not necessarily dependent on time but rather on this person’s intellectual curiosity regardless of the event’s currency to the immediate present. Furthermore, thinking historically is a capability, not a matter of predilection. Even if that person remembers the IMF Crisis better than Columbus’s discovery of the Caribbean, it does not follow that “unhistorical’’ suppositions such as “if Columbus had set sail for Africa instead, he would have never discovered the Caribbean” are not relevant to historical thinking. A “cause’’ is not some given concept or model; one has to think through a selection of reasons behind an event to determine which reasons were essential and which ones were merely auxiliary or unimportant in precipitating the occurrence of a phenomenon. Counterfactual reasoning can help a historian think through a rationale for why a supposed cause is actually a noteworthy one; the only caution is to only think through counter- factual claims, not write them down as part of the actual historical reasoning. In other words, the clarity of memory does not necessarily lead to more “historically deterministic debates’’ because logical clarity is independent from the question of whether that logic is “historically deterministic.’’ It is perfectly logical to assume that if Columbus had not been adept at sailing when he was young, then he would have not made the voyage to the Caribbean, for one is only thinking about the causal logic of actions in a given situation and time period without describing the historical consequences of those actions. Thinking about historical events does not always have to imply that one is only thinking about history in terms of chronology, for situational logicality is also important to fathom causality in action, which is what gives contextual meaning and significance to time. Moreover, “historical determinism’’ is an attitude about a particular event or a specific set of events for which a different outcome would have been likely had causes been also different from ones which were originally suggested. Why assume that a desire to adopt such an attitude is stronger with a modern event than a more chronologically distant one? The expression of a particular attitude is not necessarily dependent on how new or old an event is, and chronic difference between a historical event and the individual who is remembering the event may vary ac- cording to the individual who decides to remember it. Yet, emotional attachment to a particular event need not inversely relate with chronological distance because reasons for recollection are far too varied to summarize merely as a function of time. As long as “modern’’ is a relative term expressed from the viewpoint of certain individuals and groups, there will be no rigid standard to determine which memories constitute “modern history.” Moreover, if the historian’s task is to select an “ultimate cause’’ of a particular event, how can a historian be so sure that there is an “ultimate cause’’ without ranking a supposedly “historically deterministic’’ cause? The danger of falling into “historical determinism’’ is not a good reason to avoid considering hypothetical claims, because a historian can always change hypotheses into positive statements by searching for relevant primary and secondary sources to test whether or not there is sufficient evidence to prove its validity. The suitability of a historical cause’s use as part of a historical argument is first and foremost dependent on how reliable that cause is. Carr’s other main concern about historical causality is the disturbing use of the concept of “accidents’’ in history as synonymous with the idea of “no causation.’’ The primary example that he uses to illustrate his critique is “Robinson’s accident.’’ Carr gives a hypothetical example of Robinson, who was crossing the street to buy cigarettes but was unexpectedly struck and killed by an oncoming car. However, if the driver was intoxicated, was driving a car with defective brakes, and hit Robinson in a dark alley where barely anything was visible, what was the actual cause of the accident—Robinson, the defective brakes, the dark alley, or the drunk driver? Instead of answering his own inquiry, Carr states that if two passers-by were to give the opinion that Robinson was killed because he was a heavy smoker, and that had he not gone out to buy the cigarettes, there would have been no accident, they would be employing a “kind of remorseless logic found in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass .’’ Carr concludes by remarking that such hypothetical reasoning is not a mode of thought appropriate for history (20). The main deficiency he finds in the concept of “accidents’’ is that an “accident’’ is also an historical event. It is therefore subject to a historian’s analysis of preceding causes leading to the occurrence of the accident. In other words, “accidents’’ cannot escape a historian’s scrutiny just because they seemingly occur without any single clear cause. However complex an accident may be, Carr believes that there is still a hierarchy amongst causes behind an accident which allows the historian to discern between primary causes and auxiliary or negligible ones. The historian’s ability to discern “relevant facts’’ from “irrelevant facts’’ until there is a “rational quilt of knowledge,’’ represents an approximation of a historian’s working mind (21). Unfortunately, Carr does not give a clear answer to the critical question, how does this discernment actually work in practice? There are two ironic errors that Carr commits in telling this narrative. First, despite Carr’s attempt to show why “accidents’’ are still valid elements to consider in historical thinking, he chose the wrong type of example; his example is purely unhistorical. We are only present- ed with a sequence of actions within one ‘historical’ moment rather than several different yet interconnected events across a wide span of time. When historians consider an accident and its causes, they always consider the accident’s relative importance to other events, figures, or conditions. To declare that an event is “historical’’ is to designate a relational quality which suggests that an event has a “historical significance’’ which can describe the event’s relationship or value by connecting with other events, figures, or conditions. If one is ever inclined to declare that a single event alone is historically significant, it can only happen because one presupposes that the event is already well-known because of its relationship with preceding or simultaneous events. For example, from Archduke Ferdinand’s viewpoint, his assassination by Gavrilo Princip was an accident. However, before investigating the causes of the assassination, the historian must establish a rationale to explain why studying the assassination is important. In the case of Archduke Ferdinand, the historian, using a bit of hindsight, can argue that the assassination began a massive wave of violence which rattled across the European continent and ignited the sparks of World War I. By contrast, in Carr’s example, we are not given a reason to believe that studying Robinson’s accident is historically worthwhile. In other words, because Carr did not explain the “historicity’’ of Robinson’s accident, we are not presented with a credible reason to believe that this is a historical event. Carr’s second error is that if we consider Carr’s reason for invoking Robinson’s accident as an example, the example does not illustrate a necessity or method to find multiple causes in historical analysis. If a historian’s prime objective in search- ing for multiple causes is to search for an ultimate cause for a historical phenomenon, then Carr ought to have shown how a historian might approach Robinson’s case as a historical phenomenon. His conclusion that a historian engages selectively with causes is not actually a literal answer to any of his two-part question: 1) How does a historian choose multiple causes? and 2) How does a historian actually select an “ultimate cause’’ from those multiple causes? This is because there is no reason to assume that there must be a single cause for Robinson’s accident at all unless Robinson himself or the driver told the police that there was actually one cause to the accident. Even if the driver had told the police that there was only one cause, it is purely the driver’s own opinion which may or may not be corroborated by other witnesses or circumstantial evidence. From an unassuming observer’s point of view, there is no exact means to verify a sequence of events and pinpoint a singular cause because the observer did not encounter Robinson’s accident in real time along with Robinson. Insofar as this difference between an observer and Robinson exists, there will always be a gulf between speculations and the actual truth. Indeed, because of this gulf, the real moral of Robinson’s accident ought to have been that searching for multiple causes is necessary for a historian to account for every possible explanation of a phenomenon, since the point of finding possible causes of an accident is to establish that an accident can be explained to convince people that the accident can be perceived as an accident. Carr’s argument that one should establish a “hierarchy of causes” implies that there is a particular cause which outranks others in terms of importance. However, there is no such thing as an absolute verification of a truth’s minute details for the historian, unless, very rarely, absolute verification is a necessary condition to prove the soundness of his or her main arguments. A historian is obliged to consider as many aspects of a past event, but no one can know every single detail to get a complete and impeccable picture of an event. The historian has the right to exercise a liberty of imagination based on primary sources and eye-witness accounts, but the historian must also understand that his or her tools to unearth historical facts also delineate the parameters of epistemological certainty. Moreover, Robinson’s example also poses the question of how a historian deter- mines a cause of an accident as an accident, a process that is limited by the quantity and quality of evidence one can find. Since the parameter of what constitutes historical knowledge is bound to change depending on which sources this historian can find, Carr is actually unable to answer the first part of his question. Further- more, because the parameters of knowledge are at the mercy of the availability of historical sources, an attachment to the belief that there must be an ultimate cause is both unrealistic and false, which is why Carr is never able to give a clear answer to the second part of his question. Historical causes are not tangible and therefore cannot be visually compared with each other. Of course, if a historian is writing an autobiography and writes a history of his or her life from what he or she remembers, then, there might be some liberty for the historian to rank causes and choose the ultimate one. In such a case, there is no basis from which another historian can ask why the causes were ranked in one way but not another, because every mind has but one master. The absence of a hierarchy among causes does not imply an absence of certain- ty or that historians ought to be skeptical about everything they encounter. To the contrary, there are undeniable truths in history such as the Holocaust or Russian pogroms of the 19th century. Rather, acknowledging a multiplicity of causes al- lows for a holistic consideration of multiple dimensions of a historical event from which causal explanations can be drawn, which actually prevents a historian from engaging in “historical determinism.” If the objective of studying a historical event is, as Carr claims, to search for one cause with absolute explanatory power, then the historian is actually engaging in ‘historical determinism’ because such an objective reflects the idea’s actual essence. Hence, Carr’s opposition to “historical determinism,’’ which was precisely because he believed in the multiplicity of causes, does not logically follow from invoking Robinson’s example. Furthermore, the witnesses in Robinson’s accident were actually reflecting Carr’s faith in the multiplicity of causes, so the next task was for Carr to show how he could select his ‘ultimate cause’ for explaining why Robinson died. Instead, Carr vaguely suggests that the historian has to be selective about his causes without explaining the end to which this selectivity has value. Hence, Robinson’s example is actually a Straw Man argument because the original purpose for which the example was mentioned does not become clear until Carr supplies a rationale for justifying a hierarchy of causes. As for how and why the hierarchy fundamentally exists, Carr never gives a clear answer. Therefore, Robinson’s death merely illustrates an argument about an element which is not extant in any of Carr’s arguments prior to his discussion of Robinson’s death. 5. Three Central Problems with Carr’s Methodology in “Causation in History’’ In this concluding section, I will identify three central problems with Carr’s method which will serve as a summary of this paper’s main arguments. First, Carr’s notion of a hierarchy of causes and its importance in historical explanation is unfortunately quite nebulous because he never specifies the purpose be- hind the existence of the hierarchy, ignoring the true function of historical causes as a form of scientific processing. Second, Carr’s distinction between “rational” and “accidental” causes is not valid because regardless of an event’s nature, multiple causes are necessary to account for inherent complexities in any historical event and such causes ultimately serve as evidence for a historian’s claim, which means that the more causes a historian can find, the more reliable and believable a historian’s account becomes. On the one hand, multiple causes are necessary to describe different facets of a phenomenon; a historian will summarize his or her main arguments to show readers how those facets constitute the “wholeness’’ of a historical fact. On the other hand, there needs to be a multiplicity in the kinds of causal analysis a historian uses to approximately position arguments within a given subfield of History. Finally, Carr is wrong to suggest that causes determine a historian’s interpretation because the former is just a means for which the historian has the freedom to determine an end. Causes are merely building blocks with which a historian constructs an independently designed interpretation. With regard to Carr’s questions about how a historian chooses multiple causes and selects an “ultimate cause” among them, I argue that the only certainty a historian can have comes from ascertaining that the nature of a cause aligns with the field in which it must be accurately used. When a historian asks the question, ‘Why was Archduke Ferdinand assassinated?’ the historian implicitly means that, in general, he or she is looking for political causes specifically related to nationalist motivations behind the assassination and its impact on the outbreak of World War I, rather than cultural or social causes behind the rise of nationalism in a general sense. An argument can be made that such distinctions can be interchangeable, since Gavrilo Princip’s association with the Black Hand was a culturally motivated expression of a desire to express Serbian nationalism. However, “political’’ and “cultural’’ cannot be so liberally applied in an interchangeable manner because they are merely generic labels conceived under the assumption that historians and the general public know that such a distinction can exist. A historian may find out that Gavrilo Princip preferred Serbian circuses to Austrian ones, but one does not use this cultural fact to describe anything with sufficient certainty about Princip’s personal decision to assassinate Ferdinand, even if there is nothing mentioned in primary sources about it. The transformation of a fact into a cause is actually a fixed relationship, in which a fact can become a cause, but a cause alone can never become a fact. The historian’s designation of an occurrence as a cause reflects a personal belief that an element within a historical figure’s character or a historical event has some reasonable degree of explanatory power. History is, in general, filled with facts, but it is the conditional possibility of several facts turning into believable causes of a historical phenomenon which truly excites the historian. Causes are essentially facts whose relationship amongst themselves and the phenomenon which they wish to explain is firmly and convincingly established by a rich array of primary sources. Facts which hardly need any source-based proof are not likely to become causes because they are generic and mundane enough to be independent of any historical situation. In short, what Carr really means by “a hierarchy of causes’’ is that not all causes are created equal. The real problem is that Carr never really demonstrated what a hierarchy of causes is. While it may not be possible to definitively identify which types of causes matter more than others, Carr ought to have at least shown how a hierarchy among causes can be conceived. Yet, the real heart of the matter is that Carr could not actually show his audience that a hierarchy among causes exists because there is no singular standard of a “hierarchy,’’ other than what a scholar perceives through a meticulous reading of the relevant historical literature. That Carr could not provide a concrete hierarchy strongly suggests the impossibility of doing so because different hierarchies of causation matter for different subfields of History. Movement of capital, markets, and industrial structure in the early 18th century matter more as direct causes be- hind the Industrial Revolution than as causes behind the death of the Avant Garde in the late 20th century. The difference in subfields also translates to differences in particular “states of the field,” or the variance in the levels of academic discourse about various historical topics, leading to different developments in varying facets of historical inquiry. The nature of primary or secondary sources a historian must search for necessarily depends on the questions the historian wishes to answer in relation to how certain historical topics have been addressed in the existing scholarly literature. In other words, a search for primary or secondary sources is a dependent variable of “current’’ historical scholarship because the main function of amassing historical information is to facilitate a productive and meaningful scholarly debate. This debate, in turn, will invite future generations of historians to construct new angles and roads along which the debate must continue. Moreover, because proving causality in historical analysis can only be done through a meticulous examination of primary and secondary sources, it follows that the richness in illustrating historical causality is dependent on the availability of sources. In short, ascribing a strict sense of a hierarchical notion of historical causality is impossible because of three main variables: multiple causes and multiplicity in the kinds of causes, a rigid relationship between facts and causes, in which only the former can transform into the latter, and finally, differences in subfields and varying conditions in historiography, which imply that a historian must pragmatically conceive of a hierarchy of causes which reflects the availability of primary and secondary sources and their ability to cogently deliver a progressive view or methodological contribution to the existing scholarship. The second major problem with Carr’s method is his misconstrued distinction between “rational’’ and “accidental’’ causes. An “accidental’’ cause is a misnomer because no cause can arise without a reason. Even the most unexpected events have clear causes because searching for causation is essentially identical to search- ing for reasonable connections previously ignored or overlooked. Furthermore, if Carr himself acknowledged that ‘accidental’ causes need to undergo strict academic scrutiny as much as “rational’’ causes, then what he really means is that a scholar must have the same approach and attitude toward “accidental’’ causes as he or she has toward “rational’’ or normal causes. Yet, Carr does not illustrate how a historian actually investigates “rational’’ causes because he is interested in comparing “accidental’’ causes with “rational’’ ones rather than demonstrating how a historian uses each type of cause to con- struct a historical analysis or make an observation. In practice, Carr did not have to make a distinction between the two causes. A historian can propose rational explanations for supposedly accidental causes, and once this is done, there is no difference between “rational’’ and “accidental’’ causes. I will illustrate my point by comparing Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon as a “rational’’ event, and Pierre Curie’s carriage accident as a literally “accidental’’ event. I will show how these two events deserve equally serious scholarly attention because they all involve the same process of investigation, regardless of an event’s nature. Caesar’s decision to cross the Rubicon would be a rational event because the crossing itself is a “reasonable’’ action in that a man mounted on horseback can cross a river because he has the will and means to do so. Such an action can be expected, for regardless of what the Roman Senate thought, Caesar only had two choices: defy the Senate by crossing the river or obey the Senate and let them limit his actions. Caesar’s decision to cross the Rubicon was not “surprising’’ as an action in itself; neither would the decision not to cross be surprising, unless Caesar somehow died for reasons unrelated to the crossing. By contrast, Pierre Curie’s carriage accident is not a rational event because the exact circumstances are open to much speculation. We do not know so many de- tails about how Marie Curie’s husband died, but it would hardly matter whether the driver of the carriage or Pierre Curie was drunk or whether Curie was jogging when the driver lost control of the carriage and hit Curie at break-neck speed. What remains true independent from causes is that it was an accident because neither Curie nor the driver would have expected to run into each other, for they were no mutual acquaintances. According to Carr, the rationality of a cause does not affect its historical investigation, making both “rational” and “accidental” causes garner the same approach. Although Carr never defines what a “rational’’ event is, since human beings are responsible for creating events, it follows that what is rational is what can be expected within the realm of reasonable human behavior and thought. If the primary function of historical causes is to explain why a phenomenon, regardless of its nature, occurred, then identifying how an accident became an accident is in itself an explanation, no matter how unexpected or unforeseeable the accident must have been to the people involved in it. However, regardless of how much we know or do not know about Caesar or Pierre Curie, the principles of research remain identical. A historian must first amass all records on the crossing of the Rubicon and Pierre Curie’s accident, gather any witness testimonies to corroborate on controversial or obscure aspects of each case, perform a theoretical analysis of causes and speculations, and finally, arrive at reasonable conclusions based on the existing evidence. The rationality of the research process which is common to both events is what makes a study of the two events rational, for the nature of an event does not necessarily reflect or dictate the nature of the means with which one ought to study each event. If accidents, like rational events, also have causes, then Carr ought to have shown how “accidents’’ could be considered the antithesis of rational events. An accident is unexpected, but is not irrational, for every cause of an accident is borne from actions which the individuals involved consider rational. If two speeding cars collide, it could be an accident borne from the drivers’ disregard for the speed limit, or from one driver’s inebriation. Still regardless of whether it is due to mis- handling the car or personal flaws, none of the causes are irrational. Disregarding the speed limit or drinking heavily may have been a mistake, but neither of these activities are incapable of having a logic ascribed to them, for a historian can still argue that committing these mistakes, regardless of their severity, contributed to the occurrence of the accident. Insofar as all actions have causes and motives in their creation, the historian is obliged to study them with an eye towards collecting all relevant facts, an action unrelated to how rational or irrational a historical event may seem. It is because, as I argued through the example of Caesar crossing the Rubicon and Pierre Curie’s accident, no elements are beyond the reasonably expected scope of human behavior. Regardless of whether an event was planned or turned out to be an accident, what remains constant in both cases is that there are various actions a person can take at a particular time, and every action will have a distinct set of reasons. Carr’s distinction between rational and “irrational’’ causes is therefore, a faulty comparison, for there is no clear reason given to believe that accidents are inherently “irrational,’’ and because historians can also surmise about causes behind accidents insofar as accidents are human-induced events. The final point of this paper is that a historian’s personal selection of causes does not dictate a singular direction of interpretation. Establishing causation and providing interpretation are independently creative activities conjoined by the necessity to give coherence to a historian’s general argument. Carr seems to believe that a historian is reflecting private opinions through a selection of causes, but the selection is only the means to the ultimate end-to generate a unique interpretation which does not necessarily reflect what the causes themselves have to say about a topic. Causes in and of themselves reflect no emotions; until the historian judges the causes to be positive or negative in nature in relation to the argument he or she wants to make from the causes, causes are merely guidelines and building blocks to the overall argument which gives the essential structure to the historian’s logic. Causes merely reflect a historian’s judgment about a possibility in believing that a phenomenon happened in one direction. The real essence of the historian’s argument lies in what the historian thinks about the phenomenon, not the causes. The historian’s attention must not be limited to understanding how a car’s assembly line malfunctioned, but be extended to observe how the car as a finished product qualitatively suffers as a result of faults in the assembly line. Carr’s argument about causes might be feasible if a historian is trying to find out the causes behind a historical tragedy, but even in this case, the historian’s real argument is about proving one can see that it was a tragedy. For example, if the sinking of the Titanic was truly due to a crash into an iceberg, and a historian proves that indeed it was so, the moral of the research is not just that “a ship hit an iceberg and sank.” Rather, the moral is that because of this linkage, one can conclude that it was a terrible accident and a tragedy. Even if a historian should conclude with identifying the iceberg as the cause of the tragedy, the identification of the cause does not dictate the interpretation of the phenomenon because interpretation is not about identifying what or why something happened. Instead, interpretation is concerned with what one should observe from the structure of a historical phenomenon that emerges from identifying the cause behind the phenomenon. Identifying causes alone does not make the study of History interesting; one needs to show how causes function to produce original observations about a holistic phenomenon that emerges from showing a causal relationship between or within a series of linked phenomena. Once a general picture of a historical phenomenon emerges, every historian can have a glimpse into how the phenomenon got concluded, no matter how many diverse facts about it are unearthed. Yet, the most interesting question in historical research is not what happened, but how an event unfolded to produce a particular result. In answering “how,’’ every historian is bound to focus on diverse and specific causes to explain the general outcome. Most historians will not focus on what the importance of a particular cause is simply by analyzing the cause in its own terms but on what that cause means in relation to a web of other multiple causes. Furthermore, since a cause is but one element in a historian’s interpretation of relations between phenomena; what are termed “causes’’ were actually phenomena happening in real time for historical actors. Therefore, the originality of historical interpretation does not arise simply from cherry-picking elements from a single phenomenon to serve as “causes’’ but in linking multiple phenomena into one grand narrative. In creating this grand narrative, the historian’s goal is to show how the phenomena relate to each other, and therefore to produce an original view about how to understand the relationship. What Carr’s arguments do show is that a search for causes and causation is worthwhile because every historical cause originally begins from ascertaining historical facts, which in turn, helps a historian discover and rationally explain new discoveries. Moreover, historical causes need to delineate boundaries between various subfields in History to assure that each field employs appropriate causes which best explain a phenomenon under scrutiny. Furthermore, a proper search for historical causation must not engage in a distinction between ‘rational’ and ‘accidental’ causes because all causes are valuable insofar as they serve the primary function of explaining what happened and why an event occurred. Insofar as the historian’s duty to tell the true sequence of actions behind an event remains valid for all rational or accidental incidents, a historian must concentrate on finding causes to fulfill a cause’s fundamental purpose. Finally, causes are building blocks to facilitate an original and interesting interpretation of a historical event, but causes alone do not possess the power to determine the entire direction of an interpretation. An incisive eye for finding accurate explanations must combine with a historian’s unique imagination and vision to recreate a believable “image’’ of a reality that corresponds closely to the truth which the historian found. The combination can only come about smoothly if a discovery of causes and an original analysis of the significance of the discovery are independent and not concurrent activities of an inquisitive scholarly mind. A respect for a cause’s individuality that is distinct from a historical fact, a respect for a cause’s explanatory prowess rather than its rational or accidental nature, and a separation between the discovery and interpretation of causes are essential to the pursuit of History as a rigorous, liberal, and original science. Endnotes 1 Bernard Barber, “Review of What is History? by Edward Hallett Carr,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 68, No. 2 (September, 1962), 260-262; Seymour Itzkoff, “Review of What is History? by Edward Hallett Carr,” History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 2 (June, 1962), 132-134; Jacob Price, “Review of What is History?: The George-Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge, January-March 1961 by Edward Hallett Carr,” History and Theory, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1963), 136-145; Patrick Gardiner, “Review of What Is History? by E. H. Carr,” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 73, No. 4 (October, 1964), 557-559. 2 Aviezer Tucker, “Causation in Historiography,” in Aviezer Tucker ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography (Chichester, United Kingdom: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 101. 3 Ann Frazier, “The Criterion of Historical Knowledge,” Journal of Thought, Vol. 11, No. 1 (January, 1976), 66-67. 4 Geoffrey Partington, “Relativism, Objectivity, and Moral Judgment,” Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2 (June, 1979), 125-139. 5 Ann Talbot, “Chance and Necessity in History: E. H. Carr and Leon Trotsky Compared,” Historical Social Research, Vol. 34, No. 3 (2009), 95. 6 Edward Hallett Ibid (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 116. 7 Carr, What is History?, 117. 8 Ibid, 121-122. 9 Ibid, 122-123. 10 Ibid, 126. 11 Ibid, 133. 12 Ibid, 137. 13 Ibid, 134. 14 Ibid, 135. 15 Ibid, 141. 16 Ibid, 142. 17 Ibid, 143. 18 Ibid, 127. 19 Ibid, 136. 20 Ibid, 138. In the actual passage, he calls it the “Dodgsonian mode” after the author of Through the Looking Glass. 21 Ibid, 136. References Barber, Bernard, “Review of What is History? by Edward Hallett Carr,” American Journal of Sociology , Vol. 68, No. 2 (September, 1962), 260-262. Edward Hallett Ibid (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961). Frazier, Ann, “The Criterion of Historical Knowledge,” Journal of Thought , Vol. 11, No. 1 (January, 1976), 60-67. Gardiner, Patrick, “Review of What Is History? by E. H. Carr,” The Philosophical Review , Vol. 73, No. 4 (October, 1964), 557-559. Itzkoff, Seymour, “Review of What is History? by Edward Hallett Carr,” History of Education Quarterly , Vol. 2, No. 2 (June, 1962), 132-134. Partington, Geoffrey, “Relativism, Objectivity, and Moral Judgment,” British Journal of Educational Studies , Vol. 27, No. 2 (June, 1979), 125-139. Price, Jacob, “Review of What is History?: The George-Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge, January-March 1961 by Edward Hallett Carr,” History and Theory , Vol. 3, No. 1 (1963), 136-145. Talbot, Ann, “Chance and Necessity in History: E. H. Carr and Leon Trotsky Compared,” Historical Social Research , Vol. 34, No. 3 (2009), 88-96. Tucker, Aviezer, “Causation in Historiography,” in Tucker, Aviezer ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of History (Chichester, United Kingdom: Wiley-Black- well, 2011), 98-108. Previous Next

The Brown University Journal of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (JPPE) is a peer reviewed academic journal for undergraduate and graduate students that is sponsored by the Political Theory Project and the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society Program at Brown University. The Brown University Journal of Philosophy, Politics & Economics *FEATURES * FROM GREG FISCHER Mayor of Louisville, KY Jorge O. Elorza Mayor of Providence, RI Economics Cannabis By Kaid Ray-Tipton Latent Effects of Cannabis Legalization: Racial Disproportionality and Disparity in Washington State Drug Convictions, 2000-2015 Click to flip through the journal Philosophy A More Perfect Union Economics Energy By Benjamin Seymour Inclusive Norms and the Future of Liberal Unity By Jingpeng Shao Embracing Renewable Energy for Sustainable Job Growth in West Virginia economics Politics A.S.E.A.N Philosophy Transcendental Self By Hisyam Takiudin The Long Game: ASEAN, China's Charm Offensive and the South China Sea Dispute By Jennifer Kim Reconceptualizing the Idea of the Self Within Western Philosophy: The Existence-Reason Binary and the Nonrational Transcendental Self Politics Racial Capitalism Politics American Jews By Olerato Mogomotsi Racial Capitalism in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Challenging the Fallacy of Black Entitlement under Service Delivery Protests. By Jake Goodman The Political Behavior of American Jews A Public Choice Approach to Israel-influenced Voting

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