AUTHOR'S NOTE: Having pubilshed my book chapter section on "The Transnational Islamic State" yesterday as an international coalition began military operations in Syria, in view of the recently held United Nations climate change conference in New York, it seems timely to publish the lead section of the same chapter, "Transnationalizing Earth." Although sea level rise is only one consequence of climate change, and perhaps not the most immediate one, it is a consequence that is most dramatic and most directly attributable to climate change. --TG
What was once the hard shell of sovereignty has been
softened by national self-determination, international trade, international capital flow, international institutions, global electronic communications, and developing global human rights
norms. The social, economic, political, technological, and environmental trends
in today’s world have created opportunities for new forms of political
organization to emerge.
The Submerged State
All states will be adversely
affected by climate change, and a few may disappear beneath the waves like
modern Atlantises. Mohammed Nasheed, President of the Republic of the Maldives,
whose average elevation is 2.1 meters (6.9 feet) above the Indian Ocean, wrote
in September 2009 regarding the vulnerability of his nation in advance of a
global conference on climate change:
Sea level rise of even half
a meter would make much of it uninhabitable; meanwhile, ocean temperature
spikes could destroy the coral reefs that protect these islands from the waves.
This is why no one in the
Maldives is applauding the recent pledge of the G-8 nations to try and hold
temperature increases to 2 degrees and the atmospheric concentration of CO2
to 450 parts per million. A few years ago, those might have been laudable
goals, but new science makes clear they’re out of date.
After the rapid Arctic sea
ice melt in the summer of 2007, scientists realized that global warming was
happening more quickly and on a larger scale than they had anticipated.
Wherever they looked -- high-altitude glaciers, hydrological cycles, the spread
of mosquitoes -- they found change happening decades ahead of schedule. In
January 2008, James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climatologists,
published a series of papers showing that the actual safe limit for carbon in
the atmosphere was at most 350 parts per million. Anything higher than that
limit, warns Hansen, could seed “irreversible, catastrophic effects” on a
global scale.
We’re already above that
figure -- the current concentration is 390 ppm and rising. For the Maldives,
climate change is no vague or distant irritation but a clear and present danger
to our survival. But the Maldives is no special case; simply the canary in the
world’s coal mine. Neighboring Asian countries like Bangladesh are already
suffering from saltwater intrusion as seas rise; Australia and the American
southwest are enduring epic drought; forests across western North America are
succumbing to pests multiplying in the growing heat. And all of this is with
temperature increases of nearly 1 degree -- why on earth would we be aiming for
2 degrees (Nasheed 2009)?
Addressing the 2009 United
Nations Climate Change Conference, commonly known as the Copenhagen Summit, on
1 October, Nasheed declared, “we will not live, we
will die. Our country will not exist (Xinhua 2009).” Three weeks later, the Maldives cabinet held the
world’s first (but probably not the last) underwater meeting of a government,
communicating with hand signals and white boards for half an hour at a depth of
16 feet (5 meters) in a lagoon (BBC News 2009).
For low-lying states, mean
sea level is getting meaner every day. How high will the Netherlands be able to
raise its famous dikes before its centuries-old battle with the sea is lost?
The Pacific island nation of Kiribati has already asked the nearby nation of
Fiji to sell it fertile land on Fiji’s main island of Viti Levu in order to
relocate there as sea level rises (Chapman
2012; Perry
2012). Fiji might sell the land, but it is unlikely that it would cede
sovereignty over it; the land owned by the Kiribati government would remain
Fijian territory. What happens to the sovereignty of a state that no longer
possesses territory? Would it become a nation-state in exile or be stricken
from the rolls of sovereign states? The Montevideo Convention on Rights and
Duties of States, Article 1, states:
The state as a
person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a
permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity
to enter into relations with the other states (League of Nations 1933).
Notice the wording “should,”
not “shall.” Thus, theoretically, a state might not possess any territory at
all, or more likely, just as embassies are considered to be under the
sovereignty of the represented government, a state’s “defined territory” might
need to be no more than office space leased to its government. It is difficult
to believe that the community of nations would be so heartless as to
de-recognize a state that had lost all of its habitable territory due to
climate change. Thus there may come a time later in this century when formerly
territorial states become non-territorial states, existing only as archipelagos
of embassies representing the interests of diasporic peoples in distant lands.
Such submerged states will in effect be transnational states.
1: "The Submerged State"
2: "The Liberal Pacific Union"
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