All Under Heaven: Sovereignty and Infrastructure After Globalization

Conversations on the shifting role of sovereignty in an era of transnational and extrastate networks

The problems that we face today—from greenhouse gas emissions to new viruses—are inherently of planetary scale and scope. Yet the persistent failures of the international community to settle a clear path towards climate crisis mitigation, as well as the lack of a coordinated, transnational response to the COVID-19 pandemic, have exposed the severe shortcomings of the current institutions aimed at handling such problems. The pandemic highlighted the flaws in the dominant mode of global organization, developed during the thirty golden years of neoliberalism until the financial crash in 2008. There is now an urgent need to reimagine the way we plan and organize collective action, economics, and policy on a planetary basis. The present historical moment calls for a system that can ensure just and sustainable development for the Global South, reducing political dependency on the Global North. It calls for a system of apparatuses and institutions that would allow us to effectively address planetary-scale challenges.

The dominant model of global governance, carrying an imprint of Euro-Atlantic political culture, is being contested today by China’s vision for the world order, embodied in the Belt and Road Initiative. While the former has been historically aimed at dismantling state barriers to the movement of capital—following neoliberal logic—the latter is focused on the construction of infrastructure networks that support trade and domestic economic development, in many cases indebting the states hosting these projects. The logics and dynamics of these competing models of globalism are obviously different, but what is their standing with respect to the planet—the underlying “thing” they aim to organize? Are there any hints of an alternative model of planetary governance that would successfully address the problems that resist containment within nation states? And, most importantly: could the infrastructures that are already in place—physical, legal, and digital—be used for more innovative purposes, accommodating collective decisions about planetary governance?

The planetary and the global

Globalism itself has a long history in many flavors. There is the heroic, emancipatory globalism inherent in the visions of world proletarian revolution that fuelled the socialist movements of the nineteenth century. Then there is the colonial globalism of the Colombian era, or later of Britain and other colonial empires. Economic globalism is tied to the development of international trade, and its peak moment—ideologically as well as infrastructurally long in the making—came in the 1990s and 2000s. Some authors talk about electronic globalization and the rise of network societies, while others trace the origins of Western globalism back to ancient Greece, to the first philosophical speculations about the world as a whole. The reality is that these globalities cannot be viewed as successive historical epochs, or as disjunctive alternatives: they exist alongside and superimposed on one another, creating amalgamations of complex geopolitical relations. For example, the emancipatory globalism of socialism turned out to be as colonial as its capitalist alternative, especially when it came to the Soviet Union. One kind of globalism—the scientific one—gives us, however, a strikingly familiar insight: that there are irrevocable changes happening around us that cannot be properly addressed until they are acknowledged as planetary changes. As global knowledge infrastructures have built up an understanding of the physical, chemical, biological and geological processes on Earth, an ever-present force behind the social and political arenas of our everyday life has come to the foreground: that of the planet itself.

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The planet has long been a well-defined category in astronomy and geophysics, but when it comes to popular culture and social affairs it is a relative newcomer. A major breakthrough came with a series of encounters between astrobiology, ecology, and cybernetics, which gave rise to the Gaia hypothesis pioneered by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock. The Earth is imagined here as a complex system that maintains its homeostasis through the active contribution of all terrestrial life. This is also where many historians of ideas in Western society place the beginning of concerns about sustainability as we know them today—once the Earth is modeled as a system, its behavior can be projected into the future through the adjustment of different parameters. One famous example of such an extrapolation is The Limits to Growth (1972), a report by Donella H. Meadows and her team, providing a potential framework for alternative social and economic developments, thus acting as a policy proposal of sorts. It is far from the only gesture of its kind—for decades, the United Nations gave institutional backing for wide-ranging research into the then-nascent science of Earth systems, as analyzed by Perrin Selcer in The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment (2018).

Today, however, we are aware that the planet is not only a scientific object or a governable system—it is also a poetic resource, a narrative figure, and a sort of placeholder term for the force majeure. This intuition is well captured by one of the key protagonists of “planetary thinking” over the past two decades—postcolonial scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. What she labels the “planetary” is primarily a tool of conceptual rotation—it denotes an entity that is not aligned with human wishes or needs in any substantial way, but which is nevertheless a condition of the possibility of our existence. As she says, the planet is “so other” that it is “in the rules of the galaxy” and “we cannot touch it.” Think of the helplessness of a peasant facing a deadly flood, or the terror of a family fleeing a forest fire that broke out in their neighborhood. That’s the otherness of the force from the outside. But that’s not the whole story—if we travel with Spivak to her radical conclusion, we discover the planetary as an ambiguous yet indispensable entity: a planetary home that doesn’t care, but which nevertheless teaches us how to care for each other.

The backstory of this sprawling planetary thinking has a lot to do with the relation between topology—as a discipline studying space and space-like concepts—and geopolitics. The term “globalization” is used to describe the growing interdependence of the world's processes—the blurring of borders, the acceleration of flows of capital, goods, materials, people, and technologies. But today, we come to realize that “the planet” is not “the globe.” A global perspective is inherently human-centric, while the planetary, by contrast, shifts our focus away from the human to the interdependencies of non-human and more-than-human agents, materialities, the climate, and broader economic and political environments. Worldwide integration is an ongoing dynamic process involving the entire environment, in which humanity is only one actor. Humans are interdependent with microbes and other non-human beings, they are embedded within the complex coproductions of economies and ecologies.

As this integration continues, old geopolitical divisions and vocabularies—chiefly those related to nation states—become increasingly obsolete. Our contention is that the infrastructural space is what replaces them, mirroring and deforming the natural metabolisms of the planetary, for better or worse. But how to design or redesign these infrastructures so that they align with our new understandings of Earth? To answer this question, let us explore the systems of global governance we see today, and the models of sovereignty they rely on.

Neoliberal Globalism and Sovereignty

Globalization is often discussed as a counterpoint to national sovereignty. The core principle of sovereignty—the ability to control what crosses borders—is being challenged by the increasing volume and velocity of the flows of goods, information, capital, natural resources, and people. Ryan Bishop, Professor of Global Arts and Politics at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, argues that in a world characterized by neoliberal governance, financialization, and planetary computation, sovereignty “begins to be delinked explicitly from territory, and it begins to get tied to flows of people, finance, information.” To make sense of the complex networks of alliances and systems that scaffold globalization, Bishop devised the concept of “frictionless sovereignty.”

Bishop defines sovereignty as a political technology through “which states seek to enact or assert control over borders, financial systems, military action, violence, land (as well as seas and sea beds), the movement of money/people/data, and upon occasion human or environmental rights.” Frictionlessness, according to Bishop, allows entities— individuals, states, military forces, corporations, or others—to generate outcomes beyond their territories without any reciprocal effect.

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In January 2020, the United States assassinated Iranian general Quassem Suleimani on Iraqi soil. Iraq was entirely incapable of responding—and not only because it lacked the military firepower or reach. When the Iraqi government asked the US to withdraw its troops from the country, the US threatened to cut off the country’s access to the US dollar—a measure that would handicap an already weak national budget. In this way, globalized networks of trade—underpinned by the hegemony of the US dollar—allowed for an entirely frictionless exercise of military power on the part of the US, in a way that conferred, to quote Bishop, “maximum benefit with minimum responsibility.”

That quality of frictionlessness is embedded in the structure of globalized neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberalism, economic historian Quinn Slobodian writes, has sought not to dismantle regulation and state control, but to scale up economic governance so that it is no longer subject to revision at the level of the nation state. It emerged from the ashes of empire, in part as a response to the movements for national liberation rising throughout the Global South. Its core demand, Slobodian argues, was simple: to establish capital flight as a fundamental right. Frictionlessness, in other words, for those with the means to move.

By the 1990s, the EU, GATT, OECD, and WTO were all underpinned by neoliberal policies—each bloc itself governed by an intricate weave of trade treaties, regulations, financing regimes, and enforcement mechanisms. Their aggregate effect was to shift economic policy outside the realm of democratic accountability—thus relegating the majority of investment into private hands and subjecting it to the profit motive. This marked a shift in economic sovereignty away from the nation state and towards globalized market networks.

However, this model is now in crisis. Europe, for example, is still reeling from over a decade of fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis and the sovereign debt crises that followed. In the Eurozone—the part of the European Union that has adopted the euro—net public investment has hovered around zero since 2015, leaving a trail of crumbling infrastructure and declining public services in its wake. When COVID-19 hit, European states found themselves without ventilators, masks, and hospital beds—gasping for air as allies blocked their economic and medical lifelines.

Western and Chinese globalization

For some time now, China has been stepping in to plug the gaps. In 2019, Italy signed onto the Belt and Road Initiative—an agreement that would see China invest in Italian ports and deepen financial and trade relationships between the two countries. A total of eighteen European countries have now signed onto the initiative, with investments primarily aimed at improving transport infrastructure. In the first half of 2020, Chinese freight trips to Europe increased 36 percent, transporting 27,000 tons of medical equipment to countries including Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, and Hungary.

Some EU leaders have been cautious in welcoming these investments. EU Commissioner Günther Oettinger demanded an EU veto over future deals with China, warning of their risk to European “autonomy and sovereignty.” His concerns reflect a dramatic and growing bifurcation of views on Chinese development. Some see the BRI as an alternative to the model of globalism driven by Western financial and trade regimes—as a strategy of material development that plugs generational investment gaps across the Global South. Others, predominantly in the West, accuse China of advancing a neo-imperialist policy of “debt-trap diplomacy”: luring poor nations into unsustainable loans for infrastructure projects that will ultimately fail, locking the nations into long-term dependence on China.

China’s approach—embodied in the BRI—thus provides an alternative to the Western system of global governance. Rather than dismantling state barriers to the movement of capital, it is focused on the construction of infrastructure networks that support trade and domestic economic development. The key distinction between neoliberal globalism and China’s approach is that the latter removes the private profit motive from investment—giving host states control over the way the money is spent. Can this model facilitate the emergence of a new form of globalism?

The Belt and Road Initiative: The New Order’s Backbone

China's vision for a world order that challenges Western-centered neoliberal globalism is not yet fully formed. While President Xi Jinping calls for a “community of shared human destiny,” a model that would promote mutually beneficial international partnership, critics argue that Beijing aspires for partial hegemony over the Global South. Nadège Rolland, a senior Fellow for Political and Security Affairs at NBR, writes in a recent report that although “Beijing does not envision direct or absolute control over foreign territories or governments—the partial order could be an intermediary step toward full hegemony.”

As China’s international strategy takes shape, at the unofficial level China’s intellectual elite are advancing a diverse set of arguments about China’s future role in the international arena. Many thinkers and writers draw inspiration from traditional Chinese thought. Zhao Tingyang—one of China’s most influential contemporary philosophers—revisits the traditional concept of tianxia (“everything under heaven”) as a utopian future alternative to the Westphalian order. Zhao sees tianxia as a potential model for a hierarchical “world society” held together by culture and values that transcend racial and geographical boundaries.

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The adoption of the historical concept of tianxia as a guiding principle in modern geopolitics is controversial both in China and abroad. Tianxia has many meanings: it is a geographic entity, a metaphysical concept, a loose system of international relations, a cultural unit, a worldview, and even a moral aspiration. At its core lies the idea of China’s superiority over neighboring states. “Theoretically and symbolically tianxia is an unequal system, with China being at the top of the hierarchy,” says You Mi, a Beijing-born curator, researcher, and faculty member at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. “Yet in practice, the other polities would enjoy different degrees of material gains, from lavish gifts to trading along the tributary routes. In contrast, the European or the Westphalian model is based on, at least in theory, equality between states. But in practice, they were territorially expansionist and economically exploitative, which led to colonialism of European nation states.”

You Mi is skeptical about the viability of tianxia being used as a blueprint for international relations today. “It gets tricky when you make a case for today’s China with the case of the historical Chinese Empire, as if saying, “Because tianxia was a functional system which managed to keep regional peace and allowed for everybody to prosper, whatever we do today under the name and in the form of tianxia would achieve the same,” she says.

Whether a project of global cooperation or world dominance, China’s ambition to reshape the world through the Belt and Road Initiative is indeed of planetary scale. When the BRI was first announced in 2013, China aimed to invest in around 70 countries, improving connectivity and cooperation across economic routes running through China, Central and West Asia, Mongolia, Pakistan, Russia, as well as other countries on the Indian subcontinent, Indochina, and parts of Africa and Europe. A total of 138 countries have since become signatories to the memorandum of understanding with China, committing them to further projects. The BRI currently covers 65 percent of the world’s population in countries accounting for a third of global GDP.

The BRI, at its most basic, is a system of agreements between various stakeholders—banks, the host government, state-owned entities, subcontractors, suppliers, and operation and maintenance contractors. Just like the trade deals, contractual relationships, and enforcement tools that comprise Western neoliberal governance, China’s BRI is effectively a network of relationships—with its own arbitral system to adjudicate disputes. When China signs an initial memorandum of understanding with a host state—agreeing the nature of the investment and deciding on the infrastructure to be built—the Chinese government secures financing from Chinese development banks and selects a Chinese contractor to carry out the work.

Here, the question of China’s political agenda comes to the fore. Undoubtedly, China has bargaining power in its trade relationships—particularly with smaller, developing states.

The New Cold War and a globalized infosphere

Sri Lanka is one of the few cases where defaulted debt actually led to a neocolonial concession. The Hambantota Port development—a commercial venture—was initiated at the request of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa. At the time, Sri Lanka was deeply indebted to foreign capital markets—and the IMF—with money owed to China comprising 9 percent of the overall debt. As part of its IMF bailout package, Sri Lanka was required to sell off a number of loss-making ventures, including the Sri Lanka Port Authority. A Chinese state-owned enterprise then leased the port for an extended period, with the proceeds enabling Sri Lanka to repay its foreign creditors. The port is currently used by the Sri Lankan Navy, and is subject to regular inspections by the United States Coast Guard.

Nonetheless, critics remain doubtful of China’s intentions. The administration of Donald J. Trump was deeply critical of the lease, accusing China of plotting to establish a “forward military base for China’s growing blue-water navy.” When you look below the surface, said You Mi, “China got that port in Sri Lanka overlooking the Indian Ocean, that’s really a more possibly military agenda-driven move.”

China’s infrastructure expansion and quest for extended sovereignty is controversial. The impacts of its model of globalism on the local populations of host countries remain subject to debate—and have not yet been sufficiently studied. There are concerns that the large-scale projects undertaken as part of the BRI—be they ports, highways, energy systems, highways, or railways—fail to benefit the people that live alongside them. You Mi has argued that the rapid expansion of transportation networks can have dramatic and unexpected long-term consequences for local populations living along these routes. “There’s been far too little community involvement on the social impact, the environmental impact,” Ferchen said. Some have suggested that the speed and scale of the BRI threatens the loss of valuable farmland, replacing sustainable farming with large-scale industrial farming in the process.

But the BRI is not just the expansion of transportation networks—it is also a sprawling, global infosphere. “According to reported figures, China has completed more than $17 billion of digital Silk Road projects since 2013,” said Murphy Mok, a legal advisor on BRI projects in Hong Kong. “At least 7 billion of these are in loans and foreign direct investments into host countries relating to fiber optic cable and telecommunication networks and projects. There are about 10 billion for e-commerce and mobile payment deals.”

Yuk Hui, a philosopher from Hong Kong, believes that grand projects of networked infrastructure—particularly in the digital realm—are essential to the emergence of what he describes as concrete solidarity. With states retreating into protectionism, while making rhetorical appeals to co-immunity and mutual aid, Hui wrote, solidarity is only conceived of in the abstract—a gestural politics that is as meaningless as it is vulnerable to cynicism. In contrast, material systems of connection, communication, and collaboration, Hui explains, can become a new “basis for global collaboration”—with each infrastructural node facilitating acts of solidarity among people. At the core of his thesis is the idea of techno-diversity: “alternative technologies such as new social networks, collaborative tools, and infrastructures of digital institutions that will form the basis for global collaboration.” These technologies allow for the emergence of a new kind of peer-to-peer multilateralism, side-stepping, Hui suggests, the global institutions that have been co-opted by individual states. And that, in turn, can undermine the vicious cycles of competition among “mono-technological” giants, giving rise to a global technological pluralism. That state of techno-diversity, Hui argues, will be able to speak to needs that today are paramount for swathes of the global population: “Who will buy groceries for you if you are not able to go to the supermarket, or who will give you a mask when you need to visit the hospital, or who will offer respirators for saving lives.”

“China has one of the most sophisticated infospheres on the planet,” Hui wrote, which has allowed it to contain the COVID-19 virus within a population of 1.4 billion. Through the BRI, that infosphere is now being expanded globally to increase connectivity between China and BRI countries. These, in turn, are threatening the dominant US-based model, causing it to respond with increasing attacks aimed at Chinese companies like Huawei.

These attacks mark the beginning of a new Cold War between two global hegemons—the United States and China. They inaugurate a novel era of ideological contest, pitting radically different visions of international development against each other. In the process, new infrastructures and technologies will emerge, reshaping how states, corporations, and people engage with each other. Will these be responsive to planetary processes, and support greater solidarity? Or will they lead the world further into ruin?

Diversification of globalities and the endgame of modernity

To answer these questions, we need first to understand both the US-led model and the Chinese model as the two dominant modes of globalisation in the 21st century. These models offer competing visions of governance: while the Euroatlantic model is tilted towards neoliberal financial institutions, the China/BRI model focuses on new infrastructural hegemonies. One can, however, go further and look beyond these rival models, towards an altogether different model of planetary thinking. While it is true that globalisms facilitate the emergence of this kind of thinking, it is also distinct - this is not just another mutation or evolution of globalism, but a political and philosophical break. “Global thinking is a dialectical thinking based on the dichotomy between the global and the local,'' suggests Yuk Hui, while “a planetary thinking is primarily an imperative for diversities.” While it is true that, in this thinking, we are confronted with the planet as an external, objective force, it can also be a condition and a platform for a burgeoning field of localized and culture-specific applications, responses and adaptations. What begins as philosophical observation then results in the need for a new model of planetary governance. Such a model would transcend the nation-state, and would allow for the delegating of governing functions in many directions, while keeping them all within the framework of the planetary: whether this be through changing networks of institutions and infrastructures with global or continental scope, or creating targeted, small-scale governing bodies that can meet the needs of various communities of humans and non-humans.

So what would such a mode of governance look like? Seeing the planetary as a “platform” here is more than just a useful metaphor. It is not just a “launchpad” or “common ground” for the process of diversification, but it can also be an actually existing infrastructure of planetary-scale sensing and computation. As we have seen, this infrastructure is nowadays being developed according to competing models of globalisation, thus serving as alternative totalities, or what design theorist Benjamin H. Bratton calls “hemispherical stacks.” This drive towards multipolarization—as a result of this multiplication of globalities—then seems to be the endgame of modernity. What lies ahead is the view of the planetary space as an active and dynamic landscape of inhuman forces instead of the planar surface of Wesphalian geopolitics. Such an approach is indeed informed by the achievements and infrastructures of modern science, but it valorizes them in a pragmatic manner as a cosmological framework for a new geopolitics, not as an end in themselves.

The fate of a planetary governance that would lead us out of the competing visions of a globalized world is then largely based on our ability to align the self-organizing capacities of the biosphere with the increasing abilities of the technosphere to steer historical development. Planetary-scale computation might be understood as an approximation of the infrastructures of “natural metabolisms'', such as hydrological cycles, the circulation of chemical elements, erosion and slow geological processes, etc. Sensing and modelling the planet through different apparatuses then results in understanding points of interventions and important touch points between the sphere of the natural and social metabolism. Planetary governance then does not mean governing persons by an oppressive force of reason or knowledge, but checking the limit conditions of the habitability of the planet—a term used by Dipesh Chakrabarty to contrast the old views on sustainability with the new ecological imperatives of the planetary—and maintaining the social metabolism within the confines of these limits. To avoid totalitarian versions of such governance, incessant processes of diversification and bottom-up innovation is essential. In that pursuit, the infrastructures of late globalism(s) can be repurposed to ends transcending the belief-systems that brought them into existence.