View source for Cosmo-Localism as a Political Philosophy Beyond the Nation-State


=Discussion=

Ralph Horat and Jan Baeriswyl:

"Currently, we can observe a rising tension between locality, nationality and universality. The local community can in most cases solve its problems better than a bureaucratic central state. Many states therefore follow the "principle of subsidiarity". At the same time, however, the great challenges of the 21st century, such as climate change, pandemics, nuclear weapons or the rising power of data monopolies are global and can therefore only be solved at a global level. Global Internet communities such as the Democracy Earth project are striving for a digital identity for world citizens and a direct right to vote for every person around the globe. It may be just a question of time when the legitimacy of decisions made by supranational organizations is being seriously questioned by a digitally represented world community. Meanwhile, nationalization trends continue to proliferate in various countries, as many people see themselves as the "losers of globalization". What is needed is a fundamentally new understanding and experience of locality and universality and their interdependencies. Some political theorists and philosophers suggest that in the internet age, the bureaucratic nation-state could be outcompeted by governance structures better suited to the emerging reality, namely the network and the node.16 However, a clearly defined set of issues from climate change, data privacy to risks of nuclear catastrophe, needs to be subject to global governance and compliance of all nodes needs to be credibly enforced. The key here is “global governance, not government”. A “world government” would introduce a whole set of new failure modes and fragilities, but without any global governance mechanism for managing global issues at all, our civilization is doomed to fail.

A sketch of any viable solution therefore needs to include both striving for a maximal degree of sovereignty and self-sufficiency on a local level and forging a viable path towards global governance. This principle is at the very core of the Cosmo-local vision. Following the “principle of subsidiarity”, the vast majority of decision-making should happen at the level where the impact of the decision in question is felt most directly. As a result, the entire network including Cloud City, the physical Cosmopolis, Cosmovillages and neighborhoods will all have their own governance processes. Digital voting infrastructure will enable these governance processes to be much more fine-grained and adaptable than the antiquated voting systems most today’s democracies are locked into. Just like in the domain of finance and money, we have seen an explosion of new governance mechanisms in the digital: For example, liquid democracy combines direct and representative democracy, while quadratic voting measures the relative importance of the different issues voted on, and thereby allows minorities a voice on issues they care most about. There are exciting possibilities for building deeper democracies where actually have a say.17 These mechanisms are being described in more detail in the next Chapter “Governance Innovations”. The same blockchain-based infrastructure used to implement economic policies can be used to manage and secure democratic governance protocols. The different mechanisms, each with their own trade-offs and suitable to different situations, should be provided as open-source templates in [[Cloud City]].

Each governing body at the different scales can freely decide  which mechanism of governance they choose to organize themselves, creating an environment of innovation and iterative improvement. When it comes to global governance, this is evidently not up to any party to unilaterally decide. However, it should be an integral part of any suggestion for a new socio-economic operating system. For example, local governance of the Cosmopolis can be constrained to include global considerations from the start, specifically in the form of a prohibition to externalize costs or risks from the local to the global level. In addition, compliance with a set of minimal global standards can be negotiated in any external relationships and otherwise incentivized. Approaches such as [[Simpol]] – short for simultaneous policy – is an example of how incentives can be used to influence national decision-making towards globally relevant issues. It defines a bundle of policies, from environmental to disarmament, that are in the strong interest of the global community. These policies are to be simultaneously implemented once the required support threshold is reached throughout the different nations that agreed to the package. Simultaneous implementation allows overcoming game-theoretical stale-mates that have halted progress e.g. on environmental issues in the past. We found this mechanism to be a great example of the kinds of policies we could imagine Could City and the larger network to adopt as “minimal cooperation requirements” with external actors, whether national or corporate.

It becomes evident that governance applies to all scales (from Cloud City to local neighborhoods) and also across the different projects. As a result, finding the right governance mechanisms for the right processes is likely the place of most leverage. If we can leverage collective intelligence while making most participants feel heard, we stand a chance of iteratively designing better political, financial and social systems."

(https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/62dbb0618642e951d91a0032/640080c27d68f806147d703a_Whitepaper_Cosmo-localism.pdf)

[[Category:P2P State Approaches]]

[[Category:Crypto Politics]]