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METHODOLOGY

Propositions and Premises

The Project for the Planetary Interest rests on five propositions:

The world is in a state of transition to a new age in which nation-states are compelled to address certain problems of a global nature.
Some global problems now threaten the viability and integrity of the planet, and place in jeopardy the well-being of humanity and other species.
These problems are beyond the capacity of any country, no matter how large and powerful, to solve alone.
Contemporary political norms and institutions, based on national sovereignty as a principle and the nation-state as the decision-making unit, are not able to handle such problems adequately.
New concepts and methods of decision-making are therefore needed to augment existing ones in dealing with the challenges of the twenty-first century.

The fundamental premise of the Project is that the planetary interest is a concept that is now necessary to assist humanity address and resolve the global problems of our time. Humankind has left behind the age when all international problems could be adequately handled simply through the resolution of conflicting national interests of nation-states. Today, a qualitatively new approach to policy and politics at the global level is required. In this new paradigm, the method by which certain global problems are resolved needs to involve, first, an assessment of the planetary interest, and secondly a reconciliation of all national interests with it. This will be an essential method of reasoning for our collective well-being, and perhaps even our common survival, to be secured.

Use of the ‘vital planetary interest’ concept will assist policy-making at both the national and global levels with each of these three challenges. It evokes the single higher vision, and would guide intergovernmental negotiations with less of the chaos and brinkmanship that many international conferences exhibit today. It helps formulate the national policy of a country in approaching global problems and negotiating solutions, and enables a country better to judge the merit of another’s. And it can act as a criterion for determining which issues justify enforcement power at the global level.

Three derivative propositions can be advanced with respect to the application of the concept:

the ‘planetary interest’ must be acknowledged by all nation-states as the agreed vision reflecting their common interests;
each country’s ‘legitimate national interest’ should be compatible with the planetary interest; and
global ‘legitimate power’, as recognised by the global community should respond to the nature and severity of the global threat.

A methodological framework

The methodological framework used in this Project conforms to the reasoning process employed in contemporary national security analysis. Traditionally, four categories of analysis for the pursuit of the ‘national interest’ are used, viz.: threat, objective, strategy and policy. Fundamentally, a country’s national interest lies in protection from national security threats. In traditional security thinking, a nation perceives a problem or a threat, real or imagined. It identifies a national objective – essentially, means by which it can resolve the problem or secure protection from the threat. It devises a national strategy for the attainment of the objective, and policies (foreign policy and defence policy) in accordance with the strategy.

At the global level, the analysis is compellingly similar in the late-twentieth century. Humankind today has a planetary interest in protection from any problem confronting it or threat posed to it as a single collective. It perceives problems and threats that are global in scale. In response, the international community of nation-states has, in varying degree of clarity and formality, identified and articulated a ‘global objective’, generally in a declaration or the preamble or first articles of a treaty. It then has devised a ‘global strategy’ – a plan or programme of action – in response to the objective, and a certain set of policies, generally a set of national policies, in accordance with the global strategy.

The remaining issue is the nature of the power structure through which the international community implements that global strategy at the national level. The nature of sovereignty and political authority at the global, regional, national and local levels is undergoing profound change, and this explains the frustration felt by many over the inability of humankind to react quickly and effectively enough to the global problems and threats as they arise and are perceived.

This is the reasoning process thus employed in the Project: global problem or threat, global objective and strategy, national policies; and the changes in sovereign power to implement them.

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