Reflexive Green Nationalism (RGN): A sociological antidote to the climate crisis?

Abstract

What can theories of nationalism and the nation-state tell us about climate change? Much of the available literature, including works by prominent thinkers Ulrich Beck and Bruno Latour, identify it as a collective global challenge rather than a local and national one. But is it really so? This article develops an original theoretical framework integrating the theory of “reflexive modernity”, theories of nationalism, and case studies of green nation-states. The goal is to change the observation point and search for original solutions to the climate crisis. Building on this theoretical framework, this study puts forward the following claims: (1) climate change is undeniably a global phenomenon, but its causes are national. It can be traced back to a small number of top polluting nation-states (the US, China, Russia, India, Japan and EU28) whose historical share of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the main cause for global warming, surpasses 74%; (2) Most of these nation-states are entrenched in Resource Nationalism (RN), a form of nationalism that sees the environment as a resource to exploit; (3) there exist forms of sustainable nationalism, which this study conceptualizes as Reflexive Green Nationalism (RGN); (4) the solution to climate change is local rather than global. It depends on top polluters' capacity to re-modernize and develop RGN; and (5) according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if emissions are not reduced by 43% by 2030, the world is likely to cross the tipping point into a global climate catastrophe. Therefore, updating these nation-states and their ideology to more sustainable forms is humanity's best shot at halting the climate crisis.

Climate change: Comparing “green” and “polluting” nation-states

“…While it is true that even in those nationstates that sit at the top of CCPI rankings (see Figure 2) there is much room for improvement. Countries that have been identified as green nation-states (Conversi and Posocco, 2022;Posocco and Watson, 2022b), among them Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are the top performers, and Germany as a relatively high performer, are better placed than others to function as examples to follow. Some cities in these countries have clear goals in place, i.e., Copenhagen aims to be the world's first carbon-neutral capital city by 2025 and Oslo will probably reach net zero emissions by 2030, which is much more than what others are trying to achieve.…”

“…Most importantly, environmental policy in these nation-states came from the embrace of environmentalism by the political institutions of these nation-states (Conversi and Posocco, 2022). This is a crucial passage from environmentalism to Green Nationalism (Posocco and Watson, 2022b), which could be defined as the institutionalization of environmentalism materializing in national ministries, ministers, policies and regulations. That equals to the lock in of environmentalism, which means that the ideas stemming from the environmental ideology becomes entrenched in social and political systems that help spread it further (McNeill, 2000).…”

“…Proposing solutions for climate change without coming to terms with the nation-state and nationalism means losing sight of the protagonist in politics. And yet, no study before 2020 addressed climate change from the perspective of theories of nationalism (Posocco and Watson, 2022b). Before 2020, the geohistorical notion of Anthropocene, which identifies an era where human beings have the biggest impact on the environment, "did not appear in any of the issues of the main journals dedicated to nationalism studies (Nations and Nationalism, Ethnicities, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Ethnopolitics, SEN-Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Nationalities Papers" (Conversi and Posocco, 2022, p. 2).…”

Nationalism and the energy transition: The case of the SNP

“…The literature on green nationalism has largely juxtaposed it with resource nationalism (Arantes, 2023; Conversi & Posocco, 2022; Posocco & Watson, 2022b). Resource nationalism is another amalgam of nationalism and here is understood as a political discourse on the politics and economics of resource governance that contends that natural resources belong to the territorial nation in which they reside (Childs, 2016; Koch & Perreault, 2019).…”

“…Although it is recognised that nationalism's constituent elements are often overlapping and interconnected in their manifestation in the discourse, we treat all three amalgams as conceptually distinctive in order to facilitate a more precise and systematic analysis. For example, while green nationalism and techno‐nationalism may be simultaneously invoked by discussion of renewable energy technologies (see Posocco & Watson, 2022a, 2022b), we categorise such discourse according to whether it emphasises its technologically advanced or climate‐positive features.…”