From realist to pragmatic solutions to climate change: Reading Anatol Lieven’s Climate Change and the Nation State

Abstract

I have a soft spot for realism. While I find the realist worldview at times pessimistic and often incomplete, the logic and mechanics of power, prudence, and self-help have frequently aligned with my Central European roots. Educated in Canada, I have studied both environmental and security issues separately—the former due to my growing awareness of the risks that environmental degradation poses to human societies and the latter mostly due to the lure of realist explanations of the world. Anatol Lieven’s book immediately appealed to my academic split personality. In Climate Change and the Nation State: The Case for Nationalism in a Warming World, Lieven makes a convincing case that climate change is the greatest security threat to the long-term interests of the world’s Great Powers. Crises and especially climate-exacerbated migration will make it difficult for states to achieve political consensus and act on climate change. Lieven paints a scary future, whether we get there gradually or abruptly. It is a world of not only devastating impacts from climate change (e.g., droughts, sudden disasters) but also a world where growing social and political disruptions outgrow states’ security forces and draw in militaries for domestic control (Lieven, 2020: 9). Meaningful action will require a push against contemporary culture, consumerism, and our increasingly shorter attention spans—and according to Lieven, that push can only come from a place of fear that something threatens one’s nation. A long-sighted, civic (as opposed to ethnic) nationalism can generate such fear (Lieven, 2020: 84). Lieven (2020: 76) argues that nationalism is the one force that overcomes the problem of sacrifice by current generations for future generations, the problem that must be solved in order to address climate change effectively. Nationalism legitimizes that sacrifice and makes sense of it. Calling for a political compromise and centrist attitude, Lieven proposes two specific steps: state militaries must