TODAY’S world is full of paradoxes, many of which could be summarized by the idea that it is a world belonging to everyone and to no one. There are many issues that are everyone’s (they affect all of us and demand coordinated actions), but at the same time, no one can or wants to be in charge of them (either there is no competent authority or no one shoulders the responsibility). What is the difference between something held in common and something that is ungovernable, between shared responsibility and generalized irresponsibility? How do we distinguish that which belongs to everyone and that which belongs to no one, that which has no owner and that which is simply ignored? Are we not calling the void universal or celebrating as an “opening” that which is, in reality, simply vulnerability and a lack of protection?
This ambiguity is reflected in the opposing assessments with which we receive new realities. We declare the death of experts, the accessibility of information, the apotheosis of transparency, and the defeat of the need for mediation, but these very triumphs are also accompanied by the fear of deregulation, ungovernability, and opacity. Society is divided between optimists and pessimists, which is the axis on which we place ourselves when we have no idea of what is going on. Given this ambivalent perspective, who can assure us that everything we are now facing portends great success, rather than opening the doorway to disaster?
I propose we understand this new constellation—the dialectic between everyone and no one—as the condition that explains what we could, without metaphoric exaggeration, call the return of piracy in the global era. There is always piracy when new realities appear and it is not clear to whom they belong or where the competition lies. It makes sense that with the increase of universal public goods—such as the climate, security, knowledge, or financial stability—there has also been growing uncertainty about their possession and management. The timid configuration of humanity as the subject and agent of appeals converts what used to be sovereign states, landowners, or unilateral actors eo ipso into pirates. The current fluidification of property corresponds with the weakening of political sovereignty in a world of interdependencies; both phenomena stem from and share the same reality. World cartography no longer establishes a coherent and complete collective of self-sufficient units, but an incomplete map, with areas of ambiguous sovereignty, spaces that are difficult to regulate, and hazy responsibilities. All of this forces us to articulate a new state of equilibrium between the state, the marketplace, and society.
What unifies us and puts us on equal footing is none other than the community of our threats, the shared risks that make it physically impossible to escape danger on our own. These harsh new conditions can be illustrated with metaphors such as the gaseous world, universal exposure, or a world without outlying areas. Each of these images points toward a shared vulnerability, a similar lack of protection, impossible immunity. The flip side of interdependence is common fragility and the fear of contagion. That is why a reasonable cultivation of fear and the management of global risks are among the most important functions of today’s governments, constituting a new opportunity for political innovation. Epidemic societies need agreements about acceptable risk, strategies that will protect them in the face of their own irrationality, which is clearly seen in phenomena such as financial crises, the side effects of technologies, or the management of security.
How should we conceive of and govern a world made up of common threats and borderless sovereignties? How should we protect ourselves in limitless spaces, in a world of nets, fluidity, and connections? We must learn a new grammar that conjugates that which belongs to us and that which belongs to other people as realities that are not necessarily opposed. We must understand that certain demands for security destroy the hope of converting danger into a source of a new cosmo-politics, in other words, into the consciousness of belonging to the same world. These security demands can, instead, lead certain societies (those that are most privileged) to withdraw from the collective world, shielding themselves from its dysfunctions. Rather than promising safety that is impossible to deliver, we can only offer cooperative solutions, projects for greater integration, and complex forms of justice for which there are barely models or precedents.
In a world in which the economy is largely deterritorialized and interdependencies aggravate our common vulnerability, there is no solution except movement toward global governance and a denationalization of justice. This would mean overcoming the incomplete integration of a world that is unified through technologies, the economy, and even certain cultural products and styles but that is particularly uneducated when it comes to its political and legal articulation. Common public goods—the mutual exposure to global risks regarding security, food, health, finances, or the environment—require a corresponding politics of humanity. What we could call the civilizing of globalization is nothing but the reinvention of politics on a global scale in such a way that the world stops having owners and moves toward becoming a space for the citizenry.