Национализм и климатический кризис: как геополитика усугубляет глобальную угрозу

Climate disruption and the nationalist turn The good, the bad, and the ugly pathways shaping how states can respond to a shared planetary crisis The current US-Canada trade dispute is a symptom of our times. Ostensibly about trade and tariffs, it is more broadly about the capacity of states to cooperate in response to common challenges. In this, nationalism plays a big role. The latest flare-up began in midsummer as wildfire smoke from Canada drifted across large parts of the United States. Rather than treating the smoke as evidence of a shared environmental crisis, Trump treated it as a foreign intrusion. Accusing Canada of failing to properly maintain its forests, he described the smoke as an “invasion.” For this, Canada had to be punished. To Canadians, Trump’s boorish hostility and “51st state” trolling is the toxicity in the air. Performatively renaming Lake Ontario is his latest toponymic stunt. Such imperial grandiosity has drawn a robust reaction from Canadians. How states process the alarming material consequences of climate change is going to be a major theme of 21st century geopolitics. Climate change is a planetary dynamic, but people do not experience the planet—they experience their air turning to haze, their homes flooding, their food prices rising because of distant (or close) harvest failures. These experiences have to be translated into a story about who is responsible and what should be done. The most influential ideology telling that story today is nationalism. Nationalism is a protean ideology. How it approaches and understands climate change is not predetermined. Yet we can already see the outlines of three distinct pathways by which nationalism is framing the frightening materialities of climate change: the good, the bad, and the ugly. At its best, nationalism provides belonging and solidarity to a community of fate. How that community is defined, of course, is deeply contentious. But civic nationalism provides a model for inclusion and an ethic of solidarity and protection for national homelands. This means states can harness nationalism as a vehicle to promote collective action to address the causes and consequences of climate change. Droughts, wildfires, and rising tides threaten not only beloved national landscapes but also the economic foundations of national prosperity. Nationalism can drive conservationist policies and self-protective economic practices. This is a nationalism of prevention and protection. It channels collective identity into public prevention and preparation, promoting an energy transition while also building resilient infrastructure and systems to manage climatic stress. Nationalism promises a liveable homeland for a people now and in the future. This provides a warrant for positive collective action, including cooperation with neighbouring states over shared climatic challenges, from wildfires to drought and flooding, and the displacement they engender. But nationalism can also promote exclusivist and nativist conceptions of national identity. This is a nationalism interested in purity and division, in assessing who belongs and who does not. Its impulse is to create hierarchies and draw boundaries. Such a nationalism lends itself easily to assigning blame to outsiders. If a heating world produces disasters, migration pressures, and resource strains, nationalism supplies a ready cast of foreign culprits. This might be the neighbouring country that mismanages its forests or impoverished migrants fleeing drought. The former ‘invades’ with its ‘dirty’ air, the latter with its ‘dirty’ people. This scapegoating pathway is seductive precisely because it offers a simpler story than the diffuse, cumulative, transnational story of greenhouse gas emissions and their earth-shattering consequences. It is far easier to blame a neighbour’s bush piles or their character than to reckon with a century of industrial carbon output. Narrow nationalism imagines the homeland as a besieged fortress requiring higher walls and a punitive attitude towards outsiders. Yet it rarely acknowledges the threat climate change poses to a state’s own territory and soil, and to its future. It views climate-driven disruption as something driven by others—China and India are recurrent scapegoats across the Western world—rather than as a common problem requiring shared solutions. The third pathway is uglier still: an imperial nationalism of territorial expansionism and resource grabbing. This nationalism of great powers is different from that of other states. It tends to carry a messianic mission in world affairs. Imperial nationalism is the nationalism of states that think of themselves as civilizations, as holders of universal creeds and values. Faced with the dislocations of a heating planet, this variant of nationalism answers with a return to classic imperial habits. For some, as with Russia in Ukraine, this means a turn to territorial expansionism to secure the land, resources, and strategic position imagined necessary. China’s territorial ambitions in the South China Sea and towards Taiwan are well-known, while those of the US concerning Iran and Greenland are more recent. We see imperial nationalism at work elsewhere. Intensified competition for the critical minerals and rare earths fundamental to core military technologies and clean energy systems has spurred moves towards securitizing supply chains (so-called ‘friendshoring’ and ‘China-proofing’). Frontiers of resource extraction have expanded from mountain ranges to Arctic wildernesses to deep-sea environments, many newly accessible as ice retreats. State and state-affiliated entities are staking claims across the global commons, from Arctic shipping lanes (China’s Polar Silk Road), high-seas fisheries and seabed minerals, to the low-Earth-orbit radio spectrum. This pathway treats climate change as a competitive opportunity rather than a collective emergency. The great game of competition between world powers continues even as evidence accumulates that everyone loses when the playing field is on fire. Nationalism is not a simple ideology: it can be contradictory and compromised. Civic nationalism can be authoritarian just as narrow nationalism can be green, and eco-fascist. States often foster national origin stories that emphasize the conquest of nature and resource exploitation—giving short shrift to the Indigenous inhabitants of the land—as in Canada, Australia and many other states. They also have longstanding infrastructure connections and material relationships that compromise their ability to take decisive climate action. Pathways can become entangled in practice. In theory, how nationalism makes sense of climate breakdown need not be negative. State leaders have choices, and state cultures can change in response to chaos and failure. A self-interested nationalism can be turned towards multilateral collaboration and even cosmopolitan thinking if it places ecological protection and future flourishing at its centre. For that, it needs a political system that places science, evidence, and the public interest first. The climate emergency is planetary. Political systems may ignore this geographic reality but they cannot avoid it. No amount of toponymic assertionism changes the direction of wildfire smoke, or ends a drought. National solidarity can help mobilize people to protect the places they love. But doing so requires that we grasp how places are functions of planetary connections and flows. Nationalism becomes dangerous when it turns a shared planetary crisis into a competition between insiders and outsiders, or a blame game between rival states and empires. A wiser earth-based nationalism offers something different: the possibility of a partnership of nations working together to protect the only climate system that all of us share. That’s the nationalism we need for the age of climate disruption. Gerard Toal is a political geographer and professor at Virginia Tech, and author of Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe.