The Contested History of the Global—A Conversation with Or Rosenboim

In Episode 6 of Mapping the Planetary, Or Rosenboim, Professor of Contemporary History at Bologna University, joins us to explore the evolving concept of global order—from classical frameworks to contemporary debates about the future. 

Rosenboim invites us to see globalization not just as a process, but as a lens through which to interpret the world. She questions whether the idea of a fixed “world order” is itself misguided and provocatively suggests that embracing disorder could help us reimagine planetary politics. 

Is it time to rethink the very notion of “world order”? Could embracing disorder offer new approaches to global governance? And what lessons can today’s leaders draw from historical debates about global order?

Academic Reference:

Or Rosenboim, Hagen Schulz-Forberg, James Quilligan; The Contested History of the Global—A Conversation with Or Rosenboim. Global Perspectives 10 March 2025; 6 (1): 144299. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2025.144299

This podcast was created and produced by the Research Center for New Critical Politics and Governance (CPG).

To watch the video version of this episode, please visit the link below:
https://cas.au.dk/en/cpg/podcast/mapping-the-planetary

Chapters

• 0:00 The Emergence of Globalism
• 22:15 The Terminology of the Global
• 30:30 The New Concept of the Planetary
• 37:45 Constructions of the Future

Transcript

Hagen Schulz-Forberg (HSF): 0:10

Welcome to this podcast given to you by the Center for New Critical Politics and Governance, which we run here at Aarhus University. I'm very excited to have Or Rosenboim as a guest to speak to today about all questions related to global order and how we think about it, how to conceptualize it in contemporary history, leading up to today's quarrels of trying to think of new alternatives in which we may, or not imagine the world order. Or Rosenboim is Professor of Contemporary History at Bologna University. She has written a book some years ago now, some seven years ago, I think, called ‘The Emergence of Globalism and Intellectual History of World Order'. And ever since then, and already, of course, obvious before, she's been an erudite student of all things that intellectual history can provide you with when it comes to understanding questions of global governance, global intellectual history, history of economic thought, the history of federalism, and the history of international relations, giving it a critical, historical glance. So, on the one hand, understanding what they're doing, how governance functions in the IR relations actually play out, and being their critical student. So, Or, let me ask you about this book that you wrote now some years ago, how it came about, what you approach to things, what motivated you, and what you learned from it to then take through the next years and where you are right now. But maybe begin with a book on globalism.

Or Rosenboim (OR): 0:18

So, the book started off as a project to understand how public intellectuals during and after, immediately after the Second World War, thought the world should be organized after the war. so, as you can imagine, the Second World War led many people, especially in the West, or we can say in Britain and Western Europe and the United States, to rethink about the future, the rise of totalitarianism, let them think that they may need to set up a new kind of order in the post-war era to guarantee peace, but also prosperity and democracy. And so, they came up with various schemes to do that. And the book explores these competing visions that they had about global order. I created a loose network of public intellectuals who were based in Britain and the United States, but many of them were émigrés from Europe. so, they escaped fascism and joined forces with liberal thinkers in Britain and the US to think about the future. And I explored the various ideas that they had about how the world should be organized. so, starting off with the nation state and going in different scales from regional federations, regional blocs to post-imperial organizations, and then obviously to universal orders, I explored their ideas of globalism, because what brought them together was a constant reference to the global as a relevant scale of political order. So, they did try to abolish everything that was smaller than the global, let's say, but they were keen to argue that everything should be remeasured and reorganized in relation to this new scale of things that was the entire planet. And they perceived new technologies like the airplane or the telephone and also the nuclear bomb as the motivations for this global thinking. But at the same time, they all had different ideas about what this global order should look like. They were keen to argue that democracy must be a common value on a global scale. Yet at the same time, many of them wanted to embrace pluralism because they were concerned that obviously imposing any political order could continue and maintain the same constraints of the imperial and totalitarian age. So, pluralism was also a value. And as you can imagine, these two principles that they attached to the global could also clash. And so, my book explores these kinds of visions that they came up with in pamphlets and in public lectures. So, it wasn't just a university elite. They were keen to communicate with a wider audience. And the book critically addresses these ideas and tries to understand not only what they proposed, but also what were the limits of this way of thinking about politics on a global scale.

HSF: 0:26

Yeah, well, fascinating. I had the privilege of reading it, and I can only recommend it to everybody. If I may ask, leading on to when you say democracy and pluralism and of course variations of this thought, there were also liberals, I presume, I guess, many of them. But these variations of liberalism and to your mind, their ideas and what we often call the liberal world order or liberal internationalism, which is a standing term we use sometimes today, or we hear in use sometimes today to describe the world of global governance today as if it's a liberal internationalism. Do you think that, you know, what's the relationship between those thinkers? Is there such a thing as liberal internationalism or are there liberal internationalisms or do they not exist at all?

OR: 0:34

So, I would say that it's more aspirational than descriptive. Liberal internationalism has been a project that people have attached importance to since, well, even the beginning of the 20th century. It's been long going on as this idea that should the world be organized alongside values like the rule of law and equality in the sense of the law, but not necessarily in material terms that would lead to greater peace and prosperity and also stability. But this has not necessarily been the reality of things. So, I wouldn't say that we live in a liberal international order or rule-based order. I think this is more of an idea that has been proposed also by thinkers that I've studied. For example, in the British organization, Federal Union, which was thriving in the war years, so, from 39 to the early 40s, it really became a very powerful public organization like even the social movement in Britain. It rounded up a group of economists whose ideas clashed about the value of democracy. So, as I stated before, democracy was an idea that connected people in thinking about future global orders, but they weren't really sure about what it would actually mean. So, in Federal Union, they were keen to create a democracy that would be federal, so, would unite different democracies in the federal order. But they disagreed about the economic principles of this democracy. So, should this federation be socialist federation based on social planning and welfare like Barbara Wootton proposed, or should it be a liberal federation based on the principles of the free market like Friedrich Hayek proposed? So, these ideas clashed within the notion of democratic federation. So, it wasn't really enough to just say democracy. It didn't really suffice to create consensus. And what's interesting that today, I think a lot of people would resonate more with the ideas of Hayek who tried to create a supranational organization that could limit the powers of state to control the markets and would give capitalism a free hand to operate in its own manner without the control of politics. So, that's kind of an idea that we see circulating today much more freely. But actually in the 40s, Barbara Wootton's idea about centrally planned economy in the federation that would be democratic in the sense that it would respond to the welfare demands of the population, these ideas were much more welcome by the British audience of Federal Union in the 40s. So, we can see that the meaning of democracy and what it might entail in terms of economic policies and social welfare were actually disputed and their legacies surprising. Why should we remember Hayek more than Wootton? Well actually back at the time, she was a much more influential thinker. So, what I try to do is also to retrieve these ideas and to give them the appropriate weight that I think they deserve in the context not only of history but also of our own political debates today. When we think about supranational democracy, what should it be like?

HSF: 0:42

Yeah, fascinating as well. I mean you talk about the Federal Union, and you mentioned Hayek and Wootton but of course these are two opposite thinkers, but these were only two among a whole plethora of thinkers. Beveridge was part of it, there were international economists also part of this conversation which makes it even more fascinating that they were all conversing with each other somehow even though their ideas clashed, they would agree on a shared problem. Am I right? I would like to ask you a further question relating to politics and the nation state. So, when you say democracy, well how should we do it? We should plan the economy; we should give it more free reign. Obviously, there's an understanding of the role of politics within that, right? And how would they see this? Should politics be on top of things, you know, informed by science, informed by expert or should policy take the backseat of things? And then a follow-up question I would have, I would be curious to know when they talk about the global, as you said, they're all obsessed with the idea of the global, why is that? And what makes up the global for them? Is it that they do not like the nation or nationalism as it is and that nationalism or the autonomous nation state as a single unit would need to be constrained or kind of tamed?

OR: 0:50

So, I think the question about nationalism is really actually relevant to our problem of global thinking because in the 40s nationalism was seen as the cause, the root of all evil, the cause of the war, the reason why the entire planet was in conflict for years. So, this kind of strife was blamed on the ideology of nationalism and the nation state more generally. But at the same time in the 40s they were not really keen to get rid of the nation state as a political unit. Unlike the interwar internationalists, they didn't have these visions of world government in which the states would be abolished, and we will all live in just one world state. Actually, now in the 40s they were thinking that nation states should not be abolished but should be set in some kind of a global order that would constrain the negative aspects of nationalist ideologies. And so, in a way globalism emerged as this another parallel vision of politics that wouldn't be an alternative but would accompany the ongoing political order of the state towards a more positive future. So, in that sense politics was considered something that had to be done not only within nation states but also on a global level and that would create a much more multi-layered system that would render things more complicated perhaps but also would force the nation states to keep in line and would limit the dangerous implications of the ideology of nationalism. So, the idea was really to create another layer of political order that would be global, and, in the book, I explore various scales of order. So, going from the nation state to federalism and to the global as a whole made these thinkers think that that would be a safer way to do politics than just leave all the power in the hands of the specific states. So, that was kind of one of their ideas. At the same time there were those who thought that the problem was not just nationalism, but it was also politics. So, politics is about power, and power creates conflict. So, some people like David Mitrany for example proposed these alternative visions that were based on for him it was functions and needs. So, he wanted to identify practical needs of collaboration between states and to create these kinds of organizations that would correspond to these needs by creating links between the states or the political units that were relevant for these specific needs. So, for him that would be a way to create a multi-layered system of global order, but it wouldn't be necessarily political because he thought these needs are objective. That's something that we can just agree. We all need postal service. We all need some kind of healthcare collaborations. It's not something contested and political we can just agree on that. Now, he opposed those who suggested like Federal Union that democratic federalism could be a solution because he said any federation could have a counter federation so, you just have the same conflict on larger scale. He thought this kind of non-federal functionalist order would be a much better solution. Obviously, the response to him would be you know everything is political even postal services can generate conflict. So, there is always a need to create consent and the quest for consent is accompanied by power contestations and by politics. So, I suppose the book tries to show that in a way thinking globally even for those who tried to get away from discussion about politics and power directly it was impossible. So, the global was always about power relations.

HSF: 0:58

It was the dream of the expert who would kind of rule objectively and reduce problems to functions that can then be solved maybe even independent from the political system in which they occur. That seems to be a vision or a dream or a certain perspective that we can see throughout the decades that followed after that. But maybe I'd like to know more still related to your book about the limits of things because you mentioned limits in your answer and what are the limits of pluralism? Were there any? When you said they endorsed pluralism but then again if I meant pluralism as a box of many things it must still be in a box. What would they not accept to be? Who was not allowed to be in the playground?

OR: 1:06

So, I think nowadays pluralism is considered like a very wholesome positive value that you would definitely want in your political proposals if you were a politician. But in the 40s they definitely embraced pluralism as a value against totalitarianism, against imperial oppression, etc. And the wish to recognize the varieties of cultures and political preferences around the world seemed to be a priority then in order to preserve liberty. So, pluralism in a way is an expression of multiple liberties. But at the same time as the authors of the Chicago Constitution of 7 which imagined a world government, so, there was a group of scholars based in Chicago who wrote this constitution for a world federation. And they also sought throughout their discussions which lasted for two years, they sought to create a constitution that would recognize the plurality of political cultures around the world. And that was one of their motivations for thinking about this federation in the first place, so, a federal structure would allow them they argue to leave more space for diversity. so, while the federation as a whole they argue should be democratic, it could also include non-democratic entities like they mentioned, Saudi Arabia or Russia, etc. so, they were willing to be very inclusive. But at the same time as they discussed this, they realized that there is an inherent tension there. So, if they impose democracy as the global value because they think it's good, then at the same time how could they have authoritarian states within a democratic constitution, states that don't necessarily accept the values of this democracy that they propose. For example, they argue that the constitution would impose elections in non-democratic states they would impose elections in non-democratic states but at the same time they would also allow just to have one party in the elections because that's the authoritarian system that exists. So, they kind of ran across all these various difficulties, they thought if you have elections eventually, you'll become democratic through practice. But they also realized that this would not be a way to preserve pluralism because maybe some countries do not wish to have a democratic constitution, but we still want them in the constitution that we imagine. So, all of these issues created a lot of discussions around pluralism that eventually led the more pluralist thinkers within the constitution to abandon it. And into that space walked this Italian literary scholar Giuseppe Antonio Borgese who was an émigré in the United States because he escaped fascism, and he came up with this kind of universalist Catholic vision that was very inclusive but also at the same time imposed a very strict vision of natural law as the foundation for this constitution. So, it led them away from pluralism towards a tradition that at the end of the day replicated a lot of the oppressive patterns that have been dominating European history for centuries. And so, many of the members of this committee actually turned away from it and did not really want to endorse the constitution anymore. So, the problem of pluralism was an ongoing debate in the 40s and they could not really resolve it. How do you include those who are different without losing what you think is the most important value? And I think that a lot of people today face similar problems. So, I go back to the 40s to highlight the need of global thinking to grapple with these issues that may not necessarily have a solution but as the committee of this federal constitution in the 40s realized you can't really get anywhere without actually having people from you know, Saudi Arabia, Russia, etc., on board. So, at the end of the day, they were all European and American thinkers. They were all representing a culture of politics that was pretty similar. And they all saw their future in a similar way. So, perhaps that was not really the best way to endorse pluralism after all.

HSF: 1:14

Probably not, because it would be a form of pluralism that the others then had to buy into those who were not on the table.

OR: 1:22

But I think this kind of way has been a constant in Western politics ever since. Thinking about pluralism while at the same time not necessarily being very pluralistic about your conversation.

HSF: 1:30

Yes, yes. So, while you're thinking about these kind of core terms through which the globe should be reorganized or organized, the people at the table, those who are actually talking about those ideas are carefully chosen and they're not really representative of the world that they're trying to make a plan for.

OR: 1:38

Right. Yeah, exactly.

HSF: 1:46

Now that's kind of, that's I think an elegant way to talk a little bit about the global as such. I mean, the term, the word has been with us now for many decades, I guess, from my own recollection, the 1990s, late 1990s, early 2000s, that was the period of global history emerging and boom and historians were either they didn't like it or they thought, oh man, that's political science, that's globalization theory, we don't do that. But then it became a kind of almost an emancipatory program until recently when it seems to have died down, died down a little bit or withered a little bit in the face of the ongoing problems. That they're still seemingly what you present here as the conversation partners, that they all are from similar backgrounds, thinking in similar ways that maybe unspoken theory or an unspoken normative idea lurks behind global history or globalization theory. Now, would you share that point of view or would you, what's your take on global history as global intellectual history and the history of globalization?

OR: 1:54

Right. So, I think there are two different things. So, first of all, I mean, I'd say global history, as you say, is a project that maybe emerged from this new concept of globalization of the late 90s. So, if you do a Google Ngram, which I enjoy, but let's say it's not, yeah, exactly, not exactly the scholarly tool of excellence, but it's very fun. So, you should try. So, if you look at global on Google Ngram, you definitely see a peak in the 90s. And then it goes down a bit. So, now the global is everywhere, but also its meaning has been diluted. We don't actually really know what it means as a political program. But when it started off, it was a way to study the history of globalization, but also to go beyond it to kind of understand what history can tell us about this scale of order that is the entire globe. So, perhaps big history, but also history of different connections. So, I'm not really a global historian. I don't define myself as a global historian, but I do teach global history as it happens in Bologna. And I think a lot about the meaning of this approach. For me, it's most valuable as a turn away from national histories. So, as a way to go beyond the local or the nationalistic even approaches to history that see the history of a place as inherently bounded by national frontiers. And international history offers another alternative to that and with its own methodologies, etc. But I think what's perhaps helpful in global history is this vagueness in a sense about its meaning. So, sometimes this, as you said, is more emancipatory and it allows us to consider ideas and even patterns of behavior that move around and that have shaped societies in different places, seemingly disconnected, but actually part of this kind of movement of conceptual and political structures. So, that for me is the major appeal to kind of see how ideas move. At a certain time, I think that global history does well the critique of the global. I think we really need to engage with that kind of thinking about the global, not to be too enthusiastic about it, but to try to understand what is the submission that humans have to think about the global, the universal, et cetera, as a skill in which we should act and why this is not always good. So, why this has really imposed some constraints or created power relations that ended up in a very different place from where people have initially imagined to be. And so, for me, global history is really critical history. It's a way to criticize power relations on a global scale. And I mean, that I find it useful. I think that global historians have done a good job in recognizing the limits of the global and in thinking about the dangers as well of thinking globally, which perhaps in other disciplines, let's say in the social sciences or international relations, the global seems like a neutral term. It's kind of used freely. People just use global governance as if it's a thing that just can be uttered without being explained or justified. And I think global historians are beyond that. They understand that there is something that should be justified about the global scale and that it also should be criticized. Like we criticize every other scale of politics. So, yeah, I like the global when it's not neutral because I think that's a more honest way of describing it.

HSF: 2:02

Yes, I couldn't agree more. I think maybe if I understood you correctly, there's also if we bring in globalization again. So, there's a history of globalization, much of global history in the early days was almost like a history of globalization or conceptualized as a history of connections and overcoming the nation state. But then it was, as you say, I think there's much more potential in the critical potential and understanding conflicts and in understanding changes over time. If we do not just write that kind of history but use it as a critical tool to maybe understand again, nationalism, understand globalization as a theory which has consequences as well. And really, we shouldn't buy into that theory ourselves but take a critical distance. And as global historians or historians with a global perspective, look at actors and look at concepts and confluences in history that are maybe not confined by the nation state, but also do not rule out the nation state and indeed integrate the nation state as a very important part of the globe and of its governance as problematic as it is, I guess. And I hope you agree with that.

OR: 2:10

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's actually really useful to think about globalization, not as a process and all these very sociological terms, but actually as a lens to interpret what's going on.

HSF: 2:18

Yes. So, I understood you correctly.

OR: 2:26

Yeah. It's more of a category that we have in our mind rather than, I mean, obviously things happen in the world that can be seen as global connections, but also other things happen that maybe are not related to that. So, I see that as a category of thought and as an approach to international relations. And that's something that is useful because it also shows us what matters to us as scholars, right? Because we can't really escape, even us historians, we cannot really escape the presentist lens because the questions that we ask are always connected to the way that we live to the problems that we have in our own societies. And so, in a way, I think global history is a response to that. We see it as a rise of connections. We see that as changing our lives, but in what way. We try to explain it through theories of globalization. But now, 25 years later, maybe we can understand also what are the underlying power relations that motivated these changes and motivated the use of these categories so, we can be more critical about them and to think new about the future or the other categories that we can use.

HSF: 2:34

Yes. Now, I think that's fascinating. Thank you. Now of course, there's a new kid on the block, which is the planetary. Over the last five, 10 years, maybe I'm making this up a little too broadly, but in recent times, the global has seen critical fire itself. So, not only are global historians great critical thinkers, but the category of the global has been criticized famously by Dipesh Chakrabarty, who's maybe breaking the ice there and put some analytical categories to it, blaming the global or criticizing the global for a world imagined as colonial, as power-driven, as hierarchical, as capitalist. Basically, everything that is associated with globalization theory, if we buy into a kind of market-oriented liberal globalization theory, is kind of wrapped into this idea of the global there, and it's criticized for being exactly that, for continuing colonial relationships and all that. And in a new term called the planetary is arising as an alternative, as being not colonial anymore, but integrating actors on an equal playing field, everybody having an equal voice as integrating human and non-human relations and so, on and so, forth. I would like to hear your thoughts about this shift from the global to the planetary and whether you believe that the planetary is kind of a new promised concept, a new promised land for conceptual imagination.

OR: 2:42

So, I think it's really fascinating how people feel the need for new starts. I think this is something that really resonates strongly with the rise of the global in the 40s when it seemed to be much more promising than the international, which was tinted with this kind of intrigue and diplomatic secrecy and other kind of unnecessarily positive patterns of behavior beyond the state. So, I see this need of novelty as something very common to human thought. We want a fresh start. We want terms that are clean, that are untainted, but all the things that currently we find negative. So, back then it was war, now it's more the effects of colonialism and also the disruption of nature. so, the whole Anthropocene debate comes in as well. Personally, perhaps I'm a bit skeptical about the possibility of categories to recreate a new history.

HSF: 2:50

Of course, asking you because you're of your critical scholarship. So, as everything, I'm sure you have a critical view on the planetary as well.

OR: 2:58

Yeah. So, I mean, I sympathize with the need to be, you know, to have a more positive term. I think that is something that definitely is laudable because it recognizes the limits of previous terms. But at the same time, I'm not sure it is really possible to get away from all these power relations that have defined human existence since forever, basically. So, I'm not sure that the planetary will fulfill its promise like all the other terms that have been ditched because they failed to bring this emancipatory energy that people have expected from them. So, in that sense, I think it's good that we have this new approach that seeks to provide a much more egalitarian or inclusive or fair approach to order on the kind of world scale. But at the same time, maybe we should just move away from any of these terms, really. So, maybe the planetary as a mega category will end up being as oppressive as the global. So, I don't necessarily see how it should avoid or escape the kind of power relations that have brought down its fellow categories throughout intellectual history, really. What I'm keen to go against.

HSF: 3:06

So, let's leave the planetary and see where it's going.

OR: 3:14

Sure. I can continue to debate it, but it's still to be seen whether it can really carry this kind of energy that it wants to be, that wants to have. But what I'm really keen to ditch is the notion of order. So, that is my kind of black sheep in a way. I think that a lot of people are concerned with world order. This is one of my motivations in my research, as then what they think it should be or what I think it might be. But maybe the idea of order is in itself misguided. So, thinking about the planetary, maybe we should embrace disorder and kind of see it as a category that is much more chaotic than what we previously have imagined. So, if again, by planetary, people would seek to imagine some kind of an order that would be inclusive, not only of humans, but also of nature in a much more kind of free way and so, on. Perhaps the real change would be to consider disorder as a situation that shouldn't be remedied, not as a wrong that has to be overcome, but rather as the state of affairs that we should operate within. So, I think humans often have a tendency to wish to end situations of disorder or to impose some kind of order, be it more or less pluralistic. But rather, I think this always ends up in some kind of oppressive power situation. It's inevitable. That's how humans relate. And so, maybe we should just think of disorder or multiple orders as something that is more appealing on the planetary level rather than to think of another way of thinking of the planet as a whole, as one, which again, I think replicates a lot of the limited thinking of the past.

HSF: 3:22

I take it as a word of warning to all those and who's the planetary enthusiasts.

OR: 3:30

No, they should go on. then future historians will have something to study as well. That's good.

HSF: 3:38

But I think, but also, I mean, what you talked about, I think maybe we go to a final chapter here in our conversation, which would be interesting, which is the construction of futures. Why is the planetary so, interesting and so, emancipatory for so, many these days? It provides finally, after what feels like a long time of struggling, a concept that allows for building new future ideas that are inclusive, that are constructive, and that give some energy that are positive. Rather in a world that seems to be going bananas, that's kind of exactly what you need. And so, you're warning us against, wait a minute. If you start to measure everything and you start to ignore democracy, you ignore all sorts of other human ideas that are always around, then we will come to a same old technocratic, power-driven rule order. Is that what you're saying, scenario? But still, it's one of the futures that seems to be emerging. Which other futures do you see emerging today, other than as a constructive future order? As a student of global studies or global order, we've seen many various versions of that, the communist version, the fascist version, the liberal version, the liberal versions, going through mutations over history. And right now, I mean, I guess my question is, do you share the notion that we are at a critical juncture and that the planetary is one of the future visions that may create its own dystopias or may create its own totalitarianisms, which then would need to be tackled along the way. But where else can we go?

OR: 3:46

Well, maybe to Mars. I think it's true that we're in kind of a critical moment. I think that it's not the only critical moment. These things go in kind of waves. But I'm also fascinated with this idea of the future. I think humans have sought to imagine the future constantly throughout history. So, this is one of the motivations, really, of humanity to act, right? To try to imagine the future, to predict what might happen, and to create plans accordingly. So, that's something that one of my current projects explores, why we predict the future in what way our predictions lead us towards directions that might be right or wrong. So, often we actually get it very wrong about what the future might be. learning from how people did do it in the past is always useful. But also, it's good to know what directions we might not want to take and what directions might be more promising and then do our own thinking. So, don't just replicate what they've already done. So, currently, I'm interested also in the ways in which prediction was a tool of thinking about our relations with nature. So, how people used scientific prediction to think about politics and political order. But again, I think one of the lessons that history tells us is that there aren't really any kind of promised ways to success. The exercise of imagining the future should be continuous. That's really the way to go instead of sticking to plans that might not be the right ones. So, I think that the historical lesson here is really to engage in constant thinking about futures and to invite to this conversation as many voices as possible, because that would really lead to a much more rich experiment instead of, you know, when it typically went very wrong, is that when people had a plan or vision of the future, you just did not move an inch from it and just go on with it towards the bitter end and then kind of had to live with it for the rest of their lives. So, that was something that I think history would tell us not to repeat. But I'm all in for imagining futures. I think this is something that is indispensable if we want really to have a political conversation because politics without thinking about the future is really empty or dangerous.

HSF: 3:54

Or both. Or just pure ideology. I agree. I mean, if I understand you correctly, but it gives me a little bit also hope for the planetary scene out there, because it's a conversation that's also just beginning, right, in a way. And the levels of importance are so, manifold, you know, given climate change, given the political upheavals that we have in our time. I guess this is a conversation that is about to happen. And seriously, thinking about the future is also part of it. And let's see. Let's see where this conversation takes us. I hope that we will witness something else than what we've seen in the past, that when only a bunch of probably white people have been sitting at a table imagining pluralism for the whole world, that this pluralism for the whole world is probably imagined by more people. But when you say, this is my last question to you as a critical scholar, because of course I can immediately sound very naive by saying, let's get everybody on board. Let's talk about the future. Let's create a platform. Let's create an institution which is able to create these kinds of ideas, various perspectives that don't necessarily all need to agree, but as a platform for conversation from which, like in the past, like ideas of globalism, from which then these various shades of global order ideas emerge. Do you see even the possibility of such a conversation today?

OR: 4:02

Well, I think there are multiple millions of such conversations going on. I think what we would do well is to try to find ways to constantly challenge our own views about the future by looking at places we don't usually look. So, perhaps to engage with different historical narratives, to go and seek the story of individuals who were typically ignored, to look at, for example, now in international relations, there's been a huge move to look more at women thinkers and to see what they've done differently. So, every step in these directions has really created whole universes of ideas that weren't available to us before, because we just followed the pattern that was much more common and easy. So, I'm against, I don't have a big global solution for everything, but I think if each of us does these kind of small steps to include stories that might have been out of the usual pattern of thought, to look at forgotten thinkers or even thinkers who are just intentionally marginalized because they didn't fit into the mainstream approach, that would really help us to generate new ideas about our possibilities. Because even what we consider as possible or impossible is determined by our own knowledge. And so, expanding that would already lead us to consider what this planetary might be. So, as an intellectual historian, obviously my immediate move would be to kind of go back to previous thinkers and see, had they thought anything interesting that I can build on my own ideas? And I think this is kind of a move that can be shared also by non-historians. So, this is something that people can do in their own literal spheres as well, to try and consider ideas that are not common to our daily lives and to look somewhere else in order to connect also with different approaches to politics. So, in my own work, I try to do that by looking at sources that were marginalized, looking at the ideas of ordinary people, looking at migrants who typically have been non-central to political debates, but often bearing the burden of political decisions that were taken elsewhere. So, this is another way to shift our gaze on power relations. Instead of just looking at policymakers and people who decide what global governance and what planetary policies we should have, we can look at the people who will be actually the objects or would be influenced mostly by these changes.

HSF: 4:10

Those who would need to live their lives under these new conditions.

OR: 4:18

Exactly. And so, to engage also with that kind of perspective, I think would much enrich our conversations about the future of the planetary. It's not something that is necessarily inscribed in the planetary as a concept. That's why I'm, well, not necessarily wary, but I'm curious about where it's going to go because the planetary as a concept can go in many different directions. But if we put in it this notion that we should really move away from power centers, we should engage with alternative communities, something that people like Donna Haraway has suggested for a long time. So, maybe that could be more emancipatory, but it really depends on how it's going to be used in the next decades.

HSF: 4:26

So, we need to stack up knowledge and various perspectives. That's what you recommend. Always be curious and look into corners that haven't been studied before. And as you've said so, yourself right now, I wanted to say that you've been doing this yourself and your latest book with a wonderfully humanist title, 'Art and Love', adds a special flavor to this conversation, I think, or to my reading of your work as an intellectual historian and of learning about how history plays out when we think of about it globally and the actual, let's say, the other lives that are unfolding. You mentioned migrants, migratory lives. How can we measure them? They play a role in shaping also the future, I would argue. If we look at your book where you take various strands of personal family story and how they move through space, living in the end in one country, mostly, the changes that were happening right now, this is a great form of study. People that are uprooted right now, they can be followed, and they would probably need to live somewhere else. They would need to relocate. We will have more and more climate force migration. We'll have more and more economic migration, probably. Migration is a fact. But the stories that are unfolding there to give them more life and the humanist depth, I also take from your work as something that we should not forget as we become lured into the world of numbers and institution building.

OR: 4:34

Right. So, yes, I think the motivation to write this book was really from my own life as an intellectual historian immersed in ideas and concepts and so on and in plans for the future. So, I was thinking about how all these past thinkers imagined the future and so on. But what I was really interested in is to see how these futures unfolded in the life of ordinary people who did not really imagine these futures in such a way, but they had to live them. So, this is something that typically is ignored by all these planners, though they just come with a plan, but they don't end up living through that system necessarily. So, I wrote this book, which is a micro history of three families of migrants through Central Asia, the Baltic region, the Middle East, and then kind of moving on from them, because actually, you know, it doesn't stop the roots of migration continue through generations and people are always on the move. So, not only to kind of celebrate the life of migrants, although in a sense to show that they have always been there, it's not novelty, people have always been mobile, but also to show how these great events that we consider, you know, the global events of the past century, from revolutions, world wars, even, you know, climate, climatic events have influenced their lives and their conceptions of belonging. so, where do they belong? Where do they see themselves as, you know, parts of society? Where do they feel at home? These questions were, you know, mobile, they were not fixed. so, this is also something that global historians should reckon with, right? A lot of our categories are not as fixed as we think. People are not always in the same place. People are not always don't have just one identity. People are multiple and complex. And so, in that sense, it makes prediction even more complicated. But what I wanted to show is exactly that, you know, that going through the micro level can help us reconsider our mega ideas or macro categories and to realize that sometimes we should perhaps, you know, contain our ambitions somehow. So, global thinking is a lot about big categories, big concepts that should apply globally. But there isn't necessarily a thought about the next stage, you know, how would it really interact with the diversity and the pluralism of the world and with the individual lives? So, that's what I try to do. It tells one story really out of many others. So, you can also come up with endless micro histories, obviously. And the idea was really to show how this specific story can lead us to think again about, you know, our basic categories. So, this is another way maybe to move forward to try to connect the big notions with much more specific cases that would humanize them. Because I think one of the greater dangers of thinking about the future and doing plans is that there is a tendency to rely a lot on notions like expertise and technology and knowledge, which often distance ourselves from the human experience. And typically, that has caused many, you know, dangerous results. So, so perhaps my idea was really to go back to that human level, which exists in parallel to the global and planetary.

HSF: 4:42

It absolutely does. Thank you so much. Thank you, Or. I terribly enjoyed this conversation. But if you say rightly that, you know, predictions are wrong, but I can safely predict that there will be another version of this podcast soon, because there's so much to talk about and I hope to have you back. I hope to kind of that we will stay in touch and that you will join the conversation as a critical but constructive interlocutor.