Problems like emissions, climate change, growing public health concerns like Ebola, and the increasing accumulation of plastic particles in the Earth’s oceans affect all countries, irrespective of geographical or political borders. Dr. Hakan Altinay, President of the Global Civics Academy, and a non resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, feels that global civics might be the answer. 

roblems like emissions, climate change, growing public health concerns like Ebola, and the increasing accumulation of plastic particles in the Earth’s oceans affect all countries, irrespective of geographical or political borders. Dr. Hakan Altinay, President of the Global Civics Academy, and a non resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, feels that global civics might be the answer.

They have been called ‘problems without passports’ and there are many of them. The most visible example, these days, is Ebola, and the most classic case has been climate change, but those centripetal dynamics which defy conventional borders and intermix our fates are numerous.

When the financial sector in the United States developed unsound products or when the bookkeeping around Greek public finance was not up-to-par, the consequences of these actions were felt across the world. When Indian mothers over-rely on antibiotics for the health of their children, the chances of a drug-resistant infection emerging in other parts of the world increase. When an aggressive species travel the world in the ballast tank of a large container ship, marine life in all harbors and surrounding seas is at risk.

When one country uses a weapon of mass destruction, the norm and stigma around their use against any of us is eroded. The manner in which chicken farms in Thailand or pig farms in China are managed, have become public health concerns for everyone, as 80% of infections are common to animals and human beings, and over-crowded animal husbandry practices increase chances of mutation and the next pandemic. Marine biologists now tell us that they find plastic particles in fish all around the world; we have treated oceans and seas as one global garbage grinder, and we have started to eat each other’s garbage, albeit in miniscule but unrelenting portions.

And then there is climate change, the ultimate centripetal force. No dynamic has rendered national borders as inconsequential as climate change.

It seems that humanity has decided that the best way to start an interaction is to confirm that all parties to the interaction are bearers of recognition and respect, and that harm will not be part of that encounter. That is, in a sense, the Da Vinci Code embedded in our greetings.

Emissions from the other side of the world have as much effect on climate change as emissions from your own city, rendering distance and proximity irrelevant. And even the most powerful country is not powerful enough to insulate itself from the consequences of actions by others.

What problems without passports and centripetal forces have produced is a world in which we live with billions of others with whom we share a planet and increasingly our destinies.

There are, to be sure, a couple of suboptimal responses to the challenge of this epic interdependence. One possible response is to do nothing and continue to assume that international affairs can be conducted as if countries were billiard balls, with impenetrable and homogenous insides, and infrequent, but predictable, contacts with each other. A second response may be to hope for better global governance, delivered by brilliant technocracy and better institutional designs. I am not convinced that either option would do the trick.

Multiple layers of global governance have indeed delivered a great deal of cooperation, and yet the challenges that await us surrounding climate change and the responsibility-to-protect, and the depth of our growing interdependence require a more fundamental and robust framework than technocracy. They require a genuine and unabridged engagement with each other.

What we need is global civics. We have exiled civics into a boring study of governmental branches, yet civics is, at its core, what we need to co-manage our commons.

Think, for example, about the way we greet each other. Greeting is something we do automatically and without much thought. Yet, it may hold important clues. Greetings across the three Abrahamic faiths have one important, common feature: Assalamu alaykum, Pax vobis and Shalom aleichem all mean “I come in peace,” respectively in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Incidentally, the military salute is based on a convention to show that one is not bearing any weapons, and therefore, comes in peace. The practice of shaking hands is presumed to be based on a similar intent of demonstrating that parties bear no arms and mean no evil. In India, Namaste means “I revere you” and is reciprocated with the same words. In South Africa, Sawubona means “I see you.”

These common traits are important and telling. It seems that humanity has decided that the best way to start an interaction is to confirm that all parties to the interaction are bearers of recognition and respect, and that harm will not be part of that encounter. That is, in a sense, the Da Vinci Code embedded in our greetings.

This code makes more sense, if we take a long-term view. We did not always greet strangers in this manner. In his recent book, The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond describes the world of our tribal ancestors. In that world, people were divided into three categories: friends, enemies, and strangers. Friends and enemies are relatively straight forward; how to deal with strangers is the critical question. Diamond demonstrates that strangers were treated essentially as enemies, as there were no benign reasons for you to encounter a stranger. It looks like we started out in a world where we assumed most strangers were enemies.

We evolved into more complex social and geographical arrangements, where we could not afford to assume that all strangers were malign, because we needed their cooperation and engagement.

Fortunately, we have additional reservoirs of decency and civics. Since childhood, we have all seen countless nature documentaries, where we watched animals routinely tear off each others’ limbs. The lesson we are expected to draw is that survival, at any cost, is the natural order of life. And yet, none of these convinced us to be beastly as individuals.

… having some faith in our fellow humans is not foolish, but rational.

Take the Ultimatum Game: this is a game where a person is given $100, and is told to offer a share to a second person. It is called the Ultimatum Game because the second person has no say on what the split is, and receives, in effect, an ultimatum. The two options available to her are to accept the share, or reject it, in which case neither of the participants get anything. If we were all convinced about each others beastly nature, we would expect the most common split to be $99 for the first person and $1 for the second person. Yet, 30 years of conducting this experiment in all corners of the world reveals that this is not at all what we do. The average split that the people offer is 55-45; it is not quite 50-50, but close enough. There is another variant of this experiment, where again $100 is given to a person who is told to split it with a second person, but this time around the second person has no right to turn it down, and therefore no veto. In this version, called the Dictator Game, the average split is 70-30, and a quarter of the people give the second person $50 or more, even though there is no immediate material punishment to a 100-0 split. So what is going on? Could it be that we are not selfish brutes after all?

Fortunately, scholars did not stop asking these questions after Hobbes and Smith. Edward Wilson, for example, has shown that while egotistic individuals have an evolutionary advantage, so do solidaric groups.

Robert Axelrod has set out to discover how cooperation emerges without central authority, and designed simulation experiments where strategies, which start with cooperation and reciprocate both cooperation and non-cooperation, proved to be the most successful and resilient strategies. In other words, having some faith in our fellow humans is not foolish, but rational. Elinor Ostrom has demonstrated how we achieve cooperation and rein in selfish free riders without a leviathan, and has won a Nobel Prize for her work. She chronicled how belonging to the same normative and social communities, attending the same cafés and bars, and building reputation through the same channels, all provide formidable venues for binding covenants.

We know we cannot survive and prosper without the cooperation of our peers. The most current case for this is made by Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens: A brief history of Humankind. Harari argues that no other species cooperate with as many members as we do, and in as many and flexible modes as we do; no other human trait explains our place in the food chain as this one. Desmond Tutu explains traditional African worldview, Ubuntu, as the realization of “I am because we are”.

There is a yet another experiment that tests the rhythms of our cooperative temperament. In this experiment, called the Public Goods Game, five or more people are each given an allowance of $100 and are told that any voluntary contribution they make to a common pot will be increased by 50%, and the accumulated sum will be evenly distributed back to each member of the group. As you can infer from previous studies, some people contribute a good deal; others contribute little or nothing. Experiments have shown that the average contributions in the first round coalesce around one-third of each allowance.

When this game is played in more than one round, voluntary contributions go down. We are ready to be solidaric, but we do not want to be made fools of. Two things have proved to be effective in raising and sustaining voluntary contributions: allowing participants to punish selfish members while also incurring a cost to themselves, and communication among participants.

Therefore, not depleting existing reservoirs of good faith and decency, and instead replenishing those reservoirs with engagement and ingenuity, enabled by the likes of the Mahatma Gandhi Center, are indispensable to our response as we navigate the treacherous waters of our global interdependence. Kwame Appiah notes that we can agree without too much difficulty that we have some obligation to others; and that we cannot do terrible things to them; that we have some duty to intervene and help out if their situation becomes intolerable and we can assist at a reasonable cost to ourselves. The thorny question is whether we have any other obligations, and to answer that, he proposes the age-old practice of a wholesome conversation. Appiah’s proposal is one that we should all heed.

Dr Altinay is President of the Global Civics Academy at Brookings and Lecturer at Sabanci University. He has previously held the distinguished positions of Chairman of Open Society Foundation, World Fellow at Yale University, and Executive Director of Open Society Foundation-Turkey. Dr Altinay’sareas of expertise is constituency building and normative frameworks for enhanced global cooperation and governance, and he is the author of ‘Global Civics: Responsibilities and Rights in an Interdependent World’