Onus Orbis Terrarum: About a Possible Shift in the Definition of Sovereignty
| Author | Bruno Latour |
| Published date | 01 June 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829816640608 |
| Date | 01 June 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Conference Keynote |
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2016, Vol. 44(3) 305 –320
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829816640608
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1. [English translation: ‘Now, … this opening of the economic game onto the world clearly
implies a difference of both kind and status between Europe and the rest of the world. That is
to say, there will be Europe on one side, with Europeans as the players, and then the world on
the other, which will be the stake. The game is in Europe, but the stake is the world’.] Michel
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (translated
by Graham Burchell), (New York: Picador Press, 2008): 55.
Onus Orbis Terrarum: About a
Possible Shift in the Definition
of Sovereignty
Bruno Latour
Sciences Po, Paris, France
Abstract
Starting with an insight from Peter Sloterdijk about the enduring notion of Empire in the European
idea of sovereignty, this article explores a problem common to the discipline of International
Relations, and more generally, geopolitics as well as social theory: the very origin of the notion
of an entity endowed with some sort of autonomy over a territory. It is argued that the notion
of a bounded entity triggers many artifacts that explains, in part, the failure and denial of world
politics, especially over the question of climate change.
Keywords
Sloterdijk, Whitehead, actor-network theory, geopolitics, empire
‘Cette ouverture du jeu économique sur le monde implique évidemment une différence
de nature et de statut entre l’Europe et le reste du monde. C’est à dire que d’un côté ce
sera l’Europe, les Européens qui seront les joueurs, et le monde, eh bien, il sera l’enjeu.
Le jeu est en Europe, mais l’enjeu c’est le monde’
– Michel Foucault1
Corresponding author:
Bruno Latour, Sciences Po, 27 Rue Saint-Guillaume, 75007 Paris, France.
640608MIL0010.1177/0305829816640608Millennium: Journal of International StudiesLatour
research-article2016
Conference Keynote
306 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44(3)
2. Peter Sloterdijk, Si l’Europe s’éveille (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2003).
(I translate from the French ‘Falls Europa erwacht Gedanken zum Programm einer Weltmacht
am Ende des Zeitalers ihrer politischen Absence’, Suhrkamp, 1994).
3. Sloterdijk, Si l’Europe s’éveille, 57.
4. Ibid., 54.
5. Ibid., 82.
6. Ibid., 80.
7. Ibid., 74.
8. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000).
One Remaining Empire: the Globe
In a small book with the uplifting title If Europe Wakes Up, Peter Sloterdijk defines the
essence of Europe by its obsession for carrying, from generation to generation, the tradi-
tion of the emblem of Empire.2 ‘The quintessential function of European constitution’,
he writes, ‘depends on a mechanism to transfer the Empire’.3 In the eyes of Sloterdijk, it
is such a transfer that has always created a highly conflicted relationship to the much
narrower notion of national state boundaries. He argues that, from the Roman Empire to
the 20th century, it is this conflict that has defined the centuries-long thrust forward of
Europe, for better or worse. ‘For a millenary, Europe is a procession during which are
transported the signs of an unforgettable form of power’, he says.4 This process of trans-
lation explains, according to Sloterdijk, why, if anyone wishes to think like a real
European, he or she must necessarily always ‘think big’. Hence, the not very politically
correct subtitle of this odd essay: ‘Some thoughts on a world program for a world power
at the end of its political absence’! And he concludes: ‘What is certain is that a secular
European politics adapted to our times, should be able to tell what vision it has of the
greatness of Spirit’.5
Totally indifferent to what could render such a claim outmoded or even perverse after
so much post-colonial analysis, Sloterdijk, with his usual solemn, and, well, imperial tone
of authority, explains that it would be stupid to expect any sort of return to ‘this maniacal
expansionism triggered by the belief that [Europe] had been chosen to exert seigneurage
rights on the world’.6 After post-colonial studies has succeeded in linking Europe’s power
grab with colonisation, it simply means that for the former imperial powers there nonethe-
less remains a crucial task: to still cope with the long-term consequences of this translatio
imperii: ‘To be European today in any ambitious sense, is to conceive the revision of the
principle of Empire as the highest mission for theory as well as for practice’.7
In other words, even if Europe has been thoroughly ‘provincialized’, to use
Chakrabarty’s famous expression,8 this by now tiny segment of the world still has on its
shoulders the burden to think of an alternative to the principle of sovereignty that it has
imposed everywhere (including in its North American incarnation, where, from
Washington, DC, to universities designed by Thomas Jefferson, everyone dreams of
domes, columns, and senators in togas, as if the Roman Empire had been remade by
Hollywood in a costly and kitschy political peplum). It is not because it has been debased
by the universal idea of the nation-state that the principle of sovereignty is no longer
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