Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
Two crises converge at the moment: the crisis of liberalism and the crisis of ecology. They reinforce each other, and are too often played off against each other. One should not despair: the answer to both crises lies precisely in working on them together.
Liberalism can then provide the necessary instruments for effective climate protection, while climate protection becomes the embodiment of modern freedom.
Our problem is a double deficit of vision: both climate protection and liberalism lack a positive story of the future. This vacuum carries all the more weight, because the great narratives of past decades, social democracy and conservatism, have largely lost their historical hold. That is no small danger, since engagement with the future, as Jonathan White and Jan Zielonka make clear, is central to politics.
Climate change is a central crisis of our time, one with existential consequences. The ecological crisis has been perceived as a threat by large parts of the population since the eighties. So far, only the green climate movement has managed to channel this concern politically. That led, for instance, to the German Constitutional Court’s 2021 ruling on the rights of future generations. At the same time, public unrest follows whenever stronger climate-protection measures are introduced: Staab calls this the „ökopolitische Paradox”. The German traffic-light coalition may have failed in part because of it.
The crisis of liberalism has been examined extensively in this issue of ævum. I want to focus on one aspect: the loss of the future as the erosion of the liberal foundation, which Staab also diagnoses. Liberalism has lost its positive story of the future; the visions and images, the promises of how we can shape what is to come. This shows up in the endlessly repeated narratives of the liberal party or in its speechlessness, which extends to far more than the climate crisis.
Both crises lack the decisive solution: a story about the future, a positive vision that equally inspires and reassures people. Currently one speaks of „climate grief”, of „solastalgia”, of „eco-anxiety”, painting pictures of a dark future, or, as the French political scientist and politician Jean-Louis Missika put it in strong terms, of a fundamental lack: „The grand narrative of ecology does not exist”. That is fitting: liberals limit themselves to keywords like openness to technology, future technologies and emissions trading, slogans that fail as visions because they are too technocratic and too cold. And since these ideas have been copied by conservatives and social democrats, it is time to work on one’s own story.
But: who, if not liberals, would be predestined to counter this double crisis? Liberals have always been the forward thinkers, who brought to every challenge of the future the necessary optimism with enough grounding in reality. In that sense I would almost speak of a historical obligation for liberals to sketch a positive future and develop the corresponding narratives.
Climate protection per se is not a threat to freedom, it is its necessary guarantee. Not only the negative freedom of those alive now, but also the positive freedom of those to come is central; the possibilities of an autonomous life have to stand at the centre, both from the perspective of liberalism and that of the climate crisis. Responsibility for global goods like climate and the rule of law must be borne by the state; beyond that, civic and liberal virtues like responsibility and respect are required.
The freedom of future generations is therefore significant, as an expression of freedom and justice beyond the present, as also made clear in the German Constitutional Court’s 2021 ruling. The views held there are in the end classically liberal: on one hand, liberalism protects property and the rights of the individual. On the other side, the destruction of natural foundations of life — now, but also with a view to the future — amounts to a massive dispossession of future generations of their freedoms. The ruling manages this sensitive weighing. Moreover, with growing (and well-founded!) knowledge about the medium- and long-term consequences of climate change, responsibility and duty of care also grow. In that sense it is a liberal task for the state to protect this freedom for the long run and to defend it firmly.
But climate protection does not have to mean (only) state direction. With her understanding of climate as a common good or as a commons, that is, beyond state and market, Elinor Ostrom offers a starting point to understand climate protection as the common good and this common good as a fundamental liberal duty: the ancient thought that, in a constituted society, all parts should fare more or less equally well. Individual freedom contains responsibility for its sustainable use; freedom without mutual responsibility is worth little. Ostrom’s approach serves as a decisive complement to state responsibility.
In the spirit of an Abundance Liberalism one could bet on a state able to act, one that enables, that overcomes scarcity through invention, that supports technological progress and research as an answer to climate change, and that promotes this with a supply-side economic policy. This top-down approach can be complemented by Ostrom’s bottom-up perspective: by placing the focus on human learning capacity and the conscious taking-up of responsibility, the complex challenge of climate change can be met polycentrically.
There is an urgent need for new visions of the future, both for liberalism and for climate protection. The foundation of this reorientation is a cultural shift toward a renewed commitment to freedom, responsibility, optimism, and respect for human beings and nature.
On this basis, liberals can formulate a powerful counter-narrative to the prevailing stories of fear, loss, degrowth, or the tragedy of the commons. The solution of the climate crisis through the development of such a future narrative becomes the central task of contemporary liberalism. If we succeed in reconciling freedom and ecology in a new story, we not only save the climate, we also give liberalism a future.
