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Donald Trump’s supporters should be thanked for having considerably clarified these questions by pressing him to announce, on June 1, 2017, America’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord.

What the militancy of millions of ecologists, the warnings of thousands of scientists, the actions of hundreds of industrialists, even the efforts of Pope Francis, [4] have not managed to do, Trump succeeded in doing: everyone now knows that the climate question is at the heart of all geopolitical issues and that it is directly tied to questions of injustice and inequality. [5]

[4]. Catholics have done everything they could to ignore the link between poverty and ecological disasters that is clearly articulated, however, in Pope Francis’s encyclical, Laudato Si! (Vatican: Holy See, 2015).

[5]. Even French President Macron, who has been indifferent to these questions, felt obliged to take them in hand when he introduced #MaketheEarthGreatAgain barely two days after Trump’s announcement.

By pulling out of the Paris Accord, Trump explicitly triggered, if not a world war, at least a war over what constitutes the theater of operations. “We Americans don’t belong to the same earth as you. Yours may be threatened; ours won’t be!”

The political consequences, and presumably the military consequences – or in any case the existential consequences – of what the first President Bush had predicted in 1992, in Rio, have thus been spelled out: “Our way of life is not negotiable!” There we have it. At least things are clear: no longer is there an ideal of a world common to what used to be called “the West.”

A first historic event: Brexit. The country that had invented the wide-open space of the market on the sea as well as on land; the country that had ceaselessly pushed the European Union to be nothing but a huge shop; this very country, facing the sudden arrival of thousands of refugees, decided on impulse to stop playing the game of globalization. In search of an empire that had long since vanished, it is trying to pry itself away from Europe (at the price of increasingly inextricable difficulties).

A second historic event: Donald Trump’s Election. The country that had violently imposed its own quite particular form of globalization on the world, the country that had defined itself by immigration while eliminating its first inhabitants, that very country has entrusted its fate to someone who promises to isolate it inside a fortress, to stop letting in refugees, to stop going to the aid of any cause that is not on its own soil, even as it continues to intervene everywhere in the world with its customary careless blundering.

The new affinity for borders among people who had advocated their systematic dismantling is already confirming the end of one concept of globalization. Two of the greatest countries of the old “free world” are saying to the others: “Our history will no longer have anything to do with yours; you can go to hell!”

A third historic event: the resumption, extension, and amplification of migrations. At the very moment when every country is experiencing the multiple threats of globalization, many are having to figure out how to welcome onto their soil millions of people – perhaps tens of millions! [6] – who are driven by the cumulative action of wars, failed attempts at economic development, and climate change, to search for territory they and their children can inhabit.

[6]. Dina Ionesco, Daria Mokhnacheva, and François Gemenne, The Atlas of Environmental Migration (London: Routledge, 2016).

Some will claim that this is a very old problem. But no: these three phenomena are simply different aspects of one and the same metamorphosis: the very notion of soil is changing. The soil of globalization’s dreams is beginning to slip away. This is the truly new aspect of what is discreetly called the “Migratory Crisis.”

If the anguish runs so deep, it is because each of us is beginning to feel the ground slip away beneath our feet. We are discovering, more or less obscurely, that we are all in migration toward territories yet to be rediscovered and reoccupied.

This is because of a fourth historic event, the most important and the least discussed. It took place on December 12, 2015, in Paris, just as agreement about the climate was being reached, at the end of the conference called COP21.

What counts as a measure of the event’s real impact is not what the delegates decided; it is not even whether or not the agreement is carried out (the climate change deniers will do their utmost to eviscerate it); no, the crucial fact is that, on that December day all the signatory countries, even as they were applauding the success of the improbable agreement, realized with alarm that, if they all went ahead according to the terms of their respective modernization plans, there would be no planet compatible with their hopes for development. [7] They would need several planets; they have only one.

[7]. See Stefan Aykut and Amy Dahan, Gouverner le climat? Vingt ans de négociation climatique (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2015). The text of the INDC (Intended Nationally Determined Contribution, in UN jargon) that had been prepared for COP21 presents each country’s development projects (see www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/politique-etrangere-de-la-france/climat/paris-205-cop21/les-contributions-nationales-pour-la-cop-21, accessed August 7, 2017).

Now if there is no planet, no earth, no soil, no territory to house the Globe of globalization toward which all these countries claim to be headed, then there is no longer an assured “homeland,” as it were, for anyone.

Each of us thus faces the following question: Do we continue to nourish Dreams of Escaping, or do we start seeking a territory that we and our children can inhabit?

Either we deny the existence of the problem, or else we look for a place to land. From now on, this is what divides us all, much more than our positions on the right or the left side of the political spectrum.

And this is just as true for the old inhabitants of the wealthy countries as it is for their future inhabitants. The first, because they understand that there is no planet suited for globalization and that they will have to change their ways of life completely; the second, because they have had to leave their old devastated lands: they, too, have to change their ways of life completely and learn new ones.

In other words, the Migratory Crisis has been generalized.

To the migrants from outside who have to cross borders and leave their countries behind at the price of immense tragedies, we must from now on add the migrants from inside who, while remaining in place, are experiencing the drama of seeing themselves left behind by their own countries. What makes the migratory crisis so difficult to conceptualize is that it is the symptom, to more or less excruciating degrees, of an ordeal common to all: the ordeal of finding oneself deprived of land.

This ordeal accounts for the relative indifference to the urgency of the situation, and it explains why we are all climate quietists when we hope, while doing nothing about it, that “everything will be all right in the end.” It is hard not to wonder what effect the news we hear every day about the state of the planet has on our mental state. How can we not feel inwardly undone by the anxiety of not knowing how to respond?

It is this unease, at once personal and collective, that gives Trump’s election its full importance; without that, we would merely be reading the script of an exceedingly mediocre TV series.

The United States had two choices: by acknowledging the extent of Climate Change and the immensity of its responsibility, it could finally become realistic and lead the “free world” away from the abyss, or it could plunge further into denial. Those who conceal themselves behind Trump have decided to keep America floating in dreamland a few years longer, so as to postpone coming Down to Earth, while leading the rest of the world into the abyss – perhaps for good. matrix

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