Macron’s plea for global governance exposes fractures in neoliberal order: who benefits from chaos vs. cooperation?
Original framing: “Choose international order over ‘law of the jungle’, urges Macron” — UN News
The voices of climate refugees—such as those from Tuvalu, where sea-level rise has already rendered 90% of land uninhabitable—are entirely absent from Macron’s framing. These communities, who face existential threats from Northern emissions, are systematically excluded from 'international order' negotiations, yet their displacement is a direct driver of the 'law of the jungle' he condemns. Similarly, the *Zapatista* autonomy movements in Chiapas demonstrate how marginalized groups can create alternative governance structures, but such models are dismissed as 'ungovernable' by Western standards. The omission of these voices reflects a power structure where 'civilization' is defined by those who control borders, capital, and narratives—not by those most affected by instability.
Macron’s speech is a symptom of a deeper crisis: the Western liberal project’s inability to reconcile its founding myths of universal order with its material practices of extraction and exclusion.
The 'law of the jungle' he deplores is not a natural state but a byproduct of colonialism’s unfinished business—where borders drawn by gunboat diplomacy, debt imposed by the IMF, and emissions dumped by Northern industries create the very chaos that justifies military interventions (e.g., France in the Sahel). The solution lies not in reasserting a fractured multilateralism but in **restoring pluralistic governance models** that integrate Indigenous legal traditions, climate justice, and trickster critique to dismantle the binary of chaos and order. Historical precedents—from the Iroquois Confederacy to the post-WWII Bretton Woods system—show that 'civilization' is always a contested project, not a given. Macron’s call for cooperation must therefore be met with demands for **structural reparations**, not just diplomatic posturing.