Natural cosmopolitics

• Main Author: Smith, M. V.
• Published: University of Reading 2010
• Subjects: 327.1
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.553688

Natural Cosmopolitics presents a spacepower theory that is designed to help policy makers and strategists understand what spacepower is and how states can use it to their benefit. What is offered is a holistic treatment of spacepower that includes the security, civil, and commercial space sectors. It shows how states can employ spacepower as another element of national power in the pursuit of security, prestige, and wealth. Unlike other attempts to produce a spacepower theory that draw on analogies to airpower, seapower, or groundpower, natural cosmopolitics traces its roots from the Big Bang forward. Discussions include the evolution of the Universe, space itself, the solar system, life on Earth, the current state system, and contemporary geopolitics within international relations. Spacepower is presented as a natural outcome of these evolutionary forces, strategically the same as the practice of power in the other operating environments, because the same political processes with the same motivations drive it. It is shown that the advent of spacepower has ushered in a revolution in strategic perspective. The global perspective of the Columbian Epoch is fading away as humanity comes to appreciate the Earth as a tiny little planet in a modest solar system in a Universe that may be filled with more galaxies than people. From this, general and specific principles of natural cosmopolitics are presented along with an analytical tool to help strategists anticipate how other states may respond with spacepower to various stimuli. The role of spacepower in both war and peace is also discussed. Finally, the threat of catastrophic asteroid impacts is analysed and the hypothesis is tested that states will cooperate to provide a planetary defence.