After the Paris Climate Accords of 2015, followed by ambitious announcements and programmes for fighting climate change, re-confirmed or even reinforced after the Covid crisis, the move toward ecological transition seemed well underway in Europe. However, public opinion, jolted by the energy crisis and the increased cost of living after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is no longer so receptive to the targets set by that transition and the attendant constraints. A new message has been spreading in Europe and elsewhere, tending to associate ecological policies with lifestyle constraints and a restriction of civil liberties that seem increasingly unacceptable. Can ecology and our freedoms still be reconciled? And, if so, how?
As Jean Haëntjens shows in this article, climate change has jolted the concepts around — and the idea of — freedom that we have formed over centuries, casting them into question in a way that affects the fundamentals of liberal, democratic societies. To understand the paradigm shift that is looming, Haëntjens reminds us here of the different dimensions to the range of questions around (ecological, societal, digital and geopolitical) freedoms, and the issues that arise in the political sphere with regard to how these are exercized. Has there been a change to the social contract? Does it need revising? He lays out how thinking on our freedoms is currently developing, together with the mechanisms that may be used to regulate them while retaining the objective of preserving our environment, and also the actors (both traditional and emergent) by whose endeavours ecology and civil liberty might be reconciled. Lastly, he stresses the geopolitical dimension which transcends these debates by looking at the three main civilizational paths on offer for arriving at these goals (from China, the USA and Europe). It is quite clear that citizens are growing recalcitrant over ecological matters, but the cause may not actually be lost if we can manage to rethink this relationship with their civil liberties.
This article is downloadable only in French. It is not available in English.
