KlimaGeoPolitik - Armen Avanessian

Europa2057 Lecture Geopolitics is back — realist, neorealist, openly imperial and nostalgic. But what if we are not watching the start of yet another hegemonic cycle, the United States and China contesting the next hegemony, but a shift in the very stage on which such cycles have played out? Geography has stopped being a stable backdrop and become an actor, because the geographical itself is shifting. In this talk I argue that the planetary present becomes legible along two axes that have carried both the hegemonic cycles of capitalist modernity and the great transitions of evolution: energy and information. Climate change and AI are not two crises but one. The decisive question is then no longer who wins, but what kind of actor can carry the transition — a form beyond nation-state and platform, with Europe as its test case. And in the end everything turns on money: what the transition demands is not physically impossible, only unprofitable. Financing, against financialization.