A Global Governance for the Third Industrial Revolution. Aurelio Peccei and the origins of The Club of Rome (1965-1972)

This thesis tries to better understand the origins of The Club of Rome through the history of the ‘conversion’ of its founder – Aurelio Peccei – from a leading advocate of global development to one of the main promoters of development criticism. The Club of Rome, a non-governmental think-tank founded in 1968 and still active today, became famous after the 1972 publication of The Limits to Growth[1]. This book, commissioned to a group of scientists at MIT, tried to predict the consequences of unlimited industrial and population growth on Earth, concluding that the very survival of the human species was seriously threatened and that a new kind of global governance was needed.Thanks to previously overlooked sources, this thesis delved into new aspects of Peccei’s life and of the foundation of the Club, it analyzed Peccei’s lectures and books, and made new connections with intellectual and political historical trends. To do so, it followed two trajectories, a long-term one and short-term one. Both trajectories had not been explored so far by the literature, which neither investigated Peccei’s intellectual roots nor deepened into Peccei’s involvement in transatlantic debates during the years just before the foundation of the Club.For the long-term perspective, this thesis tried to identify the line of thought that provided Peccei with the tools to deal with the problems he saw in his contemporary world. In fact, Peccei and The Club of Rome can be seen as part of an intellectual tradition that has sought to find solutions to what was considered to be the human inability to self-regulate its growth since the Industrial era, started with Thomas R. Malthus in reference to population growth alone and later extended to other consequences of industrialization as the nuclear proliferation and the environmental crisis. This line has been made of different authors related to each other over the course of nearly two centuries, from Malthus to Julian Huxley, merging with the idea of “one-world” as the ideal solution for managing the global consequences of industrial development. This line, temporarily stopped with the beginning of the Cold War, reawakened in the second half of the 1960s with the easing of East-West tensions and with the outbreak of the informatic revolution through Peccei and his Club. Peccei’s peculiar intersection between multinational management and Soviet planning embodied the “synthesis” between capitalism and communism hoped for by Julian Huxley for world integration and aimed at a new unity by placing before the eyes of all humanity the catastrophic threat of the environmental crisis.For the short-term trajectory, this thesis explored possible explanations for Peccei’s ‘shift’ and the origins of The Club of Rome with reference to the global political-economic events of the 1960s. It argues that Peccei and his Club came into being in response to concerns related to the political-economic transformations of the second half of the 1960s, namely the NATO crisis and the détente. Peccei, a transnational manager often involved in Cold War dynamics and a representative of non-governmental Atlanticism, publicly supported a specific idea of global governance led by the Atlantic community that would have fostered world integration and rationalization at the economic, technological, and political levels.This thesis suggests that there was a connection – unnoticed so far – between The Club of Rome and 1960s NATO debates. In the very same years of the foundation of the Club, in fact, NATO also began to deal with environmentalism and, in particular, it created two organizations, the CCMS and IIASA, aimed at using environmentalism as an instrument of “soft power” for addressing the lack of unity and consensus within the Atlantic Alliance and establishing new diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Environmental problems were a ground for “non-ideological” dialogue that could potentially create internal political unity and influence the Soviet system from within. Peccei turned out to be an active figure of the “informal” Atlantic Alliance and one of the leading voices in the 1960s talking about the danger of Atlantic disunity and the need to broaden East-West relations, and he – together with other early members of The Club of Rome – participated in NATO environmental initiatives in the same years of the conception and foundation of the Club. The thesis, therefore, shows that there was a clear link between NATO’s “environmental” initiatives and the birth of the Club, not only because they were born in the same years and from the same strategic concerns, but also because the people involved were partly the same.  In light of these new connections, the thesis suggests that The Club of Rome can be seen as the encounter between the intellectual tradition aimed at governing the technological revolution through world unification and the transatlantic governance debates of the 1960s. Using new sources, it shows how Peccei was connected to both “one-worldism” and “Atlanticism” and tried to mobilize public opinion toward a feeling of impending catastrophe, responding to the need for unity and for a new kind of global governance. The motivation of Peccei’s ‘shift’, thus, could be seen in a conjunction between the effective concern about problems that threatened the survival of humanity, and the search for solutions to the existential crisis of the Atlantic community about its global political role in the second half of the 1960s. [1] Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, William W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth. A Report for The Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, Universe Books, New York 1972.