The Cool Water Effect: The Geo-Climatic Source of Western Exceptionalism
We are pleased to announce the publication of The Cool Water Effect: The Geo-Climatic Source of Western Exceptionalism by Christian Welzel, Stefan Kruse, Lennart Brunkert, and Steven A. Brieger. This volume is now available open access through Springer. The book presents a novel, empirically grounded theory on the origins of democratic institutions and emancipatory values in the Western world. By shifting the analytical lens from culture and ethnicity to geo-climatic conditions, the authors offer a compelling reinterpretation of how certain institutional and civic patterns historically took root in specific ecological environments.The book is available freely under an open access license: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-81861-5
This open access book unravels the geo-climatic source of the West’s emancipatory struggles and why the spirit of these struggles is about to spread around the world beyond its original geo-climatic root—which we describe as the Cool Water (CW-) Condition: that is, the combination of mostly cool seasons with steady rain in coastal proximity. What is so special about the CW-Condition? In a nutshell, the CW-Condition makes water and its derivative resources (i.e., land usable for hunting, fishery, forestry, crop cultivation and cattle herding) so diffuse that any emerging economy only functions with decentral management of water, land and labor. Decentral management infuses local autonomies into the social fabric, so much that evolving forms of social organization—be it family households, religious orders, business corporations or civic associations—mature under self-governance. Experience in self-governance equips social groups with two essential skills: resource mobilization and coalition building. In combination, these skills generate the power to organize grassroots resistance against top-down impositions, such as over-taxation and related forms of resource extraction. As a consequence, the state-building process begins slowly and proceeds as a conflictual affair between rulers’ authority ambitions and bottom-up opposition. This conflict steers state formation towards contractual institutional arrangements in which elected assemblies check the executive power of central rulers. Under these checks, government action navigates towards an indiscriminate pursuit of the common good.
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