Lessons Learned from 20th Century Nationalisations for the Debate on the “Environmental State”

The issue of nationalisation has been kind of taboo for decades. For instance, a paper aiming to address the lack of a theory of the state in degrowth scholarship (D’Alisa and Kallis 2020) does not mention nationalisation, not even economic planning. This dismissal of public power constitutes a broader pattern in the “commons” literature. However, the scale and urgency of the socioecological crisis requires a reconsideration of the role of the State both in economic planning and nationalisation of key sectors of the economy. The Berlin campaign for the expropriation and socialization of Deutsche Wohnen & Co brought again to the table the possibility of large-scale nationalisations of housing or even energy companies. In this sense, some authors (Berfelde and Blumenfeld 2024) have recently turned their attention to the “socialization debate” that took place in the beginning of the Weimar Republic (Neurath, Bernstein, Korsch, Kautsky, Bauer).

In this paper I suggest that interesting lessons can also be learned from the Latin America experiences of the 20th century. In fact, the shift from the classical concept of private property as an absolute untouchable right to the acknowledgement of an affirmative obligation on the state to expropriate private property not fulfilling its social function was anticipated in Mexico’s 1917 Constitution. The Social Function Doctrine, inspired by the French jurist Léon Duguit, influenced many Constitutions in Latin America and Europe and legitimated several nationalisations, land reforms and protests such as those of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil. In recent years, this doctrine has been altered in Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico and Brazil to accommodate the ecological function of land and, more generally, of property. Which is its potential nowadays for an “environmental State”?