The End of Nation State

The End of Nation State
Jean-Marie Guehenno

Revolutionaries of the 19th CAD cried freedom, the colonized of the 20th CAD called for independence.
Independence would not bring liberty, colonies would become governed men’s activities with in a defined territory. WB/IMF which protected the interests of capitalist countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Democracy and development linked and people protested against independence leaders who have exploited the credit conferred upon them. the dialogue between Mandela was a deal to leave finance, industry and commerce with the whites.
If a nation needs a state to become democracy, where is the state. Legitimacy conferred by independence struggle disappears, nothing replaces it.
Every where the state is weakened. Drugs ? take root. Latin America, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Pakistan. Drug revenues are greater than development aid 100 billion (1993), an extreme form of privatization. National budget =drug revenue.
Idea of nation only an ephemeral form between the age of kings and neo-imperial age.
What binds together citizens of a nation is a combination of historical factors which can not be reduced to a single dimension, social, religious or racial-in the memory of conversion, history, misfortune, triumphs-shared destiny with precise frontiers.
To define a man by what he owns, derives from land, to say what he is, derives from faith or its absence. Territorial rooted ness of the nation is the foundation of liberty.
Frontiers outside Europe are far more recent (and created by Europeans) and sacralization fragile. Europe had to pay for precision with a millennium of wars. Law governed men’s activities with in a defined territory.
England like Japan, but unlike France/Spain has a racial concept of its identity.. German identity rooted in language and culture.
The only place Europeans were able to place viable boundaries was in North America at the cost of genocide of natives.
In new countries, founding myth and enemies are invented to empower the concept of nationhood. Far from imperial national rivalries of 19th CAD, national movements are now defensive reflexes and xenophobic., the idea has allowed itself with race, religion and ideology and tribe..
Territory is dwindling in importance as agriculture and industry decreasing part of economy.
World is more abstract. Value is based on access to information, far more important than materials. From water way to railroad, , air transport, telecom, men have become mobile again. Premium space is meeting venues and leisure, price of agricultural land is down , it is immaterial economy, competence is most sought for.
The scarcity of physical space was the foundation of law..
Authority to tax was the first step to institutionalization of power on which democracy built. This is being called into question-move to low tax area, to higher sales, get a job elsewhere.
Capital short supply, needs to attract it, makes control of national capital difficult.
No longer territorial imperative, place of residence and investment a given, added value material, taxation no longer sovereign decision. When the nation state decides to tax new form of creation of wealth, it has to compete with the whole world and can not demand more than others do. Taxes have to be presented as playing only a modest role as a counter weight of state benefits. If tax go high than others states, capital flies. Collective benefit, security, infrastructure, justice not directly linked to tax, capital will fly to the best bargain. It impoverishes the state. State poorly equipped to manage expenses., too remote from local needs-schools, hospitals.
Efficient management possible only at the local level. Rich suburbs don’t want to subsidize poor ones, any subsidy causes a problem. Nations appears like a straight jacket, poorly adapted to integration of the world. WW II USSR exhausted ITSELF. LOSER Japan and Germany spend little on defense-who won? US vulnerable due to equalizing power of tech, stinger missile in the hand of one man, long range missiles in hands of a poor country.
Wealth grows out of multiplication of connections, so peace and stability important. US has to adapt to the role of mercenary of non-military powers.. no nation, however powerful, can single handedly guarantee stability. It would not have the confidence of others, would lack legitimacy and they will abuse it (USA). Public opinion rejects unilateral action (but is ignored). Legitimacy requires multilateral framework for security.
In economic domain constraints of national framework are more striking. Cost of industrial research is very high. 100 years ago a scientist in his lab was the engine of research/progress. States since the two WWs through military funding and research subsidies became the principal engines of scientific progress. No nation, not even USA has the finance , basic physics and biology. Global cooperation necessary-g8anr particle accelerator. The territorial given is outmoded. Dependence on soil no longer dominant social relation. Everything changes when human activity liberated itself for space.
Politics has been the art of governing a collectivity of people defined by their rooted ness, city, nation. With decreasing importance of geography, can there be politics?

Chap 2 End of Politics.
End of nation is death of politics. It presupposes existence of body politic. , allow citizens institutionalized “patriotism” by obedience to law. In the network age, relationship of citizens to body politic is in competition with connections outside of it. Well ordered hierarchy of society, local, regional, federal disappears. The crisis special perception is felt in the formation of decisions. These are fragmented, ideological and egalitarian concepts disappear. Washington has thousands of officials, several hundred congressmen several thousand staffers, 35,000 lobbyists. No longer does a lobbyist need to know a few congressmen and try to corrupt them. they mobilize all the information necessary to put across the point of view of a corporation they represent. If a corporation wants funds for a public highway, lobbyists would gather more comprehensive information than any public firm. Ecology lobby may present opposite data and fight it out with weapon of information.. Administration does not have the data. Only the rich can afford a lobbyist. In stock exchange price is dependent on institutional investors who base their judgment on analysis of balance sheets. Congress has become an stock exchange of lobbyists.
US system protects private interests very well and those of large groups like charity lobby, but not general interest as constituents will be arrayed against each other. (? NGOization), it is political gridlock-traffic jam. Politics presupposes a social contract that is greater than all contracts. That has been abandoned, been reduced to market interests, which can not establish the value of national interest. No economic law can replace the territorial and historic basis of the nation.
Professiolalization of interest dissolves politics into confrontation and leads to extreme fragmentation and every one for self. Litiginousness of the US society is the best illustration. A contract is never more than armistice in the social battlefield. There is no common good faith ground. There is no morality outside the rules agreed upon. Judges suspect collusion, if an enterprise did not fully exploit its rights. The governing principle of this world is not common interest but the battle of all against all.
Fathers of liberal democracy tried to reconcile individual interests with the humanist tradition.
Surrounded by an array of specialists, the modern manager does not manage an enterprise but situations. They live in the short term (sp US business)-quarterly statements. Those taking long term view are called strategy consultants to determine goals. American logic puts stress on transactions than on relationship and clients. Ephemeral successes of perception as the media choose to stage them has replaced the consciousness of common destiny. In the age of ephemeral, the politicians claim to be the priests of the long term but uses ephemeral means. The mode of politicians access to office forces them to exist as media products.
The politician in tandem with TV journalists organizes collective perception and Ronald Reagan came close to the ideal. The objective of the daily agenda is to create a sound bite at the right moment like theatrical effect.
TV imposes its own rhythm on political debate., mistakes like successes are soon forgotten.
On any given problem, you take a stand for or against a dominant position. Nuances are discredited (John Kerry vote for war). Argument that can not be summed up in a single sentence has no media value.
It is a politician’s capacity to impose a particular spin on events that carries the day. In politics nothing is more dangerous than appearance which becomes reality. During Reagan time public expenditure increased. Opposite impression prevailed, economists convinced themselves that the state was in retreat in the USA. Carter started rearmament, his image was that of a weak president, that counted more than the arms build up.
We are very far from the dream of parliamentary democracy. Liberal democracy, social consciousness and autonomous subjects. There are only dominant perceptions. A society with out citizens is a non-society.
American crises pushing limits of corporatization of interest to the line under which general good is dissolved is an indication of world future.
Japan never tried the age of enlightenment, the celebration of individual and is passing directly from feudal society to modernity. Its success points to the end of politics. Fragmentation of interest finds a counter weight in the memory of common origin. Washington no longer knows how to make decisions. Japan is built on secular customs, not on contracts. Japan is the memory of a society with one party in power for decades , a charade of democracy is practiced with limited confrontation like media jousts of USA.
In advanced democracies voters vote less and politicians have lost respect.
Enlightenment politicians helped to reveal social transcendence in parliamentary ceremony. Nothing is more foreign to our age than the idea of a person independent of networks. We are becoming more and more Japanese with a visiting card replacing baptism. Politeness has replaced politics, it is no longer the veneer, but (social) reality itself. Knowledge does not consist in discovering the truth but in collecting new signs. Rules have replaced principles. We have lost foundations of principles that constituted us as a society. The most we can hope for is to find in memory and ritual a society that is no longer.

Chap 3
Lebanonization
Lebanon after nearly two decades of massacres, stopped taking notice. It was attributed to a taste of violence of its inhabitants. Lesson, let us protect ourselves from these primitive people ( in virtual civil war again in early 21st CAD). Integration of the world must be accompanied by a break from the world of the poor.. Europe must stop immigration from the south (Muslim), but not from the East (Christian). Threshold of tolerance maximum % of immigrants permissible. The principle is likely to be admitted and based not on competence but race, nationality, religion.
Massacre of Muslims in Bosnia, Chechnya, Lebanon and Israel lives in each of us.
Where there is no nation, there is no community, no territorial boundaries and that leads to the search for origins, tell me where you come from.
In the mid-East, water not space is in short supply. People group themselves with tribal identities-Saudi Arabia. Iraq created as state through a war, turned into a police state, unraveled after the US invasion.
In Israel European Jews had secular vision of social contract. Once Kibbutzim failed , it no longer remained a nation, but only a community. Communal logic was viable as long as it did not compete with the national one. Jews were treated better by Muslims than they were by Christians. Community pledged allegiance to dominant power, it was protected. And had a great degree of autonomy., had only to pay a tribute. An entire tribe could change loyalties. If compromise was not possible, nomadism was a way out. Religion was pragmatic.
When the idea of nation was exported from Europe, legitimacy was claimed on its basis. Europeans dismantled the Ottoman Empire and drew “imaginary lines in the boundless desert where tribes were ceaselessly on the move” as Ibne Saud put it.. The only frontier previously had been between Ottoman and Western empires. Inside the Ottoman empire there were no political entities in the European sense. Sunnis, Shias, Maronites, Greek orthodox lived peaceably in their own areas, legitimacy not based on numbers and the countries are still satrapies of the West.
Compromise between communal sharing of power and popular sovereignty did not serve communal tug of war. Civil war ensued between in Lebanon financed by all kinds of trafficking. Dotted lines appeared with in the state separating villages and neighborhoods with terror with terror to achieve clarity in mixed areas.
Palestinians initially did not identify themselves as Christians or Muslim. Jerusalem was eventually Lebanonized. The divide between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel, though not as deep as between Jews and Palestinians in occupied territories negates democracy. Among Israeli youth the idea of expelling Arabs, enemy with in and from occupied territories who sympathize with other Arabs, is gaining currency.
Islamic religious identity appears as a likely recourse in search for identity and Christian Palestinians may turn against them. Israel while taking advantage of the divide betrays the aspirations of its founders. Communal logic has begun to tear up Central and East Europe due to awakening of historical demons restrained by communism.
This is a general crisis of nation state and will spread. Japan succeeded in homogeneity, US failed –melting pot.
Economic evolution requires human integration. Ancient hierarchy of trades, it gradually has been simplified into inventor of knowledge and supervisor of machines. Individuals are too atomized for class struggle those who do not fit into the mold are cast aside like imperfectly manufactured article by quality control.

Chap 4 Empire with out Emperor
We are indeed witnessing the birth of a new empire as it is the idea of empire that most nearly approaches the organization that is emerging resembling a roman or a Chinese dispensation where sovereigns counted far less than the prevalent laws. A universal republic is being unveiled. In a nation-state civil society was a given. The nation-state gave a convenient compromise between determinism of the community and the free will of the citizens. In post nation stage, there is no question more difficult than the definition of body politic. There are no constituted bodies.
We are entering into an age of open systems. In European union on the outside are staunch defenders of the idea of nation as the only democratic frame work. Arrayed against them are Europeanists who start with the world as it is. More than 50% economic regulations are of non-national origin, European commission its principal source. They hope for a united states of Europe with European identity as the American one.
But for such a project to become practical, Europe will have to remain at the sidelines of the great upheaval of our age. Akin to Monroe doctrine it would have to exclude all foreign powers specially the US.. the concept does not correspond to the realities of a network age.
It has no enemy to the East, can’t claim otherness from current Russia. The dispensation would have to include it.
It is difficult to imagine a Europe building a nationalist identity based on difference with the USA. For it to become a nation, it will take a great catastrophe. Common interest on the airbus (UK, France Germany), techno progress for prosperity, not enough to form national interest. A foreign policy must have legitimacy. If Washington can not be reconciled to the interest of TX, CA and NY, can Poles, Italians, French and Norwegians do it. Europe will remain an element in the ensemble of competing institutions, always an abstraction of electronic transaction, as financial markets are. Mergers, acquisitions, takeovers replace wars of conquest, civil wars and partitions. A body politic that would come close to universal would be a negation of politics as we understand it. We should speak of aggregates of networks linked together. European currency would be a highly credible alternative to Dollar and need for coordination will be imperative and will lead to global monetary system-single world currency.
The post national age, imperial in the sense that it will not have frontier that divides space and separates people in an uncertain margin.
The citizen of imperial age follows rules which may be a little different in Washington, Tokyo and London, but still rules not related to sovereignty and network will continually call into question frontiers of legal jurisdiction. Network leads to increasingly efficient connection of network nexus.
The debates of sovereign parliament have been replaced by negotiations between bureaucrats who are not accountable to any government. The world is becoming a gigantic stock exchange of information which never closes, and the more the information, the more the imbalance. This can be seen in MNCs. Each unit of enterprise is grounded in its local network and sufficiently linked to other units.
A certain modicum of transparency, circulation of information, clarity in task definition, smooth function of uncertainty is necessary to maintain dynamism. The primary goal of information is to acquire more information.
The enterprise tries to hold information to maintain advantage over competitors, but needs maximum information to remain competitive itself so has to develop links, so has to seek balance between secrecy and openness.
Managers become intermediaries rather than bosses, adjusting relationships between units. Management is efficient only decentralized. The natural model with spreading branches is replaced by multi-dimensional model based on interlocking data bases.
Consultants, brokers, lawyers, head hunters, advisers function outside the corporation, avoid institutional red tape and avoid the paralysis of large corporation, giving it flexibility. Management groups will come together or break up to lower cost of transaction. Russia may pass directly as Japan did from feudal to post national modernity.
Post national world will be the world of rules rather than that of principles or rulers.
Invisible claims
Democracy associated with liberty a) right of humanity collectively to endow itself with a government which will express its collective will and b) right of individuals to be protected from abuse of power.
Imperial age at best offers limitations of power. The process of concentration of power and a parallel effort to control its exercise will end. The idea of sovereignty and political body lose its attraction. It will be good for liberty. Those who exercised power abused it in the name of the people.
Procedures supposed to permit control of legislature over the executive no longer make much sense. In hearings for appointment to SC, the nominee tries to demonstrate he/she has no opinion on anything. Lawyers, liberty brokers, are priests of a new ritual. The lawyer instead of being of conflicts becomes an engineer of relationships. Democracy multiplied choices-political, and between public and private life. Imperial age abhors chores and parcels out decisions.. conflict becomes a social anomaly. How dare the weak engage in battle when their defeat is inscribed in social order. Weak come to recognize their place.
Decision making takes much longer in Japan than it does in America, but implementation is shorter. Before the decision many points of view in many meetings are expressed with candor. Advancement is based on seniority which is not challenged in discussions. The person who makes his point of view prevail will not advance as in the USA.. the decision in the end will be made by the most senior member-consensus is a myth, though the decision will have been enriched by the discussion.
Operatives are thus taken into confidence of decision making process. Fierce competition and forced compromise characterize Japan business world. Diffusion of power has taken the sting out of conflict. This is not triumph of liberty.
If a question of principles comes up, formality of rules reveals utter fragility.
The imperial age does not set high priority on free men. People are bound by a thousand little almost invisible cords. The great surprise is that we feel we have never been as free.
Why does this liberty leave a taste of ashes in the mouth.

Chap 6 the need for conformity.
The age of institutions separated those who decide from those who obey and organizes conflict to transcend it. The imperial age does not tolerate conflict, it needs similarity. Age of network unlike the age of politics which needed great causes, great power, great politics, does not have such ambitions. The ideal of imperial world is a stable world in which homogeneity is the rule.
In Japan diffusion of information more efficient as society is homogenous. In this world power resides in the social entity itself and in its capacity to exist as a social entity.
In a society in which power is a function of networks, social conductivity becomes essential. Descartes, “ I think, therefore, I am”. Now “I communicate, therefore I am”. Conformity is not a regrettable weakness, but a necessary condition of smooth operation of advanced industrial societies. Conformity is the capacity to avoid dissonance and non-conformity, against conformity of subordination to dominant power which it challenges, and is not a threat. There is only an endless race for uniformity. Iconoclast, the disruptor can shake things up, without threatening any one.
The imperial age is the age of mirrors. Change beyond human control is the driving force of imperial age. The company man instead of principles or conviction, must have reflexes.
A man acquires identity through his club, sport or religion. Money is the ultimate arbiter.
The individual manner of creating rarity is reproduced as advances in science, industry and marketing. Out of uniformity of products differences are produced by permutation and combination so consumer believes that a car or a package holiday is specially made for him.
Profits are made on the notional, and a firm’s most important asset is not quality, but its name. Designers thus enjoy a particular reverence as stars in the entertainment world do. All that is reproducible commands unheard of prices.
The less hierarchal the society is the more the power is diffused, the more necessary imposition of national identity.
The boss defines strategy. Each choice resonates with previous choices.
France has lived off a construct of memory. Thanks to De Gaulle, they convinced themselves that they did resist against Germany in 1944, or they won against the US when they left NATO in 1966. But was this more than a clever illusion.
Student revolt of 1968 showed the limits of illusion. The strength of the idea of a nation was that of being the fruit of history and of being a memory. If the space occupied by the nation is no longer defined by memory, the difference between us and them is the only one left to define a social group.

Chap 7 Religion with out god.
Extreme primitivism joins modernism. Tele-evangelism has succeeded saints. Contrary to Montesquieu the Age of Enlightenment did not lead to death of religion but revival usually in a degraded form. The political sphere is dying today from its own liberation from religion.
Machines represent in the world of things what priests do in the world of gods. Metallic carapace of heroes could represent the armor of middle age knights or robots of electronic age. Ritual prevails over metaphysics. We revere indeterminacy of religion as the last refuge of meaning. Religions are successful as they avoid reason.
In poor or new countries, Islamic and Hindu fundamentalists breathe their energy into disoriented societies and the contrast between lassitude of the West and revolutionary determination of Islamists frightens it. Politics is dying in affluent societies but is being virulently revived in poorer societies. Bureaucratic management of Islamic foundation has been no more effective in Iran than Soviet planning. Iranian revolution owed much to soviet ideology.
Islam does not destroy empires as communism did that of the Czars and exists with out any difficulty with the capitalist system though proscription of usury necessitates camouflage. Islam as a political force is incapable of proposing a global response to the tensions that had fostered its appearance. The failure of the political ambitions of Islam brings it back to its real religious dimension. Islam’s aim is to change consciousness of man, not institutions. Renewal Islam is fueled by frustrations of poverty and rootless ness of large cities. It offers mimicry of a just society at a personal level abandoning it as a political project. This pessimism explains why militants are so intolerant. Their ambition is to c0nstitute a homogenous community of believers more comfortably turned on itself in the refusal of the compromises of politics appeals to conscience. This marriage of religion and politics will perhaps as much affect Islam as Protestantism did Christianity.
In the new imperial age traditional groups are on the wane, leaving helpless individuals. Religion is the only constraint accepted or desired. Having given up the finding solutions to human misfortunes in political humanitarian groups, militants look to public support.
Wealth can not be made universal. Humanitarianism offers the same moral experience to the rich as Islam does to the poor.
Religion in the imperial age inherits the function of a nation of institutional age, divides rather than unites, allows us to escape uniformity and sense of particularity. Success of monotheistic religion owes much to the need to escape isolation. Our problem is of a solitude of a man lost in a crowd.
Islamic intellectuals cobble together a transcendent totality synthesizing koranic Ayah with contemporary science. Japanese accept fragmentation of the world as nature’s given. The group incarnate in the emperor is in itself a divinity. The victory of relations over principles changes the nature of religious vigil. Polytheism has a more of future than monotheism. By religion one must understand not the belief in god , but in sum of rites. There is no incompatibility between abstract globalization and archaism of religious fragmentation.
The disdain for political institutions and insistence on Islamic law is an example of law without state. Religion caters to the difference and thus identity. With religious engagement we recover the feeling of belonging lost due to disappearance of politics. Proliferation of law and religion complement each other. Communism claimed to link the two by conferring meaning on social and historical necessities. The law of the emerging empire has no state, no god-it is atheistic and leaves the field free for religions.

Chap 8 the golden calf
Modern power expresses itself in money, the great unifier of imperial age and its motley of religions. That is why corruption needs to be analyzed as the only religion today. Corruption in the third world countries is seen as a delay in the construction of nation state. In Japan it is attributed to the peculiarity of the Japanese.
In the older countries it is regarded as an anomaly. We don’t ask ourselves if it is a characteristic feature of industrial society.
Power is the capability of mobilizing the knowledge of others. There is no point at which a decision is taken but a series of steps which progressively shape the decision.
In the third world countries big bosses make big decisions which big bribes can influence. In industrialized countries deciders are multiple and targets of corruption many. In a society built on networks competition eliminates the mediocre. But several candidates may be qualified, chosen on the basis of loyalties.
In a world in which power flows from connections rather than from knowledge, one passes from contact to dependency from information to influence. (lobbyists, congressmen, official, lobbyists). The official who commands a good network will make it available to corporation which will eventually recruit him. Japanese call it amakudari (election campaign funding)
Our instinctive rejection of corruption is a relic of the past in which independence of the political sphere was a given. It is naïve to expect a politician to retain high calling of the priest of a vanished religion. Government dare not offer its officials comparable to the private sector. Social prestige has long disappeared. Yielding to corruption is an agreeable way of convincing oneself of one’s value.
By contribution to public authority that businessmen validate the idea that state is respectable only if it resembles an enterprise.
The institutionalization of separate poles of power was a wholly political notion in an age when public interest was supposed to be against private one. Efficiency now demands exactly the opposite. Any demand that is solvent is legitimate, so the golden Calf is supreme divinity.
Exhausted and sickly nations states will condemn corruption only to protect the power left to them.
Proliferation of financial scandals is not anomaly but the triumph of the only universality in money.

Chap 9 Imperial violence
Will the inherited religion prevent us from converging on an a new homogeneity, that will occupy the spaces deserted by politics?
Will we become Asiatic? Will the European model of nation state/democracy disappear. The effect may not be the same in Europe, North America and Asia, as we are alien to uniformity. Frontier will be uncertain unlike the political ones. Violence within the logic of concentration of power has run its course. Nuclear violence unlikely. National age discovered the idea of total war. MAD halted the process. Nuclear deterrence concentrates in one individual power which put every one at risk. In delegating nuclear power to the chief of the state our equality is that of slaves, a far cry from democratic relationship. Nuclear democracies produce passive and cynical citizens.
Dislocation is growing between centralization of power, nuclear deterrence and diffusion of power in the imperial age is a contradiction.
The era we are entering will not produce the concentration of violence of WW I and II. Conflation of absolute of nation state and religion of nationalist, national socialism and communism produced blood baths.
Logic of network better able to prevent rather than resolve disputes. Max Weber-states have the monopoly of violence. Vulnerability of networked societies to outside violence will be wedded to sophistication of weaponry. Blurring the distinction between public and private violence. Police forces will be charged with enforcing norms rather than expression of sovereignty.
Weakening of certain states and rise of private armies (drug dealers, security agencies-Black water) muddy the distinction between state and private violence. Armies privatized in former Yugoslavia. Criminalization of politics and politicization of crime, non-attributability of terrorist acts to state (WW I 8/1/1914-18, WW II, 9/1/ 1939-44).
It will be an age of diffuse and continuous violence and security will be very difficult to enforce.
Wealth unlinked with territory, so no need to invade (except as agents of MNCs on recalcitrant countries) .Isolation of violence will fail due to globalization of population, pollution and spread of WMDs. Wars will have no front. The empire will secrete its own barbarians. No error is irreparable but every error has consequences. Circulation of a few KG of Plutonium would be intolerable.

Chap 10 The Imperial Age11/9/1989 fall of Berlin wall.
We no longer know exactly who are the enemies. Totalitarianism was identifiable. We are deprived of the idea of liberty in the imperial age.
8/2/90 invasion of Kuwait. Invasion of Iraq was a video game., the dead in Iraq were a vague statistics. Chief center of government was control and management of public opinion at home, as much as conduct of battle. The mutineers were crushed and simultaneously punished. There is a race between the spread of techno and networks, former spreads violence, latter halts it.. how long can the west keep techno edge. Imperial world will become prey to fanaticism. And will fanaticism be more formidable than organized violence of nations. Logic of nation state will co-exist with the logic of imperialism for a while.
Men never separated from cell phones. Malls have replaced Cathedrals. Consumption is on display. All encounters are mediated by the $ sign. Imperial world is a process, not an ideology.
When will we be liberated from the tyranny of progress?
Communism conferred meaning on work of all men, tried to put an end to history by inventing a truth out of social relations.
We have to accomplish a spiritual revolution.
The very scale of upheavals demonstrated that institutionalization of power in nation state and democracy, has sufficient flexibility to adapt to perpetual change.
The end of politics will not necessarily entail a renunciation of reason and return to passion. But we must find wisdom again to preserve independence of spirit from dictators and impoverishment of conscience.
1996-2000 nation states are not stronger. Sub-Saharan Africa subject to massive genocide-Rwanda. Russia eludes the influence of central powers. Hyperinflation deprived the state of budgetary power. Assets have been liquidated and proceeds taken out (Putin managed to reverse the process-partially). For a while corruption remained the only link between economics and politics.
Under old imperialism, you either extended your frontiers or see them shrink.
European union is confronted with the question of its limits. Particularism of nation states was founded upon exclusiveness of religious universalism from the political sphere.
How would Russia adapt to exclusion from Europe. It is impossible to either exclude it or include it. US of Europe with Russia in it can not be formed. Russia would be too powerful. EU and Russia could develop relations of interdependence till further definition.
US hesitates between isolation and openness which it can not control. US involvement in the world has been due to strategic imperatives.
Competition from other countries and migration of poverty and terrorism, it has become impossible to control the world, as has to ignore it.
Laws and institutions are an essential condition of liberty, but not by themselves, that human community is a sort of complicated clock, and it is sufficient to oil its cogs.
Institutions have to be adopted to the new globality and new political forms have to be invented.
Human community is a political and a philosophical notion. Having lost the comfort of geographical boundaries its must rediscover bonds which constitute a community.
We must concentrate on observation of elements that create society-relation of female and male, parents, children, change, family values, knowledge and education, work and leisure, mid to old age. 20th CAD made more changes than the millennium that preceded it.
The ambition of discovery of the truth about society and deducing ideal political structures from it have much to do with the power of two totalitarianisms-communism and Nazism. We must continue to cast the objective gaze of a savant on social phenomenon. We can not pretend to escape from human collectivity.. Our awareness of our ignorance must increase…proportional to the extension of our knowledge. All political forms are precarious and contingent.
State, nation and democracy have been our reference points for two centuries. Techno by enhancing networks increases the capacity for good and evil.