- The most momentous development of our era, precisely, is the waning of the nation state: its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstance. National political authority is in decline, and, since we do not know any other sort, it feels like the end of the world. This is why a strange brand of apocalyptic nationalism is so widely in vogue. But the current appeal of machismo as political style, the wall-building and xenophobia, the mythology and race theory, the fantastical promises of national restoration – these are not cures, but symptoms of what is slowly revealing itself to all: nation states everywhere are in an advanced state of political and moral decay from which they cannot individually extricate themselves.
Why is this happening? In brief, 20th-century political structures are drowning in a 21st-century ocean of deregulated finance, autonomous technology, religious militancy and great-power rivalry. Meanwhile, the suppressed consequences of 20th-century recklessness in the once-colonised world are erupting, cracking nations into fragments and forcing populations into post-national solidarities: roving tribal militias, ethnic and religious sub-states and super-states. Finally, the old superpowers’ demolition of old ideas of international society – ideas of the “society of nations” that were essential to the way the new world order was envisioned after 1918 – has turned the nation-state system into a lawless gangland; and this is now producing a nihilistic backlash from the ones who have been most terrorised and despoiled.
The result? For increasing numbers of people, our nations and the system of which they are a part now appear unable to offer a plausible, viable future. This is particularly the case as they watch financial elites – and their wealth – increasingly escaping national allegiances altogether. Today’s failure of national political authority, after all, derives in large part from the loss of control over money flows. At the most obvious level, money is being transferred out of national space altogether, into a booming “offshore” zone. These fleeing trillions undermine national communities in real and symbolic ways. They are a cause of national decay, but they are also a result: for nation states have lost their moral aura, which is one of the reasons tax evasion has become an accepted fundament of 21st-century commerce.
More dramatically, great numbers of people are losing all semblance of a national home, and finding themselves pitched into a particular kind of contemporary hell. Seven years after the fall of Gaddafi’s dictatorship, Libya is controlled by two rival governments, each with its own parliament, and by several militia groups fighting to control oil wealth. But Libya is only one of many countries that appear whole only on maps. Since 1989, barely 5% of the world’s wars have taken place between states: national breakdown, not foreign invasion, has caused the vast majority of the 9 million war deaths in that time. And, as we know from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Syria, the ensuing vacuum can suck in firepower from all over the world, destroying conditions for life and spewing shell-shocked refugees in every direction. Nothing advertises the crisis of our nation-state system so well, in fact, as its 65 million refugees – a “new normal” far greater than the “old emergency” (in 1945) of 40 million. The unwillingness even to acknowledge this crisis, meanwhile, is appropriately captured by the contempt for refugees that now drives so much of politics in the rich world.
Populism is the natural backlash against globalism. This has been in motion since the mid '90s; Americans know the 1999 Seattle protests but they were the fourth or fifth year in a row in which there were immolations, riots, suicides and protests. It's hardly the "end" of anything - America, for example, had to overcome decades of isolationism before it could get involved in WWI. Populism did pick up a lot of steam last year, which is probably why the Guardian is just now noticing it.
Interestingly, where the author sees despair here, I see hope. The financial revolution wasn't a revolution like the American revolution or the French. It was a bunch of rich people convincing politicians that they could make more people rich if only they could further enrich themselves ("Greed is good" and all that). Unfortunately, only the latter part came to pass. The reason this makes me hopeful is that this "revolution" isn't the result of social pressure, but rather just a series of changes in the law that could be changes again if the political will were there. I've said before that I seem to be one of a very few people who think that are problems are eminently more solvable than they seem. The majority of our issues boil down to bad financial and economic policy (which the author, IMO, correctly points out), and those policies can therefore be replaced, since all laws are contrived by legislatures (which the author seems hopeless about). We needn't throw out the baby with the bathwater. The upside of globalization is that literally billions of people have been brought out of extreme poverty in the last couple decades. It's close to miraculous, and we shouldn't forget about that when having these debates. However, in the global age what we need are not only good domestic laws, but enforceable treaties that ensure that we can stem the race to the bottom that's been happening internationally for thirty odd years (interestingly, a similar thing has been happening between states here in the US as well). I was fairly bullish on TPP, because I actually thought that it was a step in a positive direction on international trade. Clearly I was in the minority on that (and in fairness I think there were very serious and well founded reservations about it). The system of trade we have developed has created a huge amount of wealth in the world, and that's a good thing. It's up to us to demand that our politicians create better mechanisms for broad based economic buy in. Trump will not get us there, but the silver lining of his presidency may be that he creates an awakening that could.The destruction of state authority over capital has of course been the explicit objective of the financial revolution that defines our present era. As a result, states have been forced to shed social commitments in order to reinvent themselves as custodians of the market. This has drastically diminished national political authority in both real and symbolic ways. Barack Obama in 2013 called inequality “the defining challenge of our time”, but US inequality has risen continually since 1980, without regard for his qualms or those of any other president.
Thinking about Power with Powers, an Analogy Let's define a CitizenPowerUnit where n -> how many governmental levels you have hopped up the chain n equals 1 -> your local municipal government This is obviously made up and bullshit, but it does reflect the argument that citizens get absolutely fucked as far as influence as you layer on more levels of government. Bookchin: d e c e n t e r a l i z e I've been reading Bookchin this week, which is kinda timely I guess? Basically he argues we move in the opposite direction: a confederacy of municipal governments. I think(? only haflway through my book) that he argues for a structure where policy would be set by municipal councils working in isolation, and then executed by a parallel structure of municipal administrative councils that would mesh together to form blocs as needed to achieve the scale necessary for execute various policies. On the one hand... also utopian. On the other, it seems fairly in line with developments like crypto currency and open source development. Also kind a cyberpunk, which as we've covered earlier, is cool. CPU = 100^(1/n)