Tag Archives: nation-states

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Are great powers the product of tough neighbourhoods?

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Richard Gowan of Global Dashboard points us to the blog of one Dhruva Jaishankar, who’s wondering whether the ability for states to project power is a function of the stability of their political surroundings. Turns out there are historical examples to the contrary: Europe, Japan and China, for instance.

Exhibit C. China. The growth of China is a remarkable story, but once again it has come despite—not because of—its political relationships with its neighbours. Certainly, China has not had a significant conflict since 1979 and it has settled many of its land boundary disputes. However, it continues to have uneasy relations with almost all its neighbours, including a sizeable dispute with its largest regional competitor, India. It also has one of the most unstable states in the world—North Korea—immediately bordering it. And the military presence of the world’s preeminent power in its region severely limits its actions. None of this, however, has stopped China’s rapid rise.

If you’re thinking “yeah, so what?”, then consider the fairly universal expectation that there’s more political and economic disorder coming down the pipeline, thanks to things like climate change, resource shortages and disruptive technologies. As such, predicting the next generation of global players is not a clear-cut game; nation-states we currently overlook for an assortment of reasons may jockey to the fore, while the pre-race favourites fall at early fences.

For example, what happens if a nation-state strengthens itself economically and politically by taking on all the jobs that the citizens of more fortunate states object to? Call it YIMBYism [via BoingBoing]: let the big boys outsource their problem jobs to you, and alongside the money you get political leverage (and a whole raft of vested interests in maintaining and/or manipulating the status quo to boot).

This works for corporations, too; think of all the mercenary outfits like Blackwater who’ve been taking on the dirty work in democracy- and stability-exporting (ho-ho-ho) conflicts around the world. Comparatively small change for a big nation’s military budget, but big money for a small post-national organisation, who – as a bonus, or perhaps as they intended all along, depending on the ambition and longsightedness of their founders – also get access to the broken and corrupt power systems in the areas where they’re employed.

I think it’d be interesting to look at this on a more local scale as well – zooming in to the level of states and counties, say, or even further in to urban neighbourhoods. How does power and advantage shift in a city like Sao Paolo, for instance, with its rapidly shifting map of interstitial favelas?

Yet another subject to add to the list of “stuff I’d love a small research grant to cover”…

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Redrawing the globe with the city at its heart

Very sincere thanks to @polgrim for flagging up this excellent article at ForeignPolicy.com. It’s like a heaped plate of geopolitical and socioeconomic Zeitgeist, full of favourite Futurismic riffs like the decline of the nation-state, the weakening of the “first-world” West, the shift toward urban living and the possibilities – good and bad – of rethinking the way we approach these things.

Be sure to read the whole thing (it’ll probably take you maybe twenty minutes max, and it’s worth every second), but here’s a chunk that made my brain chime like a temple bell:

Accelerating this shift toward new regional centers of gravity are port cities and entrepôts such as Dubai, the Venices of the 21st century: “free zones” where products are efficiently re-exported without the hassles of government red tape. Dubai’s recent real-estate overreach notwithstanding, emerging city-states along the Persian Gulf are investing at breakneck speed in efficient downtown business districts, offering fast service and tax incentives to relocate. Look for them to use sovereign wealth funds to acquire the latest technology from the West, buy up tracts of agricultural land in Africa to grow their food, and protect their investments through private armies and intelligence services.

Alliances of these agile cities are already forming, reminiscent of that trading and military powerhouse of the late Middle Ages, the Hanseatic League along the Baltic Sea. Already, Hamburg and Dubai have forged a partnership to boost shipping links and life-sciences research, while Abu Dhabi and Singapore have developed into a new commercial axis. No one is waiting for permission from Washington to make deals. New pairings among global cities follow the markets: Witness the new Doha to Sao Paulo direct flight on Qatar Airways or the Buenos Aires to Johannesburg route on South African Airways. When traffic between New York and Dubai dried up due to the financial crisis, Emirates airlines rerouted its sleek Airbus A380 planes to Toronto, whose banking system survived the economic shake-up in better shape.

And another:

Consider how aggressively Chinese cities have now begun to bypass Beijing as they send delegates en masse to conferences and fairs where they can attract foreign investment. By 2025, China is expected to have 15 supercities with an average population of 25 million (Europe will have none). Many will try to emulate Hong Kong, which though once again a Chinese city rather than a British protectorate, still largely defines itself through its differences with the mainland. What if all China’s supercities start acting that way? Or what if other areas of the country begin to demand the same privileges as Dalian, the northeastern tech center that has become among China’s most liberal enclaves? Will Beijing really run China then? Or will we return to a fuzzier modern version of the “Warring States” period of Chinese history, in which many poles of power competed in ever-shifting alliances?

Centralised governance is done; stick a fork in it. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold… but “mere anarchy” might not be the horror that Yeats expected it to be. We’re adaptable critters, us humans; we’d do well to remember that.

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Defining society: the anthropologist’s dilemma

Keith Hart think’s he’s uncovered anthropolgy’s biggest challenge, and the issue that’s hampering its progress as a science: defining the word ‘society’ in a way that makes sense for the times we live in.

I believe that humanity is caught precariously in transition between two notions of where society is located, the nation-state and the world. The dominance of the former in the 20th century fed the ethnographic revolution in anthropology which, rather than following the needs of colonial empire as is commonly assumed, was in fact an attempt to make the national model of society universal by finding its principles everywhere, even in so-called primitive societies. These principles included cultural homogeneity, a bounded location and an ahistorical presumption of eternity. The centrality of the state to such a concept of nation was negated by the study of stateless societies in these terms.

Clearly world society is not yet a fact in the same sense as its principal predecessor. But the need to make a world society fit for all humanity to live in is urgent for many reasons that I don’t need to spell out. Retention of ethnography (which first emerged in Central Europe to serve a nation-building project) as our main professional model has made most of us apologists for a fragmented and static vision of the human predicament, reinforcing a rejection of world history that amounts to nothing less than, “Stop the world, I want to get off”. We no longer study exotic rural places in isolation from history, but, in abandoning that exclusive preoccupation, we have failed to bring the object, theory and method of anthropology up to date.

Note the similarities to concerns about the nation-state as dominant identifier coming from all sorts of other disciplines (as frequently documented on this ‘ere blog, among other places). Nationality is increasingly coming to be seen as the hollow sham it has always been. Think about it: the problem with identifying with a nation is that you’re identifying with nothing more than a word and a piece of multicoloured cloth. The ideological continuity that nationality implies is a complete fiction: if I’m “proud to be English”, am I proud of the same things Churchill would have held dear? Is it the citizens of England I identify with, or its values and laws, or even the physical ground itself, that territory which is no longer the map? None of these things are constants; they are different now to how they were a year ago, a decade ago, a century ago. No one chose where to be born… so why this fanaticism for a fluke of geography and childhood survival statistics? You don’t see people born on a Wednesday singing anthems about the wonderfulness and well-earned superiority of Wednesdays, do you?

“England” (or “America”, or “China”, or or or… ) is a hollow word, and the vacuum at its heart is easily filled by people with agendas that have nothing to do with bringing people together. You don’t bring people together by labelling them, by gathering them beneath a banner; that’s the definition of segregation. Nationality is at best meaningless, and at worst extremely dangerous. Nationality is apartheid.  It’s an idea that makes no logical sense in a networked world, where geography increasingly constrains only your individual access to physical resources. Until we get past the idea of ‘society’ being something to which we may belong, but to which some (most!) other humans do not, solutions to all our most pressing problems as a species will continue to elude us.

My two cents, there. 🙂

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SocNets and nation-states: a comparison

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Via Bruce Sterling, a piece at The Economist compares Facebook’s population and social character to that of a nation-state:

In some ways, it might seem absurd to call Facebook a state and Mr Zuckerberg its governor. It has no land to defend; no police to enforce law and order; it does not have subjects, bound by a clear cluster of rights, obligations and cultural signals. Compared with citizenship of a country, membership is easy to acquire and renounce. Nor do Facebook’s boss and his executives depend directly on the assent of an “electorate” that can unseat them. Technically, the only people they report to are the shareholders.

But many web-watchers do detect country-like features in Facebook. “[It] is a device that allows people to get together and control their own destiny, much like a nation-state,” says David Post, a law professor at Temple University. If that sounds like a flattering description of Facebook’s “groups” (often rallying people with whimsical fads and aversions), then it is worth recalling a classic definition of the modern nation-state. As Benedict Anderson, a political scientist, put it, such polities are “imagined communities” in which each person feels a bond with millions of anonymous fellow-citizens. In centuries past, people looked up to kings or bishops; but in an age of mass literacy and printing in vernacular languages, so Mr Anderson argued, horizontal ties matter more.

Sterling himself describes it as “handwavey and misleading”, but there’s a core of pertinence: huge horizontal networks of people, disconnected from geographical restraints, with the potential for a self-sustaining internal economy. Facebook couldn’t play on the world stage just yet, but it’s early in the day for the network-as-collective-entity… and late in the evening for the nation-state.

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Is manned space flight a waste of money?

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Sending humans into space is an admirable civilisational goal, but is the expense of nation-state funded projects justifiable? Britain’s Astronomer Royal Martin Rees would argue that it’s not:

“The moon landings were an important impetus to technology but you have to ask the question, what is the case for sending people back into space?” said Rees. “I think that the practical case gets weaker and weaker with every advance in robotics and miniaturisation. It’s hard to see any particular reason or purpose in going back to the moon or indeed sending people into space at all.”

[…]

Speaking to Cambridge Ideas, Rees remained enthusiastic about manned space travel, but thought it would be rather different in style from what we have seen before.

“I hope indeed that some people now living will walk on Mars, but I think they will do this with the same motive as those who climb Everest or the pioneer explorers,” he said.

“I think the future for manned space exploration will be a cut-price, high-risk programme – perhaps even partly privately funded – which would be an adventure, more than anything practical,” he said.

Not everyone agrees, of course – including the Obama administration, China, India and the European Space Agency. But I think Rees has a point, in that nation-states aren’t going to provide the main thrust of such projects in the long run, at least not in the West; they’re too risk-averse to pull it off within budget. Commerce will be the driving force, if there is one… as suggested in Jason Stoddard’s Winning Mars, perhaps.