Tag Archives: nation-states

Blog

Iceland’s Modern Media Initiative

Remember that law that was intended to enshrine Iceland as a ‘haven’ for journalistic free speech? Well, it passed unanimously last night.

As mentioned before, a law being passed in one small country doesn’t change certain basic facts about how international law operates (nor the politics pulling the strings thereof), but it’s good to see a nation-state upholding the values I hold dear, and which appear to be increasingly unpopular with the bigger players on the world stage.

But then again, Iceland was pretty thoroughly reamed by the economic implosion, and unlike the rest of us, there was no bailout to be had. Maybe that’s what it takes to get a nation to start thinking straight… tough love, Jerry. Tough love.

Now, if Iceland wanted to start selling shares in its national identity to individuals (and hence, by extension, protection by said laws), I think a pretty big queue of geeks and wonks would form right now… myself among them.

Blog

Nation-state gives way to city-state?

2 Comments

More future politics, courtesy SlashDot: excerpts from a speech by John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (and former Grateful Dead songsmith), in which he states that the mechanics of national government in the US is failing because it’s swamped by too much data, and that a move back to the city-state model may be on the cards:

“The political system is broken partly because of Internet,” Barlow said. “It’s made it impossible to govern anything the size of the nation-state. We’re going back to the city-state. The nation-state is ungovernably information-rich.”

[…]

Barlow also said that President Barack Obama’s election, driven largely by small donations, has fundamentally changed American politics. He said a similar bottom-up structure is needed for governing as well.

“It’s not the second coming, everything won’t get better overnight, but that made it possible to see a future where it wasn’t simply a matter of money to define who won these things,” Barlow said. “The government could finally start belonging to people eventually.”

[…]

“There is a circle of fat around the Beltway that is incredibly thick” Barlow said. “We can no longer try to run this country from the center. We’ve got to run it, just like the Internet, from the edges.”

I expect Barlow’s quintessential hippie credentials will invalidate his ideas for some, but I think he’s on to something here. I’m no mathematician, but I suspect that the resources needed to maintain centralised control of any system will rise exponentially in proportion to the complexity and size of said system; in effect, we’re trying to run huge nations using software that can’t scale up effectively enough to cope.

However, I’m not naive enough to think that governments will be keen to devolve into federations of city-states; large systems gain a sort of momentum, and develop subroutines to protect their integrity and position of control. But perhaps the economic phase shift that some pundits are saying is just round the corner will leave them with little choice; at some point, it may simply be the path of least resistance (not to mention least resource expenditure) to let small communities hive off and self-manage within the loose framework of a (global? continental?) federal constitution. As Barlow points out, we have the technology to make such a world possible; it’s the lock-in compatibility issues of the current socio-politicall operating system that will prevent such a change from happening.

Related: responding to the UK government’s sudden embracing of transparency, Aditya Chakrabortty at The Guardian wonders whether it’s going to do as much good as its advocates hope:

Who could be against see-through government? After all, it feels so democratic and bipartisan (civil servants privately admit that they had already prepared the pay document for former Labour minister Liam Byrne), and it feels so modish and internet-friendly. But the mistake that is being made here is assuming that merely pumping out information is an end in itself, which doesn’t require context or any consideration of what it’s in aid of.

That might sound odd coming from a journalist, but it’s an argument that’s gaining traction in other quarters too. Last year, the American legal scholar Larry Lessig wrote an essay called Against Transparency. It made precisely the opposite case that you might expect from a stalwart of the transparency movement. In the face of all Barack Obama’s promises of greater openness, Lessig argued that more and more information released “unqualified or unrestrained by other considerations” would be harmful both to political debate and in the end to the ability of government to get things done (the example he used was campaign donations).

[ We talked about the Lessig article here at the time. ]

Beyond the bash-the-public-sector headlines, all this transparency is most helpful to those who are already able and willing to use it – that is, with the internet connections and time to sift through all the data. And, researchers have found, those tend to be the same relatively well-off and highly educated people who are already pretty well served by the public sector. As Tobias Escher at Oxford University puts it: “You end up giving more of a voice to those who already have pretty good representation.“

There’s also another concern, namely the sizeable number of people who simply don’t care to find out how their government works, though one might argue that they’ve dug their own hole. But the point remains – transparency isn’t going to be a panacea to the problems of large-scale nation-state governance. If anything, it’s just providing greater amounts of evidence for the underlying problem: a system too large and complex for anyone to fully understand, let alone begin to fix. That said, I’d rather the data was available than not, even if it’s analysed primarily for pillorying the public sector for headline-worthy misdemeanours (while more complex but fundamental issues are ignored because they lack a narrative hook or easy non-partisan explanation).

The times, they are a-changin’

Blog

Thomas Barnett on post-national identity

1 Comment

Many thanks to one Gregory Lemieux for dropping me an email with a link to an article by political strategist Thomas P M Barnett, which he rightly identified as touching on “issues of post-national identity […] that are presented regularly on your site”*. It’s an interesting piece all over: Barnett is an advocate and defender of globalization, and he suggests that the push-back against it – what he calls the “friction” – is a function of “a fear-poisoned dialogue that frequently casts globalization’s expansion in zero-sum terms, when it is anything but.”

While I’m going to withold my judgement on that idea (as it’s a topic I just don’t know enough about at this point), the segment highlighted by Lemieux is very interesting… and, indeed, very Futurismic:

… while I do believe that “resistance [to globalization] is futile” in the collective sense, I do not believe that’s the case in the individual sense. In fact, the fundamental task I foresee for political leaders the world over is to foster a culture of what I call “progressive enclavism”: the ability of their citizens to lead lives of cross-cutting connectivity — across borders, cultures, industries, domains, etc. — while simultaneously retreating, however frequently they desire, into enclaved activities and lifestyles that nurture and sustain their preferred definitions of identity. In essence, I’m describing a personal resiliency based on balancing multiple-but-reinforcing identities.

[…]

I can foresee a future, for example, where my passport bears a resemblance to a stock portfolio, identifying me as majority-share American with minority shares in, say, China (where one of my children is from) and East Africa (from where another two will soon come). I’ll be willing to pay to maintain that portfolio, because I will find profound meaning in being able to say that my family’s blended identity connects me to all these enclaves — whether they’re called nations or unions or federations. My identity “shares” could logically also connect me to enclaves based on my religious preference, my preferred mix of technology, my willingness to alter my body to extend lifespan, and so on.

John Steinbeck famously said, “Texas is a state of mind.” I’d add that everybody has their own private “Texas,” which they want to add to their mix, whether they live there full-time or not.

Globalization as a planet of atomised but interconnected cultures that can be moved between freely, as opposed to a lockstep planet of monolithic corporate or state hegemonies… a science fictional idea, maybe, but one that offers an appealing alternative to some of the grimmer political futures on offer at the moment, at least from where I’m sitting.

[ * As a side note, that’s exactly how you pitch a link to blog editor, folks. I get maybe four or five “hey, check this out and link to it, PLZ!” emails every week here at Futurismic, but most of them are so wide of the site’s purview – if not ineptly written, or part of a bulk mailshot, or both – that they go straight into the trash folder. Word to the wise. ]

Blog

Nation-building 101

Fancy starting up your own micronation? It’s not enough to just think up a flag and occupy your turf; there’s paperwork to be done. Luckily, Wired UK has a four-point beginner’s guide, as suggested by former UN strategy co-ordinator  Carne Ross, to get you started. Step one:

Play by the rules – Meet the criteria outlined in Article 1 of the 1933 Montevideo Convention (which applies to all subjects of international law): a permanent population; defined territory, and control of the territory; the capacity to enter into relations with other states. These are not binding — “You can have a state which is recognised by many other states but does not control its territory, such as Palestine” — but generally it would be hard to operate without them .

Once you’re up and running, drop me a line with any further tips, would you? I’m also available for diplomacy work on a contract basis.

Blog

Cash for coastlines: Germany suggests Greece sell islands to balance the books

1 Comment

Further indications of the corrosive effect of corporatist economics on the nation-state: German politicians suggest to Greece that it balance the books by hocking off a few spare islands and a national monument or two [via BLDGBLOG]:

Alongside austerity measures such as cuts to public sector pay and a freeze on state pensions, why not sell a few uninhabited islands or ancient artefacts, asked Josef Schlarmann, a senior member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, and Frank Schaeffler, a finance policy expert in the Free Democrats.

The Acropolis and the Parthenon could also fall under the hammer, along with temptingly idyllic Aegean islands still under state ownership, in a rush to keep bankruptcy at bay.

“Those in insolvency have to sell everything they have to pay their creditors,” Schlarmann told Bild newspaper. “Greece owns buildings, companies and uninhabited islands, which could all be used for debt redemption.”

Greece here is being explicitly viewed as a corporation, one whose assets include rights of sovereignty over areas of the planet’s surface which could be valued and sold in order to pay off monetary dets; how short a step is it viewing the corporation as a nation? Let’s say UberMunsterLagerNeu! Schallplatten Gmbh* buys a few of those Greek islands; would they be any more or less a legitimate nation in terms of actual excercisable and enforcable rights than the Dominican Republic, or Sealand? And if so, why?

[ * If you need to ask whether this is a real company name, you probably need a day or two away from the internet. 🙂 ]