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 World Transforming 

Nation States have not always been the defining way the globe's very essence has been divided up. In fact -- a transcendent thought here -- the Earth has not always been divided or even conceived as property. That in itself is an entrenched culturally structured idea one needs to step back from to recognize.

I want to recall the global map I found at the Wiki site on colonialization, and just have it here to look at it for a moment, because it shows a world of conceptual changes from 1492-2007, tracing those changes through the heart of the period of Europe's colonializing of the rest of the globe, and how that transformed from colonial territories to nation states through that period. Consider that in 1492, much of the world was not defined as nation states:

   (click on map to see larger image)

Now here's what I want to call to attention from this: we are always in a period of transition. I argue that the ideas in Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man published fifteen years ago is already history. Just look at the wealth of ideas presented as criticism. It's not easy to keep that sense of ongoing process and change in mind. It's almost a spiritual self-awareness that one must actively cultivate in an ongoing meditation with life. As a child it's not uncommon for most of us to assume the world we encounter and learn is the world as it's always been, and that "attitude" that tends to be inherent in that process can be hard to shake, even as we age and find out differently from our own direct experience and memory. The nation states we think of as defining the world we live in today may not -- I'd suspect will not -- remain as they are, just as they have not, and transitions will continue to occur in ways that will be as surprising to us now as they may have been to our forebears. I don't pretend to be the only one with these thoughts, and here is only one of many one would find: Globalization and the Nation State.

I acknowledge that the following is grossly oversimplified, but just to offer a broad structural overview to work with: Pre colonialism, where much of the globe was not defined, we can find such descriptions of Kingdoms, empires and such, some of which transformed to these geographic expansion entities through colonializing ("the sun never sets on the British Empire," and such) and that transformed into cases where colonies became independent nation states, just as the US did in the late 1700s. The above global map with its colored patterns showing the increase to colonies, then the decrease to what amounts to nation states, illustrates that pattern.

Recognize, too, that this overview is uniquely EuroAmerican-Centric. In regards to that I want to call attention to a book by anthropologist Eric R. Wolf who, himself, as an anthropologist conscious of this ethno centric thought process, calls attention to this important feature in the make up of our world views with the title of his classic and important analysis of this period of history: Europe and the People Without History


 

If there are connections everywhere, why do we persist in turning dynamic, interconnected phenomena into static, disconnected things? Some of this is owing, perhaps, to the way we have learned our own history. We have been taught, inside the classroom and outside of it, that there exists an entity called the West, and that one can think of this West as a society and civilization independent of and in opposition to other societies and civilizations. Many of us even grew up believing that this West has a genealogy, according to which ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry, crossed with democracy, in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (Wolf 1982:5).

Excerpts from a  third person overview of the process Wolf's  book:
 

Since social sciences emerged as an antidote to revolution and disorder, social scientist must have instruments for the analysis of the world system. Wolf points out three main aspects:

First, we shall not understand the present world unless we trace the growth of the world market and the course of capitalist development. Second, we must have a theory of the growth and development. Third, we must be able to relate both the history and theory of that unfolding development to process that affect and change the lives of local populations.

Wolf understood mode of production as “the major way in which human beings organize their production”, which also implies the relation of nature and human being. The capitalist mode of production came to being when monetary wealth was enabled to buy labor power, in a social relation. In this process of production, the product of the labor is alienated from the laborer. The three characteristics of the capitalist mode of production are: 1) control of means of production, 2) buy and sell labor, without access to the means of production of the laborer, and 3) a process of ceaseless accumulation of capital.

And the mercantile wealth was extracted in three ways: a) buying stocks of surplus from tributary overlords and providing goods in return, b) open exchange with primary gatherers and producers, and c) trading slaves. In the process of European expansion, mercantile wealth pioneered routes of circulation and opened up channels of exchange.

After 1,000 A.D. Europe began its political consolidation through 1) war abroad for the extraction of tribute, 2) commerce through the discovery of source internally and externally either by trade or war, and 3) enlarging the royal domain from where the king draw direct support without intermediaries. With the formation of states and the expansion of Portugal, Castile-Aragon (Spain), the international circuits of mercantile wealth and the united provinces of France and England helped the consolidation of Europe after the sixteenth century.

The beginning of state formation in the regions of Kongo, Benin and the Gold Coast facilitate the formation of a dominant class and the domination of other sector of the population as potential slaves. The introduction of firearm by the Turkish of the Ottoman Empire and latter by the Europeans, became important in the acquisition of captives, helping the trade of slaves. Areas of slave supply were: 1) West Africa: The Gold Coast, Oyo and Dahomey, Benin, The Niger Delta; 2) Central Africa: The Kingdom of Kongo, Imbangala, Luba-Lunda, Ivory and Slaving in Eastern Africa, The Bemba.

The industrial revolution changed the mercantile production of textile into capital with purchasing machines and row material on the one hand, and buying human energy to power their operation on the other hand. The industrial production moved England to a capitalist mode of production. The Dutch and Indian competition in the textile production could not compete with the English, with a rural cheap labor and mechanized production.

The new entrepreneurs began to compete with control of finishing, the production of improved yarn and new machine. Concentration of labor in factories came to take place but conflict between Irish and English workers intensified. India and England imported cotton from the United States and South America, in plantation with slaves labor. Egypt also supplied cotton for the production of English textile. The English and Indian textile industry in Bombay was the vehicle to the capitalist mode of production.
Now capitalism created two zones: the core and the periphery. It brought the entire world under its dominance in a hierarchical system with the use of capital as stock of wealth and strategic financial element combined with machinery, raw materials, and labor power. Regional specialization in the world took place in the production of row material, food crop, or stimulant, demanding a mechanism of social articulation. Different faces of acceleration and deceleration of capitalism produced a great depression in the USA, in the nineteenth century, with direct and indirect effect in the specialized regions.
The history of capitalism in the social science had been the history of the elite. Until recently historians moved toward the writing of processual and relational history of the working classes as well as the history of people contacted by the European expansion.

By Noëlle Burgi and Philip S. Golub
Le Monde Diplomatique
April 2000



For 200 years capitalism was inextricably linked to the nation state. It emerged in the form of national markets, was based on national territories and relied on the state for support. Two nation states - Britain in the 19th century and the United States in the 20th - successively formed the hegemonic core of capitalism: each of them set the technological pace, set the rules of trade and production, and imposed the constraints of the world system. According to current wisdom, however, the bond between the nation state and capitalism is now coming to an end. Globalisation is said to be making the nation state obsolete, politics irrelevant and national sovereignty an empty shell.

This alleged demise of the nation state and national sovereignty is part and parcel of the universalist claims of contemporary capitalism. For the first time in history, capitalism has spread its reach to the remotest parts of the world and posits itself as a global system. Neither British capitalism in the 19th century nor even the American post-1945 version was truly universal. Today, capitalism is said to have finally broken away from its national moorings. It has become, as it were, extra-territorial, rootless, identity-less.

Hence the withering away of the nation state. Reduced to a managerial role in which it strives to cope with economic constraints that are beyond its control, it watches helplessly as the balance of forces swings towards the global markets. Within its historical borders it has ceased to be the locus of political action and identity, of social cohesion and the general interest. Beyond its frontiers it often retains only the formal attributes of sovereignty. In short, the state is supposed to have become, at best, just one among a number of otherwise private players in the international system. At worst, to have lost control altogether and to be no longer capable of influencing the course of events.

This view is particularly fashionable in Europe, where unification is proceeding by way of agreed transfers of sovereignty, but it does not stand up to an analysis of the origins of globalisation. It ignores the decisive role of the state in creating the global free market paradigm. It conceals the underlying aims of social policy. And it fails to appreciate the balance of power in the international system resulting from globalisation. Though in many parts of the world the state has indeed lost control, the fact remains that the American state has not withered away in the new free market utopia. On the contrary, US hegemony and sovereignty have been strengthened in spectacular fashion. In Europe, state power has been redeployed in accordance with the logic of globalisation to achieve economic unification. While the role of the state has been redefined (at the cost of growing social hardship), there has been no automatic weakening of state power.

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There is much lamenting over the powerlessness of national governments. Yet these very governments are contributing fully to the elaboration and implementation of the new hegemonic political economy. They have chosen to participate actively, rather than simply adapt (11), and are acting simultaneously at national, regional, local and European levels to redefine the rules in line with current neoliberal dogma and practice. The role of EU institutions has been less to usurp national sovereignty than to enable the member states to pursue their national interests by other means.

Because of the way it was conceived from the outset, European unification is a finality without a goal, a forced and blind march forward towards a final objective that is always receding into the distance (12). Since there is no turning back, member states cannot go back on their word. They are trapped in the machinery. In defining general policy options, they bear responsibility for rules subsequently laid down by the Commission that are binding on all their citizens and take priority over national legislation.


Noëlle Burgi is a CNRS research fellow at the Centre for Political Research, University of Paris I - Sorbonne. Philip Golub is a lecturer at the Institute of European Studies, University of Paris VIII - Saint-Denis.

So this is a point where I would like to enter this matrix of interactive institutions in order to reveal and hopefully examine some of the implications of the underlying features in the globalization process and perhaps add contextual meaning to current events that are often cast to us as nation centric based politics. The idea expressed here and elsewhere is of a global economic hegemony driving the world's nation states to adapt in an integrated fashion that system.  For want of a better descriptor, I'll agree with those who identify it as neoliberalism.  This is the beginnings of a vision I been assembling of the directions we may be headed right now.  The trend has been easing gradually towards multinational corporations becoming more integrated into the world negotiation process as players with their own diplomatic agents.  That powerfully influential trend, combined with the planetary challenges it creates to our total, sustainable environment, with the competition for basic resources various segments of the total system requires challenges all of us now to discover  a common and ongoing sustaining life process. Now that's a big order, and I don't expect to fill it, but I'd like to keep it in mind as I work towards understanding the nature of the system and therefore the nature of the challenge.

Next I want to look at the evolution of NGOs over especially the past thirty years or so, in conjunction with the various international trade agreements. In the spirit of Wolf's analysis I'd like to begin to explore the structural basis of our world through its dynamically interacting institutions, and in the process try to see the suggestions of narratives that do not necessarily comply with the one fed to us through our collective media processes.

The Global Capitalist Empire

One of the ways I see it, up to now, human beings haven't had to work too hard to consciously design their societies. However, the past two hundred years have witnessed something of an anomaly in human societal adaptation.

The combination of cheap and easily convertible energy, with the rapid expansion of a narrow spectrum of social systems that aggressively maximize resource consumption, has paralleled a rapid population expansion of the human species, with a mass take over and extinction of a vast number of ecological niches.

These types of expanding social systems represent what ecologists call the low succession r-selected species, which flourish opportunistically in disturbed, low
succession, minimally speciated environments, until they falter and their poplations die back as the resources become exhausted. A typical example of such a species is the lemming. Their populations rise and fall in typical bell shaped curve on a graph, very similar to that of Hubbert curve for peak oil.

In nature what occurs next is a transformation to a greater variety of k-selected species, with lower offspring production and a greater efficiency of resource consumption which is geared to a sustainable rate.

Human beings have proven capable of creating societies that can mimic either r-selected or k-selected species. Personally, I'm looking at what a k-selected society would entail now. We have a variety of rhizome-like, cooperative organic based startups scattered around the U.S. They are kind of like seed stock for a possible collapse, as I see it.

Those R-Selected Species Just Keep On Keepin' On

One can find many reasons advanced by various scholars to back up the U.S. promotion of democracy in the world. In his book The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty First Century, Thomas Barnett offers a map of the globe that identifies two macro geographic regions as a "functioning Core" and a "non -integrating Gap." Barnett is a bright, horizontal thinking strategic planner who's worked for the Pentagon and other government bureaucracies, and it would appear from his book that he likes to imagine he's in one of those computer games where humanity is represented in blocks that contain gross numbers. His Core consists of the richest and most developed countries and regions - North America's two big ones (not Mexico), Europe's Union members (of course Great Britain), Japan, South Korea (not including North Korea, naturally), and Australia. To that he's given gratis acceptance to what he calls "emerging economies" of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Russia, China and India. Together they comprise roughly two thirds of the globes population. The "non-integrating Gap" consists of the rest. Another group of geopolitical strategists might call them the peripheries, another, the underdeveloped nations. Pick your favorite name, I guess.

Look at the map and you'll undoubtedly be riveted by the oval line circumscribing the so-called "geostrategic ellipse." Within that you will find, with the exception of Israel, no primary members of Barnett's "functioning core," although Russia's recent revival from an inevitable collapse (caused, as Barnett sees it, by it's Gap-characteristic infection, initial infection occurring around 1918) puts it in a unique position of being one of the emerging Core members with it's own rich resources in fossil fuels. Geostrategically that's a potentially sticky one for U.S. global imperial ambitions if Russia gets off track in some unmanageable way, but that's an ongoing foreign policy management problem. Those ambitions include what Barnett would call a plan for "connecting" the "disconnected Gap" to the core, for the primary purpose of achieving a more secure world, as defined by those in the "functioning Core," of course. In lieu of that, he sees the primary mission of the US and its military, of course, is to extend connectivity between the Core and Gap as far as possible.

In terms of the policies of the U.S. over the past sixty or so years, the past twenty five years of polyarchic democracy building strategies coincides nicely with Barnett's prospects for connecting the disconnected Gap, now that the military has been folded back into the batter. So for Barnett, we've gone from a period of covert clumsy CIA intervention, imposing strong man clients in key resource rich nations, to more sophisticated polyarchic elites in charge, with the necessary camouflage of democracy, since they can be elected, to the extra important stablizing factor of a redesigned Cold War Era military industrial complex situated on some 740 bases in key geostrategic locations, with the helpful support of in the neighborhood of 50 specialized intelligence agencies.

Barnett's Ten Commandments

Any savvy neoliberal globalist will recognize the sensible logic in Barnett's list of the "Ten Commandments of Globalization" suggested in his book:

 

• 1. Look for resources, and ye shall find.
• 2. No stability, no markets.
• 3. No growth, no stability. (interesting oxymoron)
• 4. No resources, no growth.
• 5. No infrastructure, no growth.
• 6. No money, no infrastructure.
• 7. No rules, no money.
• 8. No security, no rules.
• 9. No Leviathan (US superpower), no security.
• 10. No will, no Leviathan.

In regards to the Leviathan feature, Barnett proposes that the US begin to shape its military role by resculpting its major resource in the Global Imperial project by bifurcating it into a "Leviathan Force" and a "System Adminstrator" force, something obviously missing in the first stages of Iraq, and now look at the mess!

Our intellectual elites are nothing if not persistant in coming up with these master plans. Maybe one of these days they'll get the right formula for their witches brew.

Watch Thomas Barnett in an interview with Harry Kreisler in Conversations with History: