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Technology and Super-National Affiliation
In a recent essay, Henry Kissinger noted the potential of economic globalization to upset traditional paradigms of nationality and statehood.
The clash between the international economy and the political institutions that ostensibly govern it also weakens the sense of common purpose necessary for world order. The economic system has become global, while the political structure of the world remains based on the nation-state. Economic globalization, in its essence, ignores national frontiers. Foreign policy affirms them, even as it seeks to reconcile conflicting national aims or ideals of world order.
Kissinger notes this in passing, and deliberately limits his perspective in this article. He refers only to the global economy, ignoring the many other ways by which the world has become ever smaller; not only financially and militarily interdependent, but also socially interactive at the level of individual citizens.
I would like to expand that view to ask a broader question: How has technological innovation changed what it means to be a nation? Are national identities and national governments as practically significant as they were a century or two ago?
Ricochet members have argued in the past the United States of America were more culturally and politically distinct from one another in the late 18th century, before the establishment of national media like radio and television. Railways, telegraph, highways, and air travel also normalized interaction between citizens. Telephones and cheaper mail delivery facilitated daily communication between distant friends and business associates. Largely as a consequence of these inventions, regional differences have been diluted in the wake of common experience.
It’s easy to forget how recent many of these changes are. Many Baby Boomers remember sharing a phone line with neighbors, so one might have to wait until a person down the street was done talking before being able to use one’s own phone. They remember when few people owned televisions, and only three channels were available. Most highways were constructed in their lifetime. How ubiquitous and advanced must such technologies become — and how many decades must pass — for them to homogenize various peoples into one culture and one political audience?
Today, we have internet and smart phones. A business can have employees in Switzerland, Israel, and Australia who only communicate online. It might identify its “home office” with a particular country only for tax purposes. People enjoy products and media from around the world. They socialize every day with foreigners and form organizations which defy national boundaries.
As conservatives with respect for the immutable nature of Man and the inevitability of social conflicts, we know that this technological innovation is not paving a path to Utopia. It will not lead to global harmony and the elimination of cultural differences. But there will be effects. What are those effects? Might technological innovation force a fundamental restructuring of political bodies?
Image Credit: “City Lights of the United States 2012” by NASA Earth Observatory – http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=79800 for GeoTIFF original file.http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/8247975848/in/set-72157632172101342/ for quicker access to the jpeg. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Published in Culture, General
How do you reconcile this assumption with observations such as:
Couldn’t it just be a matter of time (maybe a considerable amount of time) until the world experiences what the United States did with the advent of technology? That is, technology allows us all to live in better harmony and reduce our differences?
I think Conservatives are too quick to assume that people’s differences will always always create large conflicts. I see us moving towards a more cosmopolitan world that becomes more and more like the West since technology gives people the option to choose their way of life, and our way of life is objectively better.
Much of the current trouble arises from certain groups, Islamists being the prime example, fervently not wanting to become like us. They want us to become like them.
The key word being “current.” I’m confident radical Islam will become less and less of a problem as people vote with their feet (browsers?). Not to mention, they’re really bad and accomplishing their goals on a wide or long term scale if you look at it critically.
No. Your example of the multinational corporation is a good one as it is essentially the model generally referred to by those postulating about such grand changes and imagining some new world order.
I would argue that technology is instead doing something more subtle and far more dangerous, it is feeding the illusion that such a future is within reach or even possible. Many begin to harbor the delusion that borders are no longer relevant and can be ignored, “Everything is on the Internet now, we’re all connected!”, when nothing could be further from the truth and suddenly borders become critical, deadly facts.
There was an article I was reading a few years ago in this vein speaking about the grand possibilities for information technology and the exciting future awaiting a particular third-world nation, “a potential tech hub” was how they breathlessly referred to the possibilities. Can you guess the nation? We just started bombing them.
Man’s nature may be immutable, but his culture is not. Kissinger like all realists requires that the world be nothing more than a bunch of nation states competing in a zero sum game for dominance. The realists of 500 years ago required that the world be divided up into an amalgamation of feudal fiefdoms for their world view to work. And I am quite certain that 5000 years ago realists were stressing the immutability of the hunter-gatherer kin group.
Culture is what defines us, and shapes us. Technology is giving us the chance to make the western liberal, humanist culture the standard not just for us in the West but for all people. Make no mistake technology and trade will help to foster a general universal culture if we maintain them. The nature of that culture though is in no way settled, and those who despise our culture are either trying to hijack or dismantle the international system.
We may very well go back to an older international order, after all it is very easy to fall down. But, if we do “history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.”
That’s where I was originally headed, but I don’t think that cultural unification translates into harmony. Georgia and New York are more unified than they were in the 18th century, but they still don’t like each other.
Both cultures and governments are always in flux. We speak of “revolutions” because history has a way of repeating itself. Nations grow, perhaps by consuming or joining with other nations, and then they collapse. Nothing is permanent except human nature.
I like to think that it means an end to world wars. There will still be conflict, but that sort of globally devastating war really seems to be a thing of the past.
As long as global interdependence is based on voluntary relationships between nations, private organizations, and individuals, rather than being planned and controlled by monolithic multi-national governmental organizations, then count me among the Rational Optimists.
Once super-governments get too much power, however, that will mean rebellion, and that will mean war.
Really? I don’t think they hate each other either, big improvement since 1864. Like has nothing to do with it. I don’t much care for NASCAR loving rednecks or latte sipping hipsters but that doesn’t mean I can’t get along with them, just that I’m not going to make many friends among them. But where is it written we all have to be friends to have harmony. Cultural harmony isn’t everyone holding hands and singing, its just getting along so we can all move along. Just that low bar is actually quite a cultural achievement.
But isn’t that making the point of the disintegration of old national distinctions? Today we can live any where and still be part of the cultural sub group we prefer.
These “old” and “traditional” notions of nation and state are, in fact, incredibly recent. It would be easy to argue that Mr Kissinger has been alive for more than half of the time these paradigms have existed.
As for the idea of national frontiers: how many nations or empires has New Orleans, for example, been part of in the last couple of centuries or so? Royal France, Spain, Napoleonic France, the United States, the Confederacy, the US again… Since that time Germany and Italy have come into being and passed through a series of constitutional and physical forms.
Even during the high water mark of nationalist feeling, WWI, there are thousands of stories of men finding more in common with the man in the trench opposite than in the trench next to them.
Political bodies are always fundamentally restructuring — does the US really have the same political form now it had 100 years ago? No need for the ‘Nation of Angry Birds Fans’ to do that.
There are emerging countries which do not require telephone poles, or the roads along side which to put the poles. What is needed is a patch of land and a means of electrical support (such as solar with battery storage) for cell towers. Not expensive copper cables. No trenching. No running of cables up to households (should such exist). No rotary dial or DTMF or digital phones. Just cell towers and some convenient means to re-charge cellphone batteries. More solar and a bit of electrical storage?
Technology is leap frogging some infrastructure concerns in manners we had not anticipated.
However you still need money to build cell towers and whatever powers them. You still need money to purchase a cellphone and the means to keep the battery charged. Since money is needed for these things, countries will have to find a means to allow business or the state to provide that money.
However the use of technology does not indicate that the mores and cultures of the countries which have developed the technology will be welcome. Homogeneity extending to cultural considerations is not a given. We won’t be uniform as human beings anymore than we were uniform as human beings with the invention of the telegraph, the radio, or of television. Human nature does not seem to be susceptible along those lines.
Excellent catch. Enjoyed reading Kissinger’s essay.
If I sit in Schenectady and use a telephone designed in Cupertino and manufactured in Shenzen to buy a computer also manufactured in Shenzen from a company based in Seattle, and have it shipped, first by ship, then by truck, to my front door step, the idea of a nation state is meaningless to me. They’re still using laws about pen registers and telegraphs to try to regulate me. We may be quickly approaching the point where government nears obsolescence.
There’s a couple of ways things could go. We can continue along this path of decentralization and freedom that technologies brings. And maybe (hopefully) it will continue to be a gentle curve away from the state and more towards empowering the individual.
But that means less power for the state and those people who crave power. So there may be a counter swing. The political class, who make their claims of legitimacy based on structures drawn up before any of us were born and backed by violence, may feel their grip slipping away and try to use government to preserve the archaic structure of the nation state.
We’re seeing that now with the fight over things like Uber. Uber is an entirely new economy. Technology is allowing people to relate to human beings with fewer barriers than ever before. It’s terrifying to people who make their living running the government, because it means we don’t need them any more.
Militaries protect every link in the chain.
Until they are displaced by company sponsored militaries as a show of good will to their customers and society.
Nobody (mostly) is forcing people to become more Western in the ways that matter (more personal freedom, flowing from more personal economic freedom). People keep voting for that in the way they choose to live – Islamists etc. are fighting a war on two fronts – one against the West, and the other policing their own people.
Despite my long-time love of cyberpunk literature, I’m not convinced that corporate militaries are inevitable. Militaries are really expensive. I do not see how corporations paying for their own military defense can possibly be more cost effective than letting taxpayers do the job for them.
Great. From who?
Please say pirates.
I love the photograph showing city lights in the US – am I the only one who thinks that the regularity of lights across the Eastern US – more noticeably just West of Chicago, but sort of all over – says something about the organic nature of capitalism’s invisible hand? An illustration of how central place theory is real.
It’s possible that the people who pay aren’t the ones who set the military’s goals.
(Edited to add: but yes, I did think of William Gibson.)
Look, not for nothing, but if Apple or Amazon’s supply chain became unstable, they’d adapt to it. That’s how free markets work. Companies are free to adapt.
Frankly, between the taxes paid and the costs imposed by governments in the name of customs, if those lost resources were applied, I’m sure they could easily afford to defend their supply chain.
Arrrrr!
(Yes, pirates. What else do you call those people who hold ships of products for ransom of the Gulf of Aden? Apparently also an issue near that other mainline of global commerce, the straits of Malacca.)
Right. The dozen US carrier battle groups don’t protect ships from pirates in cigarette boats.
If you’re worried about pirates, there’s plenty of more cost effective ways of stopping them then using a military.
Interesting topic. I am in closer regular touch with people all over the globe than I am with a sizeable number in the physical community where I live. However, I fear human nature is more immutable than technology (short of DNA manipulation) can change it.
Predators, opportunists, idealists, and followers will always be with us. WW1 was the war to end all wars, and it was supplanted in carnage by WW2 within one generation. The recitation of the bloody 20th century suggests that as technology expands, the sharks among us use that to expand their hunting grounds. Most recently, the Internet has amplified predatory practices, fostered the climate supporting increased anti-social behavior, and provided more opportunities for the Freakshow Left to agglomerate and foist their neuroses on the rest of us. I fear that we have yet to see the bloodiest and most destructive world war in history, and that it may well happen in our lifetimes.
Two things:
WW1 and WW2 were great examples of nation states warring against other nation states. Remove nation states from that equation, there are those wars. That’s not to say people won’t go about murdering each other, it’s just that without the organization, resources and monopoly on force of the nation state, you don’t get the organized butchery of Verdun.
I’d be in your source and the metrics behind your claim that the Internet has amplified predatory practices and fostered increased anti-social behavior.
Why would companies assume the cost and risk when they can shift the costs and risk to society at large. Unless there is a total breakdown in nation-states and companies must protect their profits, there will not be any large scale company paramilitaries. Many companies rely on some type of paramilitary security forces to defend and protect specific sites but I cannot see at this juncture company sponsored roving bands of paramilitary security forces.
Isn’t utopian communism where large scale government falls away and small communities and individuals rule? Do you really think that this will happen? There has always been individuals that seek power and those that help. It is part of our inborn social make up and will always be since we are social creatures. Government will continue for that reason alone.
Perhaps, but that doesn’t automatically mean that that government has to be an enormous nation state. It could take on other forms.
If this were absolutely true we would never get democracy. Why would anyone give up power at the end of a few years, willingly? Because they are expected to. That would have been an insane thought a few hundred years ago. It is still an insane thought in many parts of the world. But, expectations could change again. One day it could be thought of as insane to let one entity have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
This. Innovation brings “new” things. Those in power don’t want “new” things – unless they can control them. As control slips, so does their power. Look at the MSM. We still rale against it, but it hardly is what it was when I fought in Vietnam.
This is what I thought, but did not write, emphasis mine. The freedoms that technologies bring can make many aspects of government obsolete.
This also ties in with a comment I read in a different post about regulation: fewer regulations amount to less lobbying to create regulations that benefit or punish some perceived ne’er do well.
Our governments have become obese with regulation & power. They need to go on a diet, but not one laid out by the FDA.
Aaron, I love the cover picture. I wonder if there are any statistical correlations between the “freedom” of residents, and the darkness of their home on the map?