Virtual Militias

[wm]

I have a suspicion that we will see some form of "Imperial" layer added on top of increasingly small nation states - probably a sub-set of the UN, but also larger than the EU. Then again, it is also possible that we could see a fragmentation into "Imperial" factions along the NAU, EU, ASEAN, China, etc. line - sort of a reversion to te organizational style and form of the last half of the 19th century. I wouldn't want to bet either way right now.

I don't doubt that something along the lines of the latter will eventually come along. However, my crystal ball says that we will need some pretty serious multi-regional, if not global, anarchy, of at least an economics/trade sort. When folks start hijacking petroleum and/or food shipments, the pendulum should swing back towards recentralizing power. Wait until the piracy off Somalia starts occurring near Venezuela or at the mouth of the St Lawrence.

[marct]

Hi Wayne,

I don't doubt that something along the lines of the latter will eventually come along. However, my crystal ball says that we will need some pretty serious multi-regional, if not global, anarchy, of at least an economics/trade sort. When folks start hijacking petroleum and/or food shipments, the pendulum should swing back towards recentralizing power. Wait until the piracy off Somalia starts occurring near Venezuela or at the mouth of the St Lawrence.

I'd say we already have a "pretty serious multi-regional, if not global, anarchy, of at least an economics/trade sort." As to it swinging back to centralization over a little piracy, nah, I doubt it. Resource theft by pirates can't even come close to resource losses imposed by inefficient bureaucrats . I am expecting that we will see a rise in KYFHOesque philosophies that will drive certain neo-tribes to act as strange attractors agains such a resurgence.

[Hacksaw]

Taken from the back cover of "An Empire Wilderness"...

"Everywhere Kaplan travels - from St Louis to Portland, from the fouty-ninth parallel to the banks of the Rio Grande - he finds an America ever more fragmented along lines of race, class, education and geography. An America whose wealthy communities become wealthier and more fortress-like as they become more closely linked to the world's business capitals than to the desolate ghettoes next door. An America where the political boundaries between the states - and between the US and Canada and Mexico - are becoming increasingly blurred, betokening a vast open zone for trade, commerce, and cultural interaction, the nexus of tomorrow's transnational world..."



This was written 10 years ago.

Live well and row

[Ken White]

or most of it anyway (Gated communities were rare...) over 30 years ago. A lot was written on that wall in the 1965-75 time frame. Including AQ (generic version) et.al. and todays hot spots. Anyone who paid attention picked up on it. I sure wasn't alone in seeing that at the time, I can recall a number of others who spotted those sorts of things before I did.

Perhaps surprisingly, the US did pick up on it. State informed Nixon after the Munich Olympics in 1972 that terrorism was going to be a problem. Nixon set up both the National Intelligence Council and the Cabinet Committee on Terrorism which in 1977 produced a report that was highly predictive of the coming fragmentation of States, notably, IIRC, predicting the demise of Yugoslavia -- not much was done about it. Carter figured out that oil dependency needed to go due to potential fragmentation in the ME. There were others over in many fields the years, mostly ignored due to domestic politics. So a lot of people realized what was coming -- even before Kaplan wrote that.

A massive number of folks can spot trends; not all of them are academics, writers, pundits or politicians.

Only politicians seem to diligently ignore said trends...

And I suspect I and some others also beat Kaplan in 1979 when the Tehran Embassy was seized or in 1982 when all the bad stuff happened in Beirut and we agreed that bad things would come of those events and our failure to respond...

[wm]

Marc,

I'd say we already have a "pretty serious multi-regional, if not global, anarchy, of at least an economics/trade sort."

The level of serious acts of anarchy I have in mind are something like blocking the St Lawrence Seaway by blowing an oil tanker in the Eisenhower Lock, taking out the Robert Moses Dam and generating plant at the same time, for example.

How about these as possible news stories:
Hijackers holding a few trainloads of grain headed across the the US and Canadian wheat belt (CN or UP trains maybe both) and holding their contents for ransom--"ship them to the people starving in "pick your locale" or we detonate the nuke/dirty bomb we have strapped to the train."
"And in Germany for the third time this week, crowds refusing to pay rising food prices have stormed into a BMA warehouse and taken what they wanted."
This is more what I mean by serious economic anarchy. Of course it would have to be more than just one or two isolated incidents like this.

[marct]

Hi Wayne

How about these as possible news stories:
Hijackers holding a few trainloads of grain headed across the the US and Canadian wheat belt (CN or UP trains maybe both) and holding their contents for ransom--"ship them to the people starving in "pick your locale" or we detonate the nuke/dirty bomb we have strapped to the train."
"And in Germany for the third time this week, crowds refusing to pay rising food prices have stormed into a BMA warehouse and taken what they wanted."
This is more what I mean by serious economic anarchy. Of course it would have to be more than just one or two isolated incidents like this.

Sounds like Paris . No, I understand what you mean by serious acts; I just take the position that they are already happening in some locales and may well spread. They don't really happen in North America yet (barring the mortgage "fun" right now ).

Anyway, I don't think "anarchy" is a necessary precondition to te breakdown of nation state sovereignty. Any sub-state (or trans-national organization) can produce a breakdown in national sovereignty and often has. To my mind, it doesn't have to be rioting in the streets per se; it could be the complete de facto rewrite of state economic policy by multi-national corporations or organizations such as GATT and the WTO.

[Ken White]

consistently promise more than they can deliver and refuse through political cowardice to lead instead of following the pleas of squeaking wheels. Said rejection by people who have just developed a really significant antipathy to the government of the place at the time, no anarchy or global corporations involved.

A not unheard of series of events...

[marct]

..........

[wm]

Anyway, I don't think "anarchy" is a necessary precondition to te breakdown of nation state sovereignty. Any sub-state (or trans-national organization) can produce a breakdown in national sovereignty and often has. To my mind, it doesn't have to be rioting in the streets per se; it could be the complete de facto rewrite of state economic policy by multi-national corporations or organizations such as GATT and the WTO.

My point about significant anarchy was not to identify when nation states would start to break down. It was rather to identify when we might start to see the pendulum start to move back towards reaggregation of smaller units into regional cooperative organizations or governmental units.

I concur that the world is already witnessing the rise of intranational breakdowns. However it is still trying to manage that with international conglomerations (the EU, NATO, ASEAN, etc.), but even those are now starting to get frayed at the edges, as we see with national lelvel debates over such things as continued involvement in NATO ISAF missions. Gaining international consensus has started to become ever more difficult as the centralizing tendency is questioned even more by those "have nots" who see themselves as bill-payers for the excesses of the "haves."

[marct]

Hi Wayne,

My point about significant anarchy was not to identify when nation states would start to break down. It was rather to identify when we might start to see the pendulum start to move back towards reaggregation of smaller units into regional cooperative organizations or governmental units.

This may just be another case of us saying the same, or similar, things with different languages . I'm just not sure when it will happen or if it will happen. The historical analogs were all predicated on low speed communications and fairly low technology, both of which make a major difference.

[wm]

This may just be another case of us saying the same, or similar, things with different languages . I'm just not sure when it will happen or if it will happen. The historical analogs were all predicated on low speed communications and fairly low technology, both of which make a major difference.

Marc,
I don't doubt that we are experiencing one of those instances of "two people divided by a common language."
I believe that speed of communications and level of technology will impact primarily by shortening the pendulum's period of oscillation. In other words, the swings between aggregation of power and disaggregation of power will occur more rapidly, hence more social turbulence will arise. Technological advances allow people to see much more rapidly that they are not alone in their dissatisfaction with the status quo, which makes them more likely to band together to change (the "madness of crowds" phenomenon or what was called a "right on" movement in the '60s). Technology does not, however, provide us with a silver bullet to get past the emotional (and therefore not rationally considered) knee jerk solutions that the dissatisfaction will engender. Of course, I am viewing this as a Westerner, with typical Western lack of patience.