Multipolarity

Getting over nation-states took some doing. Particularly internationally, the framing of who you are, where you’re from, and where you are all stem first and foremost from your status as a citizen of a particular nation-state. We’re still not entirely certain what to make of refugees, and so few people interact with the stateless as to render the problem invisible.

This week the three major political parties in Minnesota will be having their caucuses (I’d sneak in to one but I’m double-booked playing chess with a gentleman in his 90’s that I’m loathe to stand up). The conversations are about America and meaning; the meaning of the nation and of the individuals who all draw from this source of identity. But the world is not so easily ordered.

Nation-states are a historically contingent phenomena, and trends seem to imply that they are an evolutionary stepping-stone to a plurality of descendents of all scales. Some descendents are super-states, proto-empires - over the coming decades, China looks as though it may return to its earlier role. Others are meshworks, like the old Ottoman trade networks, but modernized and, as Nils Gilman pointed out, potentially deviant. The FARC/Nigeria/Al Qaeda Mahgreb network example is one. Speaking of deviant globalization, some states may collapse entirely, only to be held upright like posed corpses for the parasitic entities underneath; the Zetas in Mexico and similar organizations in Central and South America could qualify. Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZs) such as the Occupy Wall Street (and all it’s brethren, spawning and disappearing from the city ecologies like fungi) and Tahrir have proven themselves, and are likely to appear, and reappear; political flash mobs. And none of this is even addressing the metastasizing of corporations into meta-states.

Which perhaps explains somewhat why I find liberal Americans so schizophrenic in their characterizations of their country. Their ideals do not map to the nation-state easily or appropriately. Their local concerns are very local; regional at most, with their broader concerns towards human rights, environmental degradation and the like paying no attention to the border. The height of this disconnect for me was viewing the protestors of the XL Pipeline being arrested. The XL Pipeline isn’t the problem, really; they are concerned about the Albertan tar sands. So why weren’t they protesting those? The XL Pipeline wasn’t an endgame, if it simply meant that Canada built a pipe west to the Pacific to ship to China. It seems that liberal Americans have been caught in a trap of their own making. In measuring their progress against the consistently receding marker of the American right, they’ve failed to notice their own stagnance and lack of vision.

The problem liberals have with a multipolar world is that it will make all things more complicated; not the least of all praise/blame. Economic decisions may find easy consensus, while ethical problems are intractable; or vice versa. The intuitions aren’t present. There is a tendency to view American exceptionalism in the negative, to “blame America”, treat American racism as somehow superior to the racism of the Japanese towards the Koreans (or the Indians towards the Philipinos, or the Gulf Arabs towards everyone), and conversely, to see American restraint or intervention as an automatic solution.

The next decades will require a massive mental shift as we transition from a state-to-state interaction model, to a more abstract entity-to-entity model. Prepare for a citizen’s collective with a diplomat to Wells Fargo, G.E., the Zetas and Paraguay. INTERPOL proceedings against Lulzsec even while the State Department coordinates with Anonymous.

The inability to blame the U.S., and the incapacity for an entity like the U.N. to “make the hard choices” will result in a stunningly broad consortium of entities; governments, affinity groups, corporations, gangs, etc; only a subset of which will matter in any given decision, but it’ll be different subsets for different decisions, and none will play by the same rules.

Do we have any roadmaps for this? Not much, but I stumbled across something today that began to ask the correct questions. In the highlight report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, the recommendation was given to recognize federal, provincial/territorial and Aboriginal governance as discrete and all collected within Canadian sovereignty. Where it gets interesting is in the sections where it discussed the necessity of addressing rule of law for large groups of Aboriginals living in cities such as Winnipeg. This was described as a community of interest government, as opposed to a public government (where an Aboriginal majority controlled territory with non-Aboriginal residents) and a nation government.

That’s a beginning, but I think we need to be broader, and look at governance as not merely something tied to local, but as something married to a shared vision.

Disclaimer: This is a post that's been banging around in my head for a couple weeks. I'm dissatisfied with it, but I'm going to open it to comment and critique and see what comes of it. Thank you.