Why, then, are there less than two hundred or so national states? When he was writing in 1983 there were well under two hundred U.N. representatives, and though this number has grown, forecasts for the later twenty-first century don't usually envisage more than something between two hundred and twenty or thirty new (and naturally mostly smaller) independent states.
Gellner's characteristic explanation of this disparity was in terms of overall social and cultural development. The culprit, he argued, had been first-round industrialization and urbanization. These were not processes planned by some celestial council from a suitably all-powerful centre, such as Beijing, Delhi, Rome, Madrid (or wherever). No, industrialization evolved chaotically, in fits and starts, out of the unlikely fringe location of the North Atlantic seaboard, and was marked throughout by chronic unevenness and widespread antagonism.
It was impossible for industries, larger-scale commerce, greater market-places and banks to develop at a small-town or region scale. Nor were they ever likely to be set up by the sprawling dynastic and military empires of antiquity, whose essential concern remained expansion, hierarchy and secure military dominance of an inherited rural world.
By contrast, Capitalism (as it would later be called, notably by Scots) was able to evolve only at an intermediate level, within societies smaller than the antique dynasties but much bigger than most ethno- linguistic groups. It demanded the formation of relatively large socio-economic spaces, to be viable.
Viability in that sense may never have been a fixed or unalterable condition. However, in retrospect we perceive that for over two centuries it did come to mean (as it were) 'something like France' or like England (in the familiar 'Anglo-British sense): not something like Brittany, Provence, Monaco, Wales or Ireland.
The Scots of course had already situated themselves within the bigger-is-better expansion, via the 1707 Treaty of Union. Their fate was to be the unusual one of successful 'self-colonization' in that world. That is, they avoided conquest or assimilation, and conserved a distinct civil society - but only by accepting (and in fact eagerly embracing and preaching) the broader rules of the new age, as laid down by France, England and other more viable polities.
[ ... ]
Globality is decreed in advance to possess one overall or commanding meaning: either Neo-liberal progress or some new universal oppression, choose your side. In fact, what globality may be ushering in is more like a range of conflicts, it may be too much to say 'battlefields' - but certainly terrains of decision, alternative directions and possibilities. Umberto Eco has identified one of these alternatives clearly, and amusingly, in his Putting the Clock Back.
Look at the world since the First Gulf War, he asks: just who is so plainly clinging to past patterns and habits? We see the explosion and spread of what he labels 'neo-war', the curse of US-led globalization. That is, of threatened and actual incursions against largely phantasmagoric enemies like 'Terrorism' and Islam or (on the other side) 'the West' and crusade-style Christianity or Evangelism.
The aim of these is to maintain and mobilize the mass public opinion upon which great (or would-be great) power élites still depend, against the individualism, privatization and indifference that accompany so many transnational blessings and successes. Societies have mutated far more than states. And this is why the latter find themselves tempted into another version of the 19th century Restoration that tried to impose stability, values (etc.) between Napoleon 1st and the 'Springtime of Nations' in 1848. Brown and Bush can't literally put the clock back, any more than Prince Metternich could; but at least they can try to slow it down a bit, with plausible aggression (ideally involving Mass Destruction threats), and of course the new forms of persuasion provided by the revolution in communications.
The guilty parties here are unmistakable: they are the old lags of Gellner's bigger-and-better epoch, plus new members and applicants to join the Body-builders Club - countries endowed with that favourite attribute of British Leaders, 'clout'. America First, naturally, but with Great Spain, Great Russia, Great Serbia alongside cheer-leader Great Britain, plus rising muscle-flexers like India, Indonesia, Iran and China.
At the same time as it tries to take over globalization, this great-at-all-costs club is busy acquiring its own academic credentials as well. That is, Professors who seriously believe that the globe is safer - more secure - with well-padded, first-round veterans in control. An astonishing volume entitled No More States? appeared last year from the stables of University College, Los Angeles, arguing not only that there should be no more of these small nuisances, but that possibly a reversal of thrust may be possible, in the sense of 'agglomerationism' - returns to one or other metropolitan fold by populations tempted astray by romantic delusion or bad verse.
In case anyone fears I'm making this up, let me quote from Professor Richard Rosecrance's summing up:
'Potentially dissident Scotland, the Basques, Quebec and other provincial populations have gradually come to see the federation-metropole as a less hostile environment, and their independence movements have declined in proportion...(hence) few new states are likely to be created...It is possible, even, that the number of fully independent states may decline as political units begin to merge with each other...' (5)
This conclusion had the good luck to be published not long before the 2007 elections in the U.K., and in that sense comment may be superfluous. But the general sense is unmistakable: global history must be frozen in its tracks, for the convenience of existing agglomerations, including the United States and loyal fan-club Great Britain.
[ ... ]
In a remarkable recent essay called simply 'Presence', the Dutch social historian Eelco Runia has made the point with a humorous metaphor. (9)
Globalization can't help meaning that we're all 'in the same boat'; but on this noble vessel, most of the occupants can't help being virtual 'stowaways', travelling either on fake documents and overdrawn credit-cards, or just secretly, smuggled or bribed aboard at night or in disguise. Now however, as the global process continue its erratic and ambiguous course, the rabble has begun appearing on deck, in broad daylight. And not just for the fresh air, or to admire the views.
No, they want their tickets. It's time they were recognized, and released from the dank lower levels of ballast, coiled ropes and awful stairwells. 'Equality' is the standard demand, accompanied naturally by demands for use of the cafeteria and lounges, spare beds and some formal presence by representation on the bridge. There used to be bigger-is-best techniques for avoiding this nuisance: alibis like 'federalism', 'devolution' - home rule for the steerage classes, as it were. Allow them enough folk-dancing and local government, that'lll keep them out of trouble.
But of course presence in Runia's sense represents none of these palliatives. The spirit of Gertrude Stein is turning out to be quite strong up on deck, something to do with the democratic air. On this bigger, final boat everyone is now aboard, 'self-government' is self-government is self-government. What Charles Stewart Parnell meant in the famous remark about nobody having 'a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation', in the sense of its will and sovereignty.
The motto prefixes the recent Scottish Government's 'National Conversation' on Scotland's future. In the new context this means not (or not necessarily) 'six or eight thousand' states corresponding to Gellner's sources of human diversity. But it does imply that no court of fixers should decide who is in or out, or what their relationships with one another should be.
In practice, though, it probably signifies at least something like the foreseeable figures I mentioned before - around two hundred and twenty or thirty sovereignties over this century and next. To an increasing degree these are likely to relate to one another via formulae of confederation, quite different from federalism, subsidiarity, devolved regionalism and other dodges of the bygone era. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are, like many other smaller entities around the globe, simply joining the queue to be heard on that wavelength.
[ ... ]
The counter to 'all-the-same-ism' can only be cross-fertilization, the societal equivalent of Darwin's new species and forms. That's what 'the universal' has always been, the capacity to transcend, to fuse, to breed hybrid novelty rather than merely 'agglomerate' in Professor Rosecrance's sense.
However, the power to do this rests at bottom upon more than the maintenance of diversity - it demands that differentiation be favoured, be positively fostered, by globalization. Globalization will have to perpetuate Babel, as well as confronting all its difficulties and contradictions.
At bottom, the reason is that human universals arise only via contrasts, by the transcendence of borders, via cross-fertilization, through hybrids and surprises, from the unheard-of, in communities not just 'imagined' in Ben Anderson's celebrated phrase, but previously unimaginable, from presences whose spell makes the past into a bearable future. ... "
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