New York seems to have shrunk in more ways than one. And, though at least one in four cars and homes fly the Stars and Stripes, the impression is that of a muted nation. The recession is hitting Manhattan hard, with the interesting phenomenon of the micro-recession clearly punishing certain streets where, for example, the Express subway to Brooklyn no longer
stops because it can no longer pass beneath what was the World Trade Centre.
New Yorkers are still not going out much; the nesting instinct prevails. All of this adds to the impression of a nation out of sync, uneasy with itself as much as with the rest of a world about which so many Americans know so little.
This, in turn, suggests a vulnerability that was exposed by the attack on the World Trade Centre but that represents a perplexing paradox when set aside its vast military power. Never in the history of the world, noted Yale history professor Paul Kennedy recently, has there been such a disparity of power.
The cost of running each of the United States’s 12 aircraft-carrier battle groups exceeds that of the defence budget of a medium-sized economy; its likely increase in defence spending next year ? $48-billion on top of its current annual budget of $350-billion ? is twice that of Italy’s entire annual budget.
As Kennedy puts it, rather neatly, “while the battle between the US and international terrorism and rogue states may indeed be asymmetrical, perhaps a far greater asymmetry may be emerging: namely, the one between the US and the rest of the powers”.
Peter Vale, on these pages, expressed a deep scepticism of such power, “especially sovereign power that believes it is called to global service”. And especially, one might add, when it is directed towards the imposition of solutions designed in, and for, the era of the nation-state at a time when it is becoming abundantly clear to all those who care to look that the nation-state’s day has passed.
Think about time: the human species has existed for around 100 000 years. In contrast, the construct of the nation-state is, at the most and in just a few cases, a few hundred years old. Many that were created in the last century appear unlikely to last until the end of this one. Which, if you take account of Thomas Pakenham’s vivid description of how the “gentlemen” rulers of the European powers at the end of the nineteenth century sat around drinking port and carving up Africa into nations with improbably straight borders, is hardly surprising.
This is an idea that many will find hard to stomach: polling shows that South Africans, for example, have a deep-seated sense of patriotism that cuts across race and class. But, as the brilliant young Californian sociologist William Robinson has argued, the end of the nation-state is an inevitable by-product of contemporary globalisation.
It is not that state power no longer exists, he argues, it is simply that it has moved to a different place: the transnational state. We know of its identity ? the European Union, Nato, the United Nations (sort of), and closer to home, the new African Union. But we are increasingly unsure of how it operates and how it exercises its power.
As to transnational corporate power, the same observation applies, in spades. The US transnational company GlaxoSmithKline has a turnover far greater than that of South Africa, which is why it can sponsor an MBA competition that requires teams of undergraduate contestants to develop a business plan for the marketing of HIV/Aids drugs in South Africa without any sense of either irony or humility (see www.mba.wfu.edu/).
It is also why Kenneth Lay and the other senior executives at Enron could purchase political influence in both Washington and Whitehall with apparent impunity for so long. This is what Robinson calls the “condensing” of a new ruling class that seamlessly traverses the (transnational) state and corporate sectors. It is an elite that is as evasive as it is elusive in its lack of accountability to citizens everywhere, and that has spawned the eloquent if incoherent “anti-globalisation protests” of Seattle, Davos and Genoa, and their articulation of the anguish of people excluded from participation and from power.
Anyone who made it through the ring of concrete barriers circling 10 blocks of uptown Manhattan two weekends ago would have encountered this new species at the World Economic Forum.
Listening to a senior Jamaican politician lament to me the other day how few options her nation-state has ? “We have some sugar, but what else do we have to offer this globalised economy? How can we define a role for ourselves in such circumstances?” is what she actually said ? I recalled African National Congress MP Ben Turok’s own crie de coeur in this newspaper last August when he asked of his own party the question posed by a Swedish professor Goran Therborn: What does a ruling class do when it rules?
Turok’s angst about his party’s lack of power in the face of sluggish and obstructionist forces in society and in the bureaucracy is understandable. What he could have said but chose to omit from his analysis is the lack of power that nation-states have in the design of their own destinies, though some of this impotence is the self-inflicted hemorrhage of privatisation and market liberalisation. This is a point made by Robinson.
This is the other part of the crisis of democracy, and the crisis of politics. The challenge for politicians everywhere is to find ways of restoring trust in the political process and returning power to the people. It will take more than the shock of the Enron collapse to prompt this ? though it helps.
Equally, it will take far more than futile exercises in nation-building in Afghanistan and elsewhere. “Peoples are too intermingled, territories too contested, too many states derelict and the world too dangerous for nation-building”, writes British intellectual John Gray in Prospect magazine.
“Hesitantly, unwillingly, even unwittingly, we are inching our way into a new age of empire,” Gray argues, though not so as to impose a single kind of government on the world ? liberal democracy, or Fukuyama’s “democratic capitalism” ? but in order to find a new way of organising global power so that it serves rather than defeats the only values that are truly universal: peace and human dignity.
And so back to America, which in its one-eyed approach to human rights and the rule of law evidenced by its response to Taliban prisoners, the prosecution of its war and Israeli atrocities committed against innocent Palestinians, demonstrates precious little capacity for the sort of understanding of these universal values that is necessary if it is to somehow emerge stronger from the ghostly shadow of September 11.
How on earth we can retrieve the democratic deficit of globalisation while necessarily accommodating a new regime of empires that enhance the prospects for peace and the cause of human dignity is perhaps the greatest challenge that faces humankind.
Archive: Previous columns by Richard Calland