American Power and the Fall of Modernity (Part I)Michael Vlahos, The Globalist: The dynamic force of US military and cultural interventions is like a force of nature... But someone who can look critically at our past actions can also unerringly survey the topography of the human future. It is a human landscape where so-called nation-states simply abandon billions of their citizens...
We American revel in a kind of stupidity: We disbelieve what our eyes see and put our massive state energies into the necessary narrative that our policies bring stability. Yet, our interventions only make the chaos grow.
For two centuries and more, collective belonging and meaning has been a state enterprise... Yet now that very vision is in deep recess or near-death, even as the regulatory structures of nation-states keep expanding... The air is coming our of modernity's tires -- first in the marginal places run by European colonialism, and then increasingly in the places where modernity began. Where it falters, other cultural forms rise to take up the slack...
In their stead -- especially in the faux nation-states sloughed off by European colonialism -- equally passionate local and universalistic visions have risen up. They lay their claims not in the consumer and social welfare-driven economies of the developed world, but with societies in need. They flourish where the demand for identity is greatest...
Today 60% of human society has been left behind. Scores of so-called nation-states cannot support raw human needs -- or simply care not to -- and billions are effectively being abandoned. However, these neglected people are self-organizing. New communities emerge and new identities are revealed.
Societal transformation takes the of rising poor communities that the state can no longer control -- or wants to control. Add to this anxious elites who seek the security of gated lifestyles and the retreat of security services who begin to carve our their own personal nest egg -- and you have a portrait of a nation-state becoming something different. It is a mosaic of local identities, held together by a loose weave or relationships intermediated by the state.
Consider the Early Middle Ages -- the time of decompression after Rome's fall... Much like then, the current period of Late Modernity is seeing state systems eroding at the edges, and even in their centers. The core constituencies continue to claim and operate the state apparatus, but those who have been left behind must seek other places of belonging and meaning.
Even in societies with working state administrations, the non-state continues to flourish... While the state remains effective, its base is shrinking to those more elite constituencies for whom it provides real security and services. Meanwhile in the developed world, modernity's first nation-states have neither the money nor the commitment to reclaim their lost stature and authority...
Global networks will continue, but only for those who manage to 'make it' by the first decades of this early-21st century. Unable to aid the 60% left behind, humanity's prosperous minority -- whether they admit it or not -- is increasingly looking to its own defense and preserving the integrity of a smaller system that is still viable. Globalization is now all about a minority living defensively within a seething non-state majority...
But why is it already too late?... Fossil fuels supplies are dwindling, and the global environment is fast deteriorating. Techno-miracles could help, but the world recession is starving investment in alternative and green energy, no matter how bold the rhetoric. When we finally come out of the current economic slump, we will be hit by a liquid energy crunch. And we will be desperately short of alternative energy to fill in the gaps... When we emerge from that crisis, we will then have to confront the first big impacts of climate change: tormenting weather, crop crashes, a world water shortage and dying oceans. Then there is the inevitable pandemic threat.
These will be existential shocks. A robust world network might tolerate these reasonably well, but a world network made weaker by the riotous spread of non-state actors may struggle. The downside we face is not that globalization will come crashing down. Rather it is that our world may begin to look increasingly like the world of Late Antiquity.
