How to Save the World

The sign (erected by Zapatista rebels in México) says "Here the people lead and the government follows." It prohibits the sale of arms, drugs and unlicensed logging and concludes "No to the destruction of nature". Image from Wikipedia.

Over at the Oil Drum, Jeff Vail has been predicting that México, as a functioning nation-state, may not survive the year. He cites the collapse in that country of oil production (a Peak Oil phenomenon), attacks by anti-government forces on oil infrastructure, growing poverty and inequality, inability of the state to provide for the essential needs of the nation, growing power of organized crime, corruption and desertion of police forces, the assassination of judges and officials with impunity, and the growing bankruptcy of farmers due to the distortions of subsidized globalization and phony 'free' trade.

Jeff argues that the very existence of functioning nation-states (in contrast to non-functioning, nominal nation-states like Afghanistan) depends upon their ability to meet the needs of the people, to a degree sufficient for the people to continue to support (with their political and military allegiance, their willingness to respect and uphold the law, and their willingness to pay taxes) the nation-state.

Nation-states that are struggling to do so will often try to create a need, and a sense of urgency, for the nation-state to continue, by conjuring up an imaginary crisis (e.g. weapons of mass destruction) or an imaginary enemy ( e.g. immigrants, or unstable or covetous neighbours). If the people are sufficiently ill-informed, governments of nation-states can keep the country together, and ravage its wealth for the personal gain of themselves and their supporters, for a long period of time by doing this.

It is much easier to create a sense of urgency for self-defence, especially as the world becomes geopolitically and economically smaller every day, than it is to create a sense of urgency for, say, decent health care or equitable distribution of wealth, particularly in large nation-states where the lack of the latter can be blamed on 'bureaucracy' and 'inefficiency'.

As Jeff points out, nation-states don't collapse suddenly. They erode, bit by bit, until you wake up one day and find that you live in a country where:

almost all the wealth and power is held by a small, powerful elite that uses propaganda and political muscle to keep it that way
voting and other acts of citizenry don't make any difference
the majority of people say they want much less government, even if that means much less, or no, government services
the corruption of the police and politicians is rampant, to the point neither is any longer interested in upholding the law or looking after the needs of citizens, but rather their own self-interest, financially, security-wise and/or ideologically
organized crime is rampant, to the point it has and exerts more power at the local level than does the government
the government is under enormous pressure to devolve authority to regional and/or local governments, in the probably naive hope that this will lead to greater effectiveness and responsibility
acts of sabotage, suicide and/or attempted secession are on the upswing
what is keeping the nation-state together is mostly manufactured fear of some outside enemy

We have reached the paradoxical point where the nation-state has probably outlived its usefulness, but we face global challenges that dwarf anything we have had to face since civilization and the idea of the nation-state began.

Those who have not paid attention to the lessons of history would have us believe the answer is one global government, that will take away the manufactured outside enemy because there will no longer be an outside. There is no reason to believe that a single global nation-state would succeed any better than the balkanizing, mostly struggling nation-states of today. In fact, without an outside enemy (and, no, we cannot convince people that global poverty or global warming is the enemy; we've tried that), it is unlikely such a global nation-state would last as long as it would take to put it together.

Devolution of power to provinces, counties, or regional states has also been tried, and while it generally has the advantage of ethnic, linguistic and/or cultural homogeneity of population (and hence less likelihood of civil war), there is no history or reason to believe it can be any more responsive and able to meet the needs of the citizens than larger nation-states, and there is every reason to believe it will be less able to cope with any real outside enemy, should one emerge (and because of the growing inequality of wealth and resources between regions, and general overpopulation, ecological devastation and resource scarcities, they are more than likely to emerge).

That leaves us with more old-fashioned alternatives: anarchy or self-managed communities. These models both worked for millennia, but we have long forgotten how they worked. It took centuries and staggering bloodshed for us to make nation-states work, in some places, for awhile. Downshifting to anarchy or self-managed community models is likely to be just as tumultuous. For one thing, most of the world no longer has genuine communities, and to create them would require a lot of large-scale musical chairs as people sought others with whom they could hope, and want, to create community.

In areas that have, or can find, real community (including, as I reported yesterday, some areas of México), this model is already working to some extent, and can work in more places, especially if and when nation-states and their regional surrogates collapse for lack of support from the people that once made them work, and give up trying to suppress community-based 'independence' movements.

I am less optimistic about anarchy (by which I mean not the propagandized version of endless chaos and violence, but the libertarian ideal of no government at all, where people agree to get along with, and work with, their neighbours because it is in their interests to do so). My pessimism is due in part to the fact that such a model takes a lot of practice to get right, and in part to the fact that it takes a lot of room and other abundance of resources, to preclude our all-too-human predilection to resort to gang behaviour and banditry at the first sign of resource scarcity. There are just too many of us, and we have used up too much of the Earth's abundance, for this model to work.

And although I am also pessimistic about the re-emergence of community as the primary social, political and economic unit of our society, just because of the enormous amount of re-learning and practice (and making monumental mistakes) it will entail, I also sense that we have no other choice.

When the circumstances described in the bullet points above prevail in more and more countries (and this is well underway), I think Jeff is right to predict that we will see the (agonizingly slow, but steady and irreversible) collapse of the nation-state, and in the vacuum that this collapse produces, the only viable 're-placement' for conducting social, political and economic activity I can foresee are self-managed communities. Jeff even wryly suggests that this relocalization may help us cope better after the End of Oil.

The process of getting there, alas, is not going to be pretty.

And I wonder what the collapse of México means for NAFTA and the SPP?

Category: The Political Process