The European Dream (36 page)

While the powers that be continue to jostle back and forth between federalism and confederalism, the very technological, economic, and social realities that gave rise to the European Community and that continue to push it along its journey to union have created a political dynamic of a different sort. Rather than becoming a superstate or a mechanism to represent the enlightened national self-interests, the EU has metamorphosed into a third form. It has become a discursive forum whose function is to referee relationships and help coordinate activity among a range of players, of which the nation-state is only one. The EU’s primary role has become orchestral. It facilitates the coming together of networks of engagement that include nation-states but also extend outward to transnational organizations and inward to municipal and regional governments, as well as civil society organizations.

The EU is a response to a peculiar kind of globalization—one that the visionaries of the post-World War II era never anticipated. Between 1945 and the late 1980s, the world was divided into two powerful political blocs, the United States and the Soviet Union. Each attempted to expand its sphere of influence by exercising a measure of centralized control over countries, regions, and global commercial forces. Likewise, the post-World War II era saw the rise of several hundred transnational corporations who sought to extend their reach and influence by transborder mergers and acquisitions and the establishment of vast global value chains. This was the era of centralized and hierarchical command-and-control operations, at both the political and economic levels.

What neither the politicians nor business leaders foresaw was the advent of a new kind of technology revolution whose modus operandi is, at the same time, both highly connective and decentralized. The software revolution, the digitalization of media, personal computers, the World Wide Web, and wireless information flows transformed communications from a vertical to a horizontal plane and from centralized command-and-control to decentralized interactivity. Similarly, the shift in the global energy regime, which is just now getting under way, from elite energy sources such as oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear, which are centrally organized and vertically distributed, to more dispersed renewable energy sources such as the sun, wind, biomass, geothermal, and hydro stored in the form of hydrogen, and generated locally at end sites in a decentralized fashion, is changing the very nature of how energy is shared. Power, both literally and figuratively, will be increasingly decentralized in the coming century.

The EU was born into the old world of vertical organization and centralized control. The community was an effort to pool nation-states’ economic, social, and political resources and create “economies of scale” that could compete with the larger political and commercial forces around it. While one of the two political superpowers still exists and transnational corporations continue to expand their reach to every corner of the globe, counterforces at the local and regional levels are emerging that are both challenging global, political, and commercial hegemony and, at the same time, attempting to assert their places in an increasingly connected world.

The new decentralized technologies are being exploited in two opposite directions—toward greater concentration as well as greater dispersion of power. For example, while Microsoft has attempted to be the gatekeeper to cyberspace by imposing its operating system on most owners of personal computers, the scrappy upstart company Linux, a firm started by social activists dedicated to the free sharing and sourcing of code between computer users, is now threatening Microsoft’s dominance.

Likewise, while global corporations are using the new decentralized forms of communication to create business-to-business partnerships and establish a tighter grip on their respective industries and the communities in which they do business, local activists around the world use the same connective communication technologies to organize global resistance movements to what they regard as unbridled corporate power.

The point is, the rise of the new decentralized information and communication technologies in the late 1980s unleashed powerful new forces and countervailing forces and brought many new players onto the public stage. The new connective technologies helped corporations transcend national boundaries and disperse their production and distribution activities around the globe. The same connective technologies, however, helped cities and regions, cultural and ethnic groups, and social and environmental movements to leapfrog national boundaries and begin exercising influence on a broader global playing field.

The EU suddenly found itself in the midst of a whirlwind of contending forces vying for power and recognition, each with its own resources to bring to bear and its own agenda, and none powerful enough to dominate the political process alone. This was a far more complicated political game.

Previously, the EU merely had to negotiate its external relationships with the two superpowers, the U.S. and USSR, and its internal relationships among the contending member states. The member states, in turn, contained the myriad of subnational forces within their own territories. The global information and communication revolutions decimated nation-state boundaries just as the cannon once toppled the city-state walls of the feudal era. And, like the former era, new forces were let loose onto the political landscape, this time beyond the reach of the nation-state itself.

The first inkling that politically centralized command-and-control mechanisms were too antiquated to accommodate the vast changes in spatial and temporal orientation brought on by the new information and communication technologies came with the sudden fall of the Soviet Empire. The new technologies ran havoc over the rigid bureaucratic style of governance in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The inability of Communist governance, at every level, to respond to the liberating power of decentralized global information and communication technologies helped seal its doom. The old walls of repression and censorship were too thin to withstand the media invasion. The penetration of MTV (Music Television), rock music, and Western lifestyles behind the iron curtain, via the new information and communication technologies, proved too much for a creaky governmental apparatus whose methods of governance were borrowed from technologies and organizational styles popular in the early twentieth century.

The old centralized forms of governance—both in the Soviet Union and in the West—were modeled after Frederick Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor, whom we touched on in chapter 4, was the first to introduce a rationalized, hierarchical command-and-control mechanism into American industry in the first decade of the twentieth century. His model was quickly taken up by governments around the world.

Taylor argued that management should assume complete authority over how work is carried out on the factory floor and front office. He reasoned that if laborers retained some control over how their work was to be executed, they would conspire to work as little as necessary to perform the tasks assigned to them. Taylor’s organizational model depended on severing any independent judgment on the part of the workers and giving them exact orders along with precise instructions on how they were to perform their work.

Governments, like companies, relied on this kind of top-down bureaucratic model of governance for most of the twentieth century. In this schema, the ideas, feelings, and expertise of those delivering government services, as well as the affected citizenry, are largely ignored. The most efficient organization is deemed to be the one where the civil servants perform like soldiers and the citizenry are treated as passive recipients. The old form of rationalized command-and-control mirrored the machine mentality of the era. Both machines and men were thought of as passive instruments wound up by an outside prime mover and made to repeat simple actions over and over again. The rationalized model made little or no room for input from those executing the tasks or from those receiving the services. It was assumed that they had little value to contribute up the line of command.

The introduction of intelligent information and communication machines with feedback loops changed the nature of technology and created new metaphors for rethinking the art of governance.

The philosophical inspiration for the new technology revolution dates back to the early years of the twentieth century and the scientific writing of Alfred North Whitehead, the father of process philosophy. He was the first to eliminate the ancient wall separating space and time—being and becoming—and reduce all phenomena to pure activity. Before Whitehead, most philosophers believed that phenomena was divided into two realities: what something was and what it did. There was structure and function, the “being” of a thing and its “becoming.” Whitehead, one of the first modern philosophers to live during the transition to electricity, came to view behavior as pure process in which space and time melded together into a single extended field of pure activity. What something is, proclaimed Whitehead, can’t be differentiated from what it does. All phenomena represent continuous patterns of activity responding to changes in the patterns of activity around them. Because everything is in continuous flux, novelty is present at every instant. Whitehead believed that all living things are continuously anticipating novelty in their surrounding environment and making adjustments to those changes in order to secure their duration—what we now call “feedback.” Whitehead called this anticipation-response mechanism “subjective aim” and said that it was really what “mind” was about.

A half century after Whitehead’s insight, Norbert Wiener introduced a mechanical analogue of process philosophy with the concept of cybernetics. Wiener and his colleagues were working on improving the sighting and targeting of anti-aircraft gunnery in World War II. Wiener’s engineering insights on how machines and humans communicate transformed process philosophy into a new technological format, which soon thereafter gave birth to modern information and communications technology.

Wiener inaugurated the new field of cybernetics research. Cybernetics comes from the Greek word
kyberneties,
which means “steersman.” Cybernetics reduces purposeful behavior to two components, information and feedback, and postulates that all processes can be understood as amplifications and complexifications of both. Wiener defined information as

Cybernetics is the theory of the way these messages or pieces of information interact with one another to produce predictable outcomes.

According to cybernetics theory, the “steering mechanism” that regulates all behavior is feedback. Anyone who has ever adjusted a thermostat is familiar with how feedback works. The thermostat regulates the room temperature by monitoring the change in temperature in the room. If the room cools off and the temperature dips below the mark set on the dial, the thermostat kicks on the furnace, and the furnace remains on until the room temperature coincides once again with the temperature set on the dial. Then the thermostat kicks off the furnace, until the room temperature drops again, requiring additional heat. This is an example of negative feedback. All systems maintain themselves by the use of negative feedback. Its opposite, positive feedback, produces results of a very different kind. In positive feedback, a change in activity feeds on itself, reinforcing and intensifying the process, rather than re-adjusting and dampening it. For example, a sore throat causes a person to cough, and the coughing, in turn, exacerbates the sore throat.

Cybernetics is primarily concerned with negative feedback. Wiener points out that “for any machine subject to a varied external environment to act effectively it is necessary that information concerning the results of its own action be furnished to it as part of the information on which it must continue to act.”
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Feedback provides information to the machine on its actual performance, which is then measured against the expected performance. The information allows the machine to adjust its activity accordingly, in order to close the gap between what is expected of it and how it in fact behaves. Cybernetics is the theory of how machines self-regulate in changing environments. More than that, cybernetics is the theory that explains purposeful behavior in machines.

Today’s intelligent technologies all operate by cybernetic principles. Continuous negative feedback—and occasional positive feedback—take us from a much slower technological era organized around linear, discrete, and discontinuous actions to a vastly sped-up age of pure process and uninterrupted flows.

Smart technologies were coming of age in the early 1980s, just at the time when governments everywhere were under intense scrutiny by an increasingly leery and cynical public. Government bureaucracies were accused of being bloated, inept, uncaring, and slow. A deep worldwide recession in 1973-75 and again in 1980-82—occasioned by the oil shock—added billions of dollars to government deficits in the U.S. and elsewhere, forcing a discussion about the appropriate size of government and the extent to which it could be counted on to provide a broad social net for its citizenry. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain and President Ronald Reagan in the U.S. led a political rebellion against big government, preaching the value of deregulation of industry and privatization of government services. The idea was to disperse as much government activity as possible into the commercial arena and the not-for-profit third sector, where it was supposed that the marketplace and the civil society would provide more efficient means for delivering value. “Bigger is better” lost its cachet, and decentralization became vogue.