Authors: Al Gore
During the Industrial Revolution, the introduction of transportation networks such as railroads and highways further expanded the political role of nation-states, and further consolidated national identities. At the same time, the nature and scale of industrial technologies expanded potential points of conflict between the operations of the market and the political prerogatives of the state.
The internal cohesion of modern nation-states was also strengthened by the introduction of national curricula in schools that not only reinforced the adoption of a common national dialect but also spread a common understanding of national histories and cultures—usually in ways that emphasized the most positive stories or myths in each nation’s history,
while often neglecting to include narratives that might diminish feelings of nationalism. (For example, Japanese textbooks that minimize its invasion and occupation of
China and Korea have regularly become sources of tension in Northeast Asia.)
Transnational global technologies such as the Internet and satellite television networks are exercising influence in spheres that used to be dominated primarily by the power of nation-states. Many regional satellite television networks dispense with national frames of reference in presenting news. And the Internet, in particular, is complicating many of the strategies formerly relied upon by nation-states to build and maintain national cohesion. Just as the printing press drew adherence to
single versions of national languages and solidified national identities, the Internet is making available the knowledge of every country to the people of every other country.
Google Translate, the largest of many machine translation services, now operates in sixty-four different languages and provides translations from one language to another for
more documents, articles, and books in one day than all of the human translators in the world provide in a full year.
And of course, the number of texts translated by computers is increasing exponentially.
Seventy-five percent of the web pages translated are from English to other languages. It is often, and inaccurately, said that English is the language of the Internet. Actually there are more
Chinese language users of the Internet than there are people in the United States. But the content of the Internet that is now being dispersed throughout the world is content that still mainly originates in English.
The narratives of national histories that have dominated the curricula of mandatory public education systems now have competition from alternative narratives widely available on the Internet. And they often have the persuasive ring of truth—for example, for minorities within nation-states whose historical mistreatment can no longer be as easily obscured or whitewashed.
For these and other reasons, the glue holding some nations together in spite of their ethnic, linguistic, religious and sectarian, tribal and historical differences appears to be losing some of its cohesive strength. Belgium, for example, has reallocated the power
once vested in its national government to its component regional governments. Flanders and Wallonia are not technically nation-states but might as well be.
In many parts of the world, identity-driven subnational movements are becoming more impatient and, in some cases, aggressive, in seeking independence from the nations of which they are now part. Nation-states have been described as “imagined communities”; it is, after all, impossible for citizens of a nation-state to interact with all other members of the national community. It is their common identity that forms the basis of their national bonds. If those bonds no longer lay as strong a claim on their imagination, their identity bonds may attach elsewhere—often to older identities that predated the formation of the nation-state.
In many regions, the growth of fundamentalism is also connected to the weakening of the psychological bonds of identity in the nation-state. Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Jewish—even Buddhist—fundamentalism
are all sources of conflict in the world today. This does not come as a surprise to historians. After all, it was the desperate need to control religious wars and sectarian violence that led to the formal codification of nation-states as the primary form of governance in the first place.
In the midst of the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes proposed one of the first and most influential arguments for a “social contract” to prevent the “war of every man against every man” by giving a monopoly on violence to the nation-state and granting to the sovereign of that state—whether a monarch or
an “assembly of men”—the sole authority “to make war and peace … and to command the army.”
Nationalism became a potent new cause of warfare over the three centuries between the Treaty of Westphalia and the end of World War II. As the weaponry of war was industrialized—with machine guns, poison gas, tanks, and then airplanes and missiles—the destructive power unleashed led to the horrendous loss of life in the wars of the twentieth century. And the imposition of order by nation-states within their own borders sometimes created internal tensions that led their leaders to use the projection of violence against neighboring nation-states as a means of strengthening internal cohesion by demonizing “the other.” Tragically, the monopoly on violence granted to the state was also sometimes brutally directed at disfavored minorities within their borders.
In the wake of World War I, a number of nation-states were formed in the imagination of the United States, the United Kingdom, and other European nations that were seeking to create stability in regions like the Middle East and Africa, where tribal, ethnic, sectarian, and other divisions threatened continued destabilizing violence. One of the premier examples of an imagined community was Yugoslavia. When the unifying ideology of communism was imposed on this amalgam of separate peoples, Yugoslavia functioned fairly well for three generations.
But when communism collapsed, the glue of its imagined nation no longer could hold it together. The great Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko described what happened next with the metaphor of a prehistoric mammoth found frozen in the ice of Siberia. When the ice melted, and the mammoth’s flesh thawed, ancient microbes within the flesh awakened and began decomposing the mammoth. In like fashion, the ancient antagonisms between Serbian Orthodox Christians, Croatian Catholics, and Bosnian Muslims decomposed the glue that had formed what is now referred to as the “former Yugoslavia.”
Not coincidentally, the border between Serbia and Croatia had marked the border
1,500 years ago between the Western and Eastern Roman empires, while the border between Serbia and Bosnia marked the fault line between Islam and Christendom 750 years ago. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, the new leader of independent Serbia
went to the disputed territory of Kosovo to mark the 600th anniversary of the great battle there in which the Serbian Empire was defeated by the Ottoman Empire; in a demagogic and warmongering speech, he revivified the ancient hatreds wrapped in memories of that long ago defeat and
launched genocidal violence against both Bosnians and Croats.
The legacy of empires has continued to vex the organization of politics and power in the world long after nation-states became the dominant form of political organization. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, European countries colonized 10 million square miles of land in Africa and Asia,
20 percent of all land in the world, putting 150 million people under their rule. (Indeed, several modern nation-states continued to govern colonial empires well into the second half of the twentieth century.) To pick one of many examples, the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I resulted in the decision by Western powers to create new nation-states in the Middle East, some of which pushed together peoples, tribes, and cultures that had not previously been part of the same “national” community, including Iraq and Syria. It is not coincidental that both of these nations have been coming apart at the seams.
With the weakening of cohesion in nation-states, wherever peoples feel a strong and coherent identity that is separate from the one cultivated by the nation-state that contains them, there is new restlessness. From Kurdistan to Catalonia to Scotland, from Syria to Chechnya to South Sudan, from indigenous communities in the Andean nations to tribal communities in Sub-Saharan Africa, many people are shifting their primary political identities away from the nation-states in which they lived for many generations. Although the causes are varied and complex, a few nations, like Somalia, have devolved into “post-national entities.”
In many parts of the world, nonstate terrorist groups and criminal organizations such as those who are now wielding power in so-called narco-states are aggressively challenging the power of nation-states. There is an overlap between these nonstate actors:
nineteen of the forty-three known terrorist groups in the world are linked to the drug trade. The
market for illegal narcotics is now
larger than the national economies of 163 of the world’s 184 nations.
It is significant that the most consequential threat to the United States in the last three decades came from a nonstate actor, Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda. A malignant form of Muslim fundamentalism was the primary motivation for Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack. (According to numerous reports, bin Laden was revulsed by the presence of U.S. military deployments in Saudi Arabia, the custodian of Islam’s holiest sites.)
The damage done by the attack itself—the murder of more than 3,000 people—was horrible enough, but the tragic response it provoked, the misguided invasion of Iraq, which, as everyone now acknowledges, had nothing whatsoever to do with attacking the U.S., was ultimately an even more serious blow to America’s power, prestige, and standing.
Hundreds of thousands died unnecessarily, $3 trillion was wasted, and the reasons given for launching the war in the first place were later revealed as cynical and deceptive.
The decision by the United States government to abandon its historic prohibitions against the torture of captives and the indefinite detention of individuals without legal process has been widely seen around the world as diminishing its moral authority. In a world divided into different civilizations, with different religious traditions and ethnic histories, moral authority is arguably an even greater source of power. Even though the ideologies of nations vary widely, the values of justice, fairness, equality, and sustainability are valued by the people of every nation, even if they often define these values in different ways.
The apparent rise of fundamentalism in its many varieties may be due, in part, to the pace of change that naturally causes many people to more tightly embrace orthodoxies of faith as a source of spiritual and cultural stability. The globalization of culture—not only through the Internet, but also through satellite television, compact discs, and other media—has also been a source of conflict between Western societies and conservative fundamentalist societies. When cultural goods from the West depict gender roles and sexual values in ways that conflict with traditional norms in fundamentalist cultures, religious leaders condemn what they view as the socially destabilizing impact.
But the impact of globalized culture goes far beyond issues of gender equity and sexuality. Cultural goods serve as powerful advertisements for the lifestyles that are depicted, and promotions for the values of the
country where such goods originate. In a sense, they carry the cultural DNA of that country. As the global middle class is exposed to images of homes, automobiles, appliances, and other common features of life in industrial countries, the pressure they exert for changes in their own domestic political and economic policies often grows accordingly.
The longer-term impact may well be to break down differences. A recent study in Cairo found that there is a strong correlation between the
amount of television watched and the decline of support for fundamentalism. One of the sources of the enhanced influence of Turkey in the Middle East is the
popularity of its movies and television programs. The dominance of American music has enhanced the impression of the United States as a dynamic and creative society. The ability to influence the thinking of peoples through the dissemination of cultural goods such as movies, television programs, music, books, sports, and games is increasing in an interconnected world where consumption of media is rising every year.
The second half of the twentieth century saw a
decline in the number of people killed in wars, and a
decline in the number of wars in every category, international and civil—even though millions continued to die because of the pathological behavior of dictators. The decline has continued in this century, leading some to argue that humankind is maturing, humane values are spreading, and military power is less relevant in an interconnected world. It is a measure of this change that the people of the United States feel a palpable loss of national power at a time when its military budget is larger than those of the next fifty other nations combined. However, self-described foreign policy “realists” (who believe that nation-states
always
compete in an inherently anarchic international system) warn that similar predictions made in past eras proved to be false.
History provides all too many examples of unwarranted optimism about the decline of war during previous eras when a new appreciation for the benefits of peace seemed to be on the rise. The best-selling book globally in 1910 was
The Great Illusion
by Norman Angell, who argued that the increased economic integration that accompanied the Second Industrial Revolution had made war obsolete. Less than four years later,
on the eve of World War I, Andrew Carnegie, the Bill Gates of his day, wrote a New Year’s greeting to friends: “We send this New Year Greeting, January 1, 1914 strong in the faith that International Peace is soon to prevail, through several of the great powers agreeing to settle their disputes
by arbitration under International Law, the pen thus proving mightier than the sword.”
Human nature has not changed and the history of almost every nation contains sobering reminders that the use of military power has often been decisive in changing their fate. Nationalist politicians in many countries—including the United States and China—will, of course, seek to exploit fears about the future—and the fear of one another—by calling for the buildup of military strength. In the present era, some Chinese military strategists have written that a well-planned cyberattack on the United States could allow China to “gain equal footing” with the U.S.
in spite of U.S. superiority in conventional and nuclear weaponry. And as has often been the case in history, fear begets fear; the buildup of a capacity for war leads those against whom it might be used to infer that there is an intent to do just that.