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KlappentextToday, the majority of the peoples of the planet live in nation-states, based upon the idea, if never the reality, of a single people, a single culture, a single rule of law and a single source of sovereign authority. But will they continue to do so in the future?

None of the major challenges that confront humanity today - from climate change to disease, from terrorism to mass migration - can be handled effectively by single nation-states, no matter how powerful. The world is no longer made up only of states but also of an ever-increasing multitude of interstate networks and organizations which recognize no borders. We are beginning to be able to imagine the very real possibility of a new global civil society. But what political form should this take?

By examining the history of the evolution of human society from the world's first empires to today's world of interstate networks, this book argues that there now exists the possibility of the emergence of a new political form, a global 'federation of federations', that will bring the species closer to the possibility of a more harmonious, equitable and secure future.

Anthony Pagden is distinguished professor of political science and history at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Details

Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781509565412

ProduktartE-Book

EinbandartE-Book

FormatEPUB

Format Hinweis0 - No protection

FormatFormat mit automatischem Seitenumbruch (reflowable)

Verlag

John Wiley & Sons

Erscheinungsjahr2024

Erscheinungsdatum11.09.2024

Auflage1. Auflage

Seiten261 Seiten

SpracheEnglisch

Dateigrösse320 Kbytes

Artikel-Nr.17531268

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Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction

Chapter 1: Birth of the Nation-State
Chapter 2: Ordering the World
Chapter 3: A World-Order of Justice
Chapter 4: A Federation of the Worldmehr

Leseprobe

Introduction

Today, we live in a world of states. This is true even of those ten million or so stateless persons who are stateless´ only in the sense that they are not recognized as belonging to the states where they actually live. A state is very simply a legal and political order which exercises sovereign power over a nation. A nation is widely understood to be a single people living within a single geographical space, united by culture, by language, by habits and beliefs, who share a common history, whether real or imaginary, and, more often than not, a common religion. Together they make up the nation-state´; and since 1945 it has become what the United Nations Charter calls the right of all peoples´ to live in one to which they, by birth or inheritance, belong. The distinction between the terms state´ and nation´ is, however, a very slippery one; and they are frequently used as if they were simply interchangeable. For while there clearly cannot exist a state without a nation, there are many nations that are not governed in this way by states - or at least not by states of their own choosing. A people such as the Kurds who are subject to the laws of the modern states of Turkey, Syria and Iran are a nation without a state. None of the remaining Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, although they may often possess extensive independent executive powers, have states of their own. There are many tribes in Africa who, like the Maasai and Tuareg, the Dogon and the Himba, live across the borders of several different nation-states. In 1917, the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who was conscious of belonging to no nation, called the nation-state a ghastly abstraction of organizing man´.1 For all these anomalies and exceptions, it has come to be looked upon as if it were almost a natural human condition.

In fact, however, it is of very recent origin. The modern nation-state first emerged, in anything like its modern form, in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries after more than a century of unrelenting, internecine, religious and ideological conflict. It was conceived as a means of uniting under one sovereign authority, the collection of feudal domains, city-states and religious communities, those petites patries, as they were called in French, or patrias chicas in Spanish, of which most of the monarchies of Europe had hitherto been composed. It was given a more powerful more inclusive political identity by the American and French Revolutions, both of which re-fashioned existing pre-modern nations into new nation-states with new state forms. It also developed an ideology of its own - nationalism´ - what Émile Durkheim in 1895 called that obscure mystic idea´, the belief in the integrity and distinctiveness of one´s own nation and of the ultimate superiority of one´s own nation over all others.2 Subsequently, it has overtaken the world. Have you not seen´, asked Tagore, that the dread of it has been the one goblin dread with which the whole world has been trembling?´3

The nation-state was, therefore, as Tagore made clear, initially a European creation which was subsequently exported to, or was imposed upon, the rest of the world. Despite the often bitter debates over just what the political future of the newly independent states of Asia, Africa and the Middle East might be, all the future liberators of the colonized world were eventually convinced that the only way to achieve - and secure - true independence was to do as the Americas, both North and South, had once done: create for themselves self-governing, sovereign states. Seek-ye first the political kingdom,´ as Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of an independent Ghana, famously declared, and everything else shall be added unto you.´ In the course of its brief and violent history, the nation-state has therefore, come to be looked upon not merely as a phase in human history but as the goal towards which all mankind has been struggling throughout its entire existence, as indeed the end of history´.

It has proved to be a highly efficient means of uniting the populations within its borders; but it has also, as the two world wars demonstrated with great ferocity, succeeded in dividing the peoples of the world in ways in which they had rarely been divided before. For many in the years since 1918, this has suggested that there might exist other ways of conceiving both the state´ and the relationship between states, a relationship that might result in the emergence of an as yet shadowy and indistinct, but broader, more cosmopolitan´, and potentially at least, less restrictive, less murderous form of human association. Many have announced the imminent death of the state. What very few, however, have sought to predict with any clarity was what would replace it. This book is an attempt to suggest an answer. It is, however, an answer that can only make sense in the context of a history of the ways in which, over the centuries, human beings across the planet have reflected on the nature and the possibilities of the ever-expanding degrees of interaction, of connection, that exist between them.

Before the arrival of the nation-state, much of the world was divided into empires, the most extensive, longest-lasting of all the kinds of political societies that have ever existed. Empires are notoriously difficult to define or even to describe. They united peoples, albeit initially often against their will. They also dispersed populations across the globe. They created new perceptions of space and time. They built new societies, new ethnicities and new political forms. And in their quest to govern infinite spaces, they have, in effect, created what we today loosely call the globe´ as an imaginary political space.

Empires, however, were not only as they are so often represented today, merely systems of conquest and colonization, driven by an overriding, inevitably self-serving vision of how the world should be governed, what laws it should possess, what values it should aspire to, and sometimes what religion or culture it should follow. For the world´s empires, even the most famously rapacious of them, not merely fought and conquered, exploited and extracted, pillaged and settled. They also created extensive trading networks beyond the real limits of their own territories. They served, that is, not only to dominate peoples but also to connect them. This, it is now becoming clear, is true of even the most loosely organized of them. The Mongol Empire, for instance, for so long believed to be nothing but the creation of marauding bands of semi-nomadic horsemen, was also the creator of a complex set of commercial relations strung out across the whole of Asia that became, in time, a force for global development that is still felt to this day.4

Eventually, this expansion of trade and commerce led to what was called the (global) commercial society´. By the mid-eighteenth century, most of the peoples of the world, those at least who had not succumbed to what Adam Smith called [t]he savage injustices of the Europeans´, had some degree of interaction with, or at least an awareness of, the existence of a great many of the others. And while this all too often served to reinforce a perhaps innate sense of the superior worth of certain groups of humans over others, it also resulted in a need to communicate with, and to understand, those others, a desire which, in time, resulted in the creation of a more multifaceted, more connected world. The belief - the hope - of the great political and economic theorists of eighteenth-century Europe was that what Montesquieu famously called sweet commerce´ would eventually make all peoples more gentle´ because commerce implied, above all, communication; and communication, even if it arose out of greed or necessity, would eventually compel humans to recognize each other´s worth, to sympathize´ with them across the continents. All of this may have been unduly optimistic, too often derailed by human greed, by what David Hume reviled as the jealousy of trade´, since most trading nations were more, rather than less, likely to be perpetually at each other´s throats. But even the highly sceptical Hume was prepared to believe that what he called the intercourse for mutual convenience and advantage´ would inevitably result in the increase in the largeness of men´s views, and the force of their mutual connexions´.5 The commercial society led, inexorably, to the vision of a world we today describe increasingly in terms of the global, the planetary, and what Jeremy Bentham in 1780 was the first to call the international´.

The processes of conquest, colonization and commerce made a world. What, however, has sought to hold it together, to give it coherence, has been law, or more accurately the attempt to create a global system of justice. Empires were, or were believed to be, as much legal orders as they were systems of extraction and exploitation, and their principal objective has always been declared to be precisely to bring justice to all the peoples of the world. This may seem to be merely a means of sanctioning what was in reality a sustained process of brutal expropriation. But if empires had not also been able to deliver some real benefit to their conquered peoples, they could...
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The Burdens of Empire

Frieden und Krieg in der Frühen Neuzeit

Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800

The Fall of Natural Man

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