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... Ah, love, let us be
true The Nation Claims for the demise of the nation state are somewhat premature, and are predicated on the notion that politics is about economics. If such were true it would then follow that in a totally interlinked global economy, where no national economy is independent, the idea of the nation makes no sense. Yet someone still makes the laws and fights the wars. Of course, politics is not about economics and the nation state is more than both. Ideally, a nation is a group of people who share, and have been shaped by, a common land, heritage and culture who wish to live under laws of their own making in order to actualise their own potential in ways that they see fit as a collective. As a corollary every major culture should be able to live under laws of their own choosing in a self determining manner. The 'traditional' nation state is very much as described by the above, and comprises the bulk of First World nations. They are mostly 'natural' states that have evolved borders established through centuries of warfare and population diffusion - which is why they are far from arbitrary. They mark the point at which the killing or migration had run its course. However, many Third World nations, particularly in Africa, are merely post-colonial artefacts defined purely by arbitrary lines on maps that take no account of the different cultures they both include and divide. It is a truism that where one finds nations defined by straight lines on a map, taking no account of geography and people, we have a recipe for war or at least ethnic clashes and corruption as power is brokered between competing groups. We, on the other hand, would be quite happy to see nations break up and reform on a smaller more viable scale, each encompassing people who are happy to live with each other and with the laws they themselves establish. It is our belief that the land belongs to the people living on it - not the politically motivated mapmakers. Take for example, the wars in the former Yugoslavia, where the term 'ethnic cleansing' was introduced to the world for the first time (new name, old concept). The West was desperate to maintain Yugoslavia as a single multicultural nation despite its obvious disintegration amid appalling violence, in many cases bordering on genocide. Only when populations had been displaced along ethnic lines through intimidation and murder, and military action stalled by a balance of power established by costly Western intervention, did the lines on the map stabilise into real independent nations with the telltale 'crinkly' borders. The most logical solution to the Yugoslavia break-up would have been very different. The West could have called upon the UN to supervise the dissolution by militarily suppressing the fighting while actively encouraging 'ethnic cleansing' by buying, and exchanging, properties within the new nations. The end result would have been the same, but a lot more people would still be alive, and the money spent on the bombs we rained down upon them would have been invested in real estate transactions instead. So today we have the paradoxical position espoused by the 'globalists'. On one hand they claim that the nation state is an anachronism whose time has passed. On the other they are terrified when non-viable states break apart. Even when this has actually happened they still maintain the fiction that these continue to be 'nations'. The resolution to the seeming paradox is quite straightforward. It is that the 'globalists' still need the trappings of the nation state to pass and enforce laws to hold their citizens in line and simultaneously provide free reign for the new transnational economic order. As an added bonus they rather favour nations that are 'multicultural' so as to fragment any consensus against them, and indeed, appear to offer solutions for problems of their own making. Of course, the irony here is that 'multicultural' is only to be approved of as long as all those internal 'cultures' accept the common economic wisdom that greed is good and the market is the metaphor of choice. Those that do not get demonised, whether they are 'nationalists' or Moslems. To create this illusion they need to perform a curious sleight-of-hand. While claiming that the nation state is dead or obsolete they must simultaneously convince us of the necessity for supra-national power blocs which are giant replicas of that supposedly defunct model. The only real difference being that the power is devolved upwards away from the people who are subject to it. It is very similar to the other favourite method of investing supra-national organisations such as the IMF with great power and no electoral accountability. It is a method of neutralising democracy on a vast scale. Every time you hear how the government cannot act because of 'world conditions' (or whatever…) hear it as a statement that your vote is worthless - a mere placebo. Nations are the next level up from the trade union in the protection of the people. Once global capitalism swept them aside it was the turn of the nation to be removed as an obstacle to the money machine which exists solely to multiply itself regardless of any cost that can not be quantified in dollars. You might expect to be able to vote for the politicians that supposedly run your country, but when was the last time you voted for who was to sit on the board of Monsanto or Nestle?. What is truly obsolete is the model of the nation state, for anything but a nation that embodies the ideals outlined at the beginning of this article. Where a nation does not embody these ideals it should be broken up into units that do. And the very last place the trappings of 'nation' should exist is in vast conglomerates of different peoples - or 'empires' as they were once known. It is important for nations to recognise and accept one overriding truth - that the laws and legitimate exercise of the power of the government of a nation stops at its own borders. And what of geographically localised minorities within larger nations that wish to secede and form their own nation? Well, if they can form a viable nation state they should be allowed to do so. This does not mean that the 'parent nation' has any obligation to help its offspring survive, and in fact may even try to bring it into line by various means including economic sanctions. What must be ruled out is the use of military force. For a brief few years it seemed that the notion of one nation invading another had become illegitimate in the eyes of the world. That ideal, imperfect through it may seem when dealing with unpleasant regimes, must not be allowed to die. The alternative is far worse, as most of Human history testifies. The National Environment We have a rather traditional and Romantic view of the ideal relationship between a land and it's people - we consider them a unity. When we say that the land and the people are one we are not primarily speaking of territoriality, of lines on a map, although this has always been a factor. Even though every culture needs its own piece of Earth that it calls home and where its people can feel secure amongst like-minded fellows, it is much more than this. We are one species amongst many, and all major cultures on Earth grew out of its surroundings, and its interaction with the flora and fauna of its homeland. Humanity in general, and each culture in particular has been, and should remain, part of a reasonably balanced local ecology. The psychic effects of being cut away from nature are apparent in every modern city. Cities are a breeding ground of ecological deficiency diseases manifested as crime, alienation and depersonalisation. We forget that all we admire in the character of a nation has its roots in Nature, from a time when most of its population were country dwellers, and that much of what we despise evolved in the cities, often quite recently. Again, is it a coincidence that global Capitalism brings with it an urbanisation that creates a common international environment while at the same time destroying the unique national qualities embodied in life and land itself? Ghandi certainly thought so, when he recognised the village as the heart of India. True diversity is being drained away to provide a lowest common denominator of a consumer society, and replaced with an ersatz 'multiculturalism' where diversity is redefined as eating Indian food or listening to African music in an overpriced rabbit hutch of a house or apartment in a polluted and overcrowded city. What was once 'the countryside' is now stripped of life by the multinational agribusiness, or covered in concrete for yet more roads. Thirty years ago one could look at the sky of a summer evening and see tens of thousands of birds from horizon to horizon flying to roost for the night. No longer. Be grateful we are in one of the better parts of the world. International Relationships - The European Union In an ideal world nation states that share common interests will come together in co-operative supranational organisations and ensure that multilateral consensual Law and Justice govern their relations. However, exactly what form they should take and what powers they may legitimately wield are important questions that are at the heart of the controversy over EU expansion and the future of Europe. We are missing an historic opportunity to create something new in history - a power structure that is neither nation, nor alliance, nor empire. Instead, however, we seem to be in the process of creating a poor copy of the USA, with all of the bad features and few of the good. Indeed, we are currently going through the same process as the fledgling USA did as its founding states came together. Yet within a century the centralised government had accrued so much power that it successfully fought one of the most vicious wars up to that point in history in order to prevent member states seceding. And from that point on the federal government has relentlessly centralised power to the extent it now reaches directly into the lives of every citizen on almost every major issue. It is this modern USA that the EU wishes to become. We would prefer the model of the EU to be based more on that of the newly founded USA with its federation of independent states which ran their own internal affairs, and where real power was effectively decentralised, and what central power existed was directly elected by the people. Historically, the further power is removed from the people the more corrupt and tyrannical it becomes. One only has to look at the salaries that the bureaucrats of the EU pay themselves, and the waste, to see this beginning to happen on a grand scale. The only thing that keeps Big Government honest is fear of the people - something lacking in Brussels. This is the essence of the choice Europe faces - centralisation of power, or decentralisation? The days of huge monolithic nations and empires are coming to an end, simply because there is no requirement for them in a world of instantaneous communication and rapid travel. It is not the true nation state whose days are numbered, but those of the gigantic central authorities masquerading as nations. Making the EU in the image of a failed model is a mistake on a colossal scale, and an opportunity we stand in danger of losing - the opportunity to present the world with the political structure of the future. The path forward should be to make the European Parliament with its directly elected members (MEPs) the most senior body. At present it is merely a rubber stamp for the real power which is split between an unelected Council of Ministers representing the individual nations and the Commission which is a politicised bureaucracy whose senior members are appointed by the member states (i.e. the Council of Ministers wearing a different hat). The alternative scenario is one in which the Parliament sets policy, the Council acts as a second chamber with the power of veto, and the Commission becomes a de-politicised civil service executive. The Court of Justice would preside over disputes involving members states, EU institutions and businesses - but not individuals. The European Economic and Social Committee would largely be scrapped as there would no pan-European social policy at all; this being a matter for individual states. In no case would the EU or any of its institutions have a remit extending into the purely internal workings of the member states. The most important principle that should be adhered to by all the governments concerned is that of not relinquishing their primary duties to protect their own people and execute the laws of their own people inside their own territories. No national government should have the Right to deliver its citizens en masse and irrevocably into the hands of a foreign power, no matter how well intentioned. Power should be moving downwards, not upwards. The top level should concern itself primarily with co-ordination and should itself be controlled as directly as possible by the people of the Union. Written into the charters governing such organisations should be no social or cultural content, but rather, strictly defined limitations on the powers and authority of such a body. For we want such an organisation to be truly multicultural in the fullest meaning of the word - that is, separate cultures living under their own laws. What defines a culture is not economics, not military policy, not even government - but the laws that a society drafts for itself in the social sphere, and the Rights and Duties its people choose to live under. At present the European Union is far from ideal, but what has been done can be undone. Treaties do not bind nations in perpetuity. © The Consensus 2002 |
