From Nations to Networks

• Book: From Nations to Networks. by David de Ugarte, Pere Quintana, Enrique Gomez, and Arnau Fuentes.

URL = http://deugarte.com/gomi/Nations.pdf

Summary and structure

Key thesis summarized in this citation:

“Esperanto, the bearer of a universal humanist ideal, showed in practice, probably definitively, that the alternative to surpassing nationalities does not lie in universalist cosmopolitanism, for the only way of being human is to have a tribe, but in making the community real and tangible, and thus truly human.”

David de Ugarte et al.:

“In the first part of this book, we will try to understand nations, as well as the tools and symbols from which they were imagined and experienced.

In the second part, we will follow the experiences of 19th- and 20th-century segregationists, those who did not accept the passage to a world that resembled a jigsaw with hundreds of coloured pieces, and tried to split away from the inevitable internal homogenisation which it generated.” (http://deugarte.com/gomi/Nations.pdf)

Excerpts

Introduction

From the prologue by Josu Jon Imaz :

“The speed of the transformation process of social links, from territory-based forms to network-based forms, has increased geometrically in the last decade. This is the phenomenon that is analysed with an extraordinary precision in the pages of From Nations to Networks. Territorial links become more flexible, and networks and communities are created in which geographical connections are sometimes replaced by affinities, common interests and shared aims. The concept of belonging does not disappear, but is extended to spaces with higher degrees of freedom. It is as if until now we had been flat figures living in a two-dimensional space divided by black lines, with domains painted in different colours, and suddenly we had become three-dimensional: now we are larger geometrical bodies, with more complex shapes. We still interact with the plane that intersects with us, as we are still ascribed classical national identities, but we acquire further nuances and dimensions. And we even discover links that bind us beyond belonging or not to the same colour of the plane in which we had previously lived, and which now is one more among the infinity of planes which we can regard as part of ourselves.

The network is the mechanism that strengthens the power of a research group, the market ranking of a company's products, someone's schedule or his or her degrees of relationship. I have recently spent half a year in a university in the United States, during which time a large part of my personal and even professional relationships became virtual. The network was part of my life, the created network had become part of my own identity and I myself was undergoing a certain deterritorialising experience. Due to academic and professional reasons, in the eighties and nineties I lived six years abroad. But I was only able to experience the phenomenon of network participation referred to in this book this past year. Why? Because of the development of a technology that enables full articulation of a network, a technology that fifteen years ago was still in its early stages.

…

New spaces tend towards the disappearance of centres and the creation of networks. They are no longer configured following the model of old clusters, but rather start to look like an extensive mesh.

There is more network enmeshment and less "slopes" and "gradients" for countries and environments that wish to enter the system. And for those of us who work towards a fairer society, this means new opportunities for the 80% of mankind which has been displaced from development spaces in the last century.

The authors are right in that this is probably only the beginning, and it will be the confluence and interaction of the new trans-national conversational spaces and economic spaces with a similar domain that will make new identities fully emerge. Also, the linguistic communication space will play a crucial role in these identities, as this book also stresses. We cannot yet fully apprehend what political structures will emerge from these network realities, but it seems likely that they may contribute to a lesser dependence on the territory and revalorise spaces of personal and political freedom.” (http://deugarte.com/gomi/Nations.pdf)

Identity and Sovereignty

David de Ugarte et al.:

“The central thesis of this book is that the passage from a society with a decentralised economy and communications – the world of nations – to the world of distributed networks which arose from the internet and globalisation, makes it increasingly difficult for people to define their identities in national terms. That's why new identities and new values are appearing, which in the long run will surpass and subsume the national and statalist view of the world.

Identity springs from the need to materialise or at least imagine the community in which our life is developed and produced. Nations appeared and spread precisely because the old local collective identities linked to religion and agrarian and artisan production no longer adequately represented the social network that produced the bulk of the economic, social and political activity which determined people's environment.

In the same way, for a growing number of people, national markets are becoming an increasingly inadequate expression of all the social relationships that shape their daily lives. The products they consume are not national, nor are the news contexts which determined the great collective movements, or, necessarily, most of those with whom they discuss the news and whose opinions interest them. National identities are becoming both too small and too large. They are becoming alien.

It's not a rapid collapse. We must not forget that nations arose from real need, and, despite that, their universalisation took almost two centuries and was quite difficult to say the least, as it met with all kinds of resistances. The abandonment of real communities where everyone knew everyone else's faces and names in order to embrace a homeland, an abstract community where the others were not personally known, was a costly and difficult process.

And in fact it's quite likely that the national State and nationalities will stay with us for a long time, in the same way as Christianity still exists and some royal houses still reign, even though nowadays national identities are politically dominant and determining, and the world is politically organised into national States, not on the basis of dynastic relationships or faith communities.

Many historians, politologists and sociologists nowadays foresee and even advocate a privatisation of national identity, a process which would be similar to the passage of religion into the personal and private domain that characterised the rise of the national State. But the issue is that such a privatisation, such a surpassing, can only take place from a set of alternative collective identities.

And what's really interesting is that identitarian communities and virtual networks that seem capable of bringing about such a process are not only defined by their being trans-national, but they also display a nature that is very different from the respective natures of the great imagined identities of Modernity, such as nation, race, or the Marxist historical class. Their members know each other even if they have never physically met. They are in a certain sense real communities, or, more precisely, imagined communities that fall into reality.”

…

The nation is still presented as a "natural" fact that we unconsciously seek in every "complete" political unit: a unified language, a unitary map/territory, a media-defined public sphere, and ideologically defined political subjects.

The nation, as a form of political organisation and identity, was much more powerful, encompassing and massive than any of its predecessors because its symbols linked institutions and power to everyone's identity, to the extent of sustaining the configurative and determining power of the nation.

In the end, what is essential about the nation is its exclusive claim over its identity as configurative, as generating co-nationals. It is the nation that makes the nationals, not the nationals that make the nation. People belong to the nation; they are a construct, a product of the "national reality", not the other way round. The nation reinterprets the past looking back on its own historiography, which goes far beyond the time when it was first imagined. In fact, it is the nation that gives rise to History as a supposedly scientific and detached narrative, with the explicit aim of conferring unity through time to the units that emerged from contemporary maps.

From Thiers to Stalin, the first form of nationalist imperialism was exerted over the past, as a way of grounding the conversion of people's identities – people who had ceased to be the subjects of History in order to be considered the products of the recently discovered national History. Culture was redefined by the nation and from the coffee house: ceasing to be a personal symbolic sediment in order to become a supposedly constituent political phenomenon. “

In conclusion:

“In this brief biography of the national imaginary, we have seen how it emerged from a real need to imagine the new production and socialisation community generated by the market, as well as from the increase in labour division that became more evident and spread practically all over the planet between the 17th and 20th centuries. We have seen how that imagination took shape and reached its materialisation in the form of the national State born in the French Revolution and the American wars of independence. And finally, how its conversion into a culture state, constituting personal identities and the framework for all conflicts, established it practically into our day.” (http://deugarte.com/gomi/Nations.pdf)

From failed segregationism to failed micro-states

Part two of the book has a fascinating history of 19th cy. Segregationist attempts, i.e. refusals of the nation-state such as Mormonism and alternative Zionisms, and of 20th cy. Libertarian and other microstates. Their common mistake is to want to ground alternative socialities in derivatives of imaginary nation-states. But early attempts at internet ‘societies’ like Freedonia are also failures, because they lack a viable shared economy, which coincides with the human network.

Thus, after this vital and interesting history of post-national attempts, comes a very interesting passage:

David de Ugarte et al.:

“The Freedonia story represents the transition and continuity between the Randian segregationism and the new world of trans-national communities. The segregationist temptation appeared repeatedly in virtual networks in the second half of the nineties. It was the easiest option. When network life occupies the identitarian space and explains more about who we are and who we speak to than the nation, the immediate temptation is to replicate the national model, seeking a territory and building a customised micro-state. Segregationism was always there, underlying, inviting us to occupy a distant island or build a floating city where the real community can be accommodated and new forms of social organisation can be tried. And the myth of Mormon success is still powerful.

But the 20th-century groups were no longer like 19th-century ones. Randian attempts are unlike those of the Mormons, a presential and real community. With their form of shareholders' society, Randian experiments resemble more the failed colonisation societies than John Smith's persecuted and cohesive religious parishes, where, despite their being more people, everyone knew each other, worked alongside each other, and personally trusted each other, generating, in so doing, an economic basis and emotional tries which were strong enough to support the gigantic efforts and sacrifices which proved to be necessary. Actually, when we think about it, Sealand, once the mythical layer of Cryptonomicon and Wired is stripped, is nothing but the adventure of a family of British squatters who kept some bad company.

Freedonia, the first internet-era community that sought its own territoriality, was, in its naivety, both a forerunner and a frontier. Its scarcely 300 members led a real and intense political life. They built a conversation that provided them with an explanation and a meaning. They shared their daily lives and built a common identity which bound them together more than their respective national contexts. Briefly put, they constituted a trans-national community. But they never had an economic basis, a map, a common space between the conversation flows and their own way of making a living.

It is true that a community can be based on collective conversation and the consequent political play. In an extended and interesting experiment51, Dutch ethologist Frans de Waal showed how a group of chimpanzees all whose members enjoyed unrestricted access to food not only preserved power structures, but experienced them more intensely than ever. Politics does not arise in politics as a result of scarcity: it is not only an organised struggle for the surplus, as Marx thought. It is there before and after abundance.

But maintaining a conversation and social game does not equal supporting a human community. Beyond conversation, nothing generated the need or the possibility of a headquarters territory in Freedonia. There was no persecution forcing them to do so, not a prior economic activity among its members which justified their settling in a specific place. Randians likewise lacked both. That's why Freedonians and Randians sought their destiny from the settler's logic. Believing that the territory would generate its own economic structure, an economy hardly sketched out from libertarian principles which would ground a community which would not longer be trans-national or virtual but territorial. This is a mistake.

…

Segregationism fails. Without a shared economy, there is no human community which will endure in time. That's why unfaithfulness, transitoriness, and temporary alliances are, as Juan Urrutia points out52, common to all network conversational identities.

After Freedonia, trans-national conversational communities evolved dramatically, both in number and in form. Some of them, like Second Life, included as an extra attraction a small parallel economy – which artificially produced scarcity – and a certain political space. But, for the time being at least, they are merely a game and a representation, a pastime and a simulation of a world which can already be intuited but which must come from elsewhere.

New identities will only emerge when trans-national conversational spaces are superimposed onto economic spaces within a similar domain and they interact.

On different scales, from the networks constituted by tens of thousands of Neonomadic individualists to the great corporate Venices, this is exactly what we are starting to see this decade, and what prefigures the forms of the great future postnational map.” (http://deugarte.com/gomi/Nations.pdf)

The increasing unfreedom of states vs. the experienced freedom of networks

David de Ugarte et al.:

“By the end of the eighties, the relationship between economic freedom and political freedoms seemed unquestionable. Who could deny that, from the point of view of Eastern Europe, democracy, development, and capitalism went hand in hand?

The Tiananmen Massacre, far from contradicting the general framework, seemed rather to confirm it. Reforming currents and democratic demands – it was said – emerged from the emerging prosperity which could already be felt in the experimental poles of the free market.

Outside the communist world, the Taiwanese and Korean transitions seemed to reaffirm this idea: economic freedoms and free trade where the doorway to development and the matrix for strong democratic reform movements which, in turn, generated institutional frameworks generating more capitalism and more development.

Democracy, development and capitalism seemed to be as inseparable as they were evident. It was the time when Francis Fukuyama published his book The End of History.

But let us examine what remains nowadays of the "dragons". Singapore, the enterprise-cum-authoritarian State, not Havel's Czech Republic, seems to be the new beacon for the developing world, a beacon very well-liked by totalitarian states in the midst of economic reform.

…

Today Vietnam and China have the highest growth rates, while the world pampers China after symbolically recognising it as an equal in the Beijing Olympics. The "Russian model" fits naturally into this map, and is spreading throughout the once Second World like a plague: limited pluralism, plebiscitary populism, the cult of providential leadership, a war-like language, the development of the authoritarian patronage of an increasingly autonomous State.

In parallel, in the countries once known as free, the trend, encouraged from the United States and the European Union, seems to be towards the establishment of control societies53 fed by the fear to the consequences of globalisation, articulated by an increasingly disciplinarian State, and identified once more with a Neo-Puritan political culture.

This global political framework contrasts with the social experience of a new kind of identities born in the new distributed and de-territorialised social networks -- identities which therefore arose from a certain experience of abundance and pluriarchy.The clash would result in a revaluation of the new de-territorialised lives, a certain awareness that from this kind of life one can not only experience but consolidate a space of personal and political freedom which surpasses in a tangible and specific way the space offered by States.” (http://deugarte.com/gomi/Nations.pdf)