Disintegration as Hope

Mauro Vaiani | Disintegration as Hope | (2015 - Book manuscript – Do not quote – Do not diffuse)

Disintegration as Hope An Insight into the Post-Totalitarian Scaling Down of States

(Mauro Vaiani, PhD in Geopolitics, University of Pisa)

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Mauro Vaiani | Disintegration as Hope | (2015 - Book manuscript – Do not quote – Do not diffuse)

‫امید پر ہی دنیا قائم ہے‬

(ummid pe dunya qayam hai)

उम्ममीद पर ददननियया कयायम हहै (ummid par duniya kayam hai)

The world stands on hope (A Urdu-Hindi Adage)

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Mauro Vaiani | Disintegration as Hope | Index (2015 - Book manuscript – Do not quote – Do not diffuse)

Index

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Mauro Vaiani | Disintegration as Hope | Abstract (2015 - Book manuscript – Do not quote – Do not diffuse)

Abstract

This research theorizes an ongoing, global, grand trend of geopolitical disintegration, in the post-Cold War world. The paradigm proposed here attempts to explain the

redistribution of power occurring within old and new world powers,

empires, markets, and states. The disintegration trend is occurring practically everywhere, well beyond the well-known Western cases of aspirations to independence, such as Corsica, Sardinia, Scotland, Catalonia, Flanders, and Quebec; the Eurozone crisis; the incomplete decolonization process in Africa and Asia; the history of disintegration of the former countries of actually existing socialism; the so-called failing states. The focus is not on empirical description of each case, but on understanding the essential turn: the centuries-long, global integration process, from which the modern states and contemporary world have arisen, has reached its intrinsic limits, and we have now entered a period of disintegration. In developing this argument, the intrinsic flaws of the integration process will be examined, and anti-disintegration prejudices – such as those against balkanization or acritically in favor of world governance - are debunked. This work draws on a range of contributions from International Relations theorists, along with political scientists and scholars of geopolitics, anthropologists and sociologists, political geographers and economists, historians of colonialism and nationalism, critics of globalization and post-industrialization theorists, experts in secession, and federalists, libertarians, and anarchists. Eight key figures in theorizing this hypothesis have been Karl Polanyi, Karl Deutsch, Charles Tilly, Hannah Arendt, Kenneth Waltz, Edvard Kardelj, Ernest Gellner, and Tom Nairn. *

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The first of this three-part study is dedicated to a historical journey. The state, with its wars and expansionism, was not an inevitable destiny. Instead, a very small group of modern states, in competition and imitation amongst themselves, initiated a long-term, steady march of world conquest, resulting in the westernization of the entire planet. After the Industrial Revolution, some modern states have unleashed total wars that were the climax of seven centuries of the history of integration. ** The second part treats the social changes that have led to the post-totalitarian human condition, where mass obedience has eventually become impossible. Karl Deutsch and Charles Tilly's early intuitions about social mobilization and political awareness will be developed. 1989 has become emblematic of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but a comparable, even if more subtle, less evident process was already under way: the decline of U.S./Western imperialism, and the internal crisis of every big state. As counter-intuitive as it may seem looking for example at the Middle East, political oppression and geopolitical violence have been decreasing in the post-Cold War disintegrating world. In the same time, pretenders to direct political world domination have become a rare phenomenon – economic domination suffices. In Kenneth Waltz’s words, echoing Rousseau, in his Man, the State and War : A Theoretical Analysis (1954), we have entered a permissive state of geopolitical disintegration – which in our view has a positive potential. Redistribution of power from centers to peripheries, empowerment of federal units, and the multiplication of small states may occur from now on because there is nobody and nothing capable of preventing them. From this geopolitical point of view, 1989 is not the finishing line, but it stands for the very beginning of a process. While sharing certain premises of a well-known and thoughtful article by Alexander Wendt, Why a World State is Inevitable (2003), the present work reaches a very different conclusion. A deceptive anti-nationalist rhetoric in the global mainstream, particularly in post1989 neoliberal neocolonialism, is frontally attacked in this part, drawing from Tom 5 / 289


Nairn and, through him, from the earlier work of Ernest Gellner. In fact, the umbrella term of nationalism can lead to not distinguishing between totalitarian powers and their victims, colonizers and colonized peoples, oppressors and resisters, terrorists and protesters, leading to scientific blindness, along with a dangerous lack of moral clarity. *** The third and last part maintains that the apparently immutable cyclic history of violence, with the endlessly repeating rise and fall of empires, has been broken by the post-Cold War disintegration trend. As said by Brian Ferguson in the important book he edited, The State, Identity and Violence : Political Disintegration in the Post-Cold War World (2003), populations have not at all suddenly become more violent once the bipolar restraint has been removed. Rather, they have become more politically active, mostly through non-violent means, in challenging a violent status quo. Today, less than ever, the entrance of popular strata onto the political stage cannot be seen as a danger to civilization and democracy. The bigger the state, the less people can feel they make a difference. Therefore, in every giant republic, an overwhelming number of peripheral, marginal communities might want to go beyond merely electoral democracy to demand a meaningful share of real power. Obviously, communities demanding self-government on their own territories have to simultaneously take on the burden of greater responsibility. At this regard, an openly normative model of responsible sovereign citizenry is here proposed, where fundamental common goods, and collective duties to take care of them, are as important as individual rights. Echoing Machiavelli and Gramsci, the selfgoverning citizenry is seen as a potential new «Prince» of their territory. As Tom Nairn stated in his Faces of Nationalism : Janus Revisited (1997), a greater number of voices and actors in the international arena should be welcomed instead of feared. It might not easily diminish the dramatic global problems created during and by the Westernization of the world, but it could increase opportunities to deal with them in a more plural, diverse, and innovative way. -|-

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A case for peaceful means of decentralizing the power of modern states is presented in this study, as a contribution to political action. In a time of geopolitical change, it would be important to rely on expertise, but also base oneself on compassion and on a real interest in the historical and geographical, spiritual and material pathways that each local, concrete human community is pursuing. While burdened by the contradictions of our modernity, and menaced by recurrent economic and ecological crises, local citizenries, exercising sovereignty where they live, can probably best answer their own needs along with their neighbors’, and global ones. Concentrating on their own territory, environment, and population, sovereign citizenries may change their everyday reality, containing political corruption, transcending economic inequality, and counteracting ecological destruction. And in so doing, they demonstrate it may be easier to scale down, rather than tear down, pyramids of oppression.

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