What, if any, explanation can one find in the dissolution of Yugoslavia? Against the background of conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, this question has divided many well intentioned intellectuals (not only in France) inclined to solve an absurd situation of genocide. Intellectuals questioned what appeared to be irreducible religious contradictions between Catholic and Orthodox Christians, or between Christians and Moslems. The old conflict between the pro-fascist Croatian Ustash and the Serbian Chetniks dedicated to the vain goal of a greater Serbia was also on their minds. They also wondered what the chances of the new nation-states of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, and many of the autonomous regions and republics of the former Soviet Union were. How will the Commonwealth of Independent States function once goals and purposes of nation-states take over those assumed in a nebulously defined commonwealth? And how can one explain the enormous discrepancy between the attempt to constitute a broad European Community (actually, the United Markets of Europe), while other parts of Europe break into small nation-states? How much of the underlying tribalism, or provincialism, or religious adherence, or how much of the functions of literacy at work can be read in the political fervor of nationalistic activism of our day? One answer, no matter how encouraging, cannot address a full paragraph of questions. These questions suggest that the politics of nations is so multifaceted that understanding it requires not so much rehashing the past but focusing on the broad picture of its dynamics.
Between the old city-state, the early empire (Roman, Byzantine), the medieval world of local attachments (pertaining to shared space used mainly for agriculture, and under the firm grip of the Papacy), and today's world of mass immigration and human displacement (for political, economic, religious, or psychological reasons), we find inserted the settled universe of nation-states and their respective literacies. In this universe, literacy and religion undergird the legal system. Politics defines national identity, subsuming language, ethnicity, ways of working, culture, superstitions, prejudice, art, and science. Within the nation-state's borders, citizens are subjected to a political practical experience of homogeneity, centralism, and uniformity, required by the efficiency expectations of the Industrial Revolution. The ideal of cosmopolis, the all- embracing empire of reason declared by the Stoics, runs counter to the ideal of the nation-state, which celebrates national reason and willingness to compete with others.
When the pragmatic circumstances leading to today's global economy started exercising their action, an all-embracing empire of a different nature resulted. The new statement says that Christians, Moslems, Jews, Buddhists, animists, even atheists, although bearing a national identity, are part of the global economy. Not surprisingly, political action and economic integration each run its own course. Commerce, with all its imbalances and unfairness, the almost uncontrollable financial dynamics, and migration of industries take more and more frequently what appears as the necessary path of globality. Politics, even when it acknowledges globality, focuses on national definitions. To an outside observer, a nation's politics appears insignificant, powerless in comparison to economic forces, although it claims to control these forces through monetary policies, labor laws, and trade regulations. The trans-national world has its own impetus. It continues to evade political constraints, ascertaining its own life. It was described from the perspective of its financial and economic condition as The Borderless World (the title of Kenichi Ohmae's book), within which nationality counts only marginally. This is yet another reason for the low interest in public life on the part of the wealthy in our days.
When the new southern republics freed by the breakdown of the Soviet Union debate which form of writing they should adopt-Arabic, Cyrillic, or Roman-and how to define their respective nations, they still look for national identifiers. Turkmanis and Uzbekistanis, Latvians and Estonians, Ukrainians and Georgians, Hungarians and Romanians, and enterprising Poles comb their territories in search of business opportunities. The same takes place in many other countries, whose citizens are obsessed more with prosperity than with sovereignty, with access to financial means more than with self-determination, and with cooperative effort, even involving traditional enemies, more than with a constitutional foundation or universal protection of human rights. Interestingly enough, while national identity is more and more superseded by people's a-nationality, many new countries, emerging as a result of the asserted right to self-determination, face as their first task not the future but the past: definition of their national identity. Nevertheless, the civilization of illiteracy does not promise that Italians can be made for all these new countries. Rather, these nations will become, in not necessarily satisfying ways, a-nationals, citizens of the world economy. Many of them will make up the new immigrant populations settled in ethnic neighborhoods where access to consumption will arouse a nostalgia for some remote homeland.
No one can or should generalize. Many prejudices still heat the furnaces of hatred and intolerance. Enough citadels from the past pragmatic framework maintain hopes for expansion and cultivate a politics appropriate to ages long passed. But regardless of such unsettling developments, the nation-state enters an age of denationalization, absorbed into a world of economic globality, less and less dependent on the individual and thus less and less subject to political dogma.
Of tribal chiefs, kings, and presidents
Changes in the condition of human practical experiences effect changes in the self-identification of the individual and of groups of people. Emphasis is less and less on nature and shared living space, and more on connections free of arbitrary borders, even of elements pertaining to culture and history. New political experiences, still subjected to expectations carried over from the past, do not actually continue the past. Accordingly, the nature of political experiences changes. Assumptions regarding leadership, organization, planning, and legality are redefined. Tribal chiefs might well have turned, through the centuries, into the kings of the Middle Ages, and, with the advent of a new society, into presidents. There is, nevertheless, no reason to believe that in a universe of distributed tasks and massive parallelism, a need for political centralism and hierarchy will remain. The president, for instance, is the king of the civilization of literacy; and his wife becomes the queen, in defiance of all the literate documents that justify presidency. Executive power, in conjunction with the legislative and judicial branches, implements ideals of liberal political democracy as these became essential to the pragmatics of industrial society. But once new circumstances emerge, the underlying structure reflected in the power structure undergoes change as well.
In the spirit of the dynamics of change, one should notice that, in a framework of non-hierarchic structures, there is no legitimate need for the presidency. Theoretic arguments, no matter how rigorous, are after all irrelevant if not based on related facts. New circumstances already made the function of president strictly ceremonial in many countries. In other countries, a president's ability to exercise power is impeded by laws that make this power irrelevant. Economic cycles, affecting integrated economies, turn even the most visionary heads of states (when they happen to be visionary) into witnesses to events beyond their control. Politics does not happen at levels so remote from the individual that individuals disconnect themselves from the political ceremonial. It happens closer and closer to where ideals and interest crystallize in the form of new human interactions.
Who would represent the country if the function of head of state were abolished? How can a country have a consistent political system? Who would be responsible for implementing laws? Such questions originate, without exception, within literacy's system of expectations. The extreme decentralization that is made possible by the new means of the civilization of illiteracy requires, and indeed stimulates, different political structures. Instead of the self-delusion and demagoguery triggered by an idealized image of the politically concerned citizen, we should see the reality of citizens pursuing goals that integrate political elements. Literacy resulted in a politics of representation that ended up in effectively excluding the citizen from political decision-making. Rationalized in the structures of democracy, political ideals are now a matter of efficient human interaction. A president's performance is totally irrelevant to the exchange of information on networks of human cooperative effort. Agreements relevant to the people involved, executed in view of reciprocal needs and future developments, result more and more outside political institutions, for reasons having little to do with them.
The majority of political functions, as they apply to presidents, congresses, or other political institutions, still originate in forms characteristic of past political experiences. They are based on allegiances and commitments contradicted by the pragmatics of today's world. The fact that heads of states are also heads of the military (commander-in-chief) comes from the time when the strongest man became the leader. But in the modern world of growing emancipation, women are valid candidates as heads-of-state all over the world. However, sexual bias has kept women from gaining the military competence that a commander-in-chief is expected to have. Another example: What is the reason for a president to be at the funeral of a deceased head-of- state? Blood ties used to bond kings and nobility more strongly than political arguments, long before fast transportation could carry a monarch to the deceased in less time than it took for decay to set in. A farewell wished today at the funeral of a Japanese emperor, a Moslem ruler, or an atheistic president belongs to the spectacle of politics, not to its substance. The expensive, and delusive, literate performance of state funerals, oath-taking, inauguration, parades, and state visits is more often than not an exercise in hypocrisy. These spectacles please only through their cynical pandering to the people's desire for circus. Pragmatically relevant commitments are no longer the privilege of state bureaucracies. When the historic necessity of states winds up to be no more than the expression of remote tribal instincts, the literate institution of state becomes superfluous.