The looming end of the “sovereign nation state”!

I struggled with myself to even write this article. Because political articles don’t belong in this blog. Not because I don’t want to offend one political party or another, no. But because I consider politics to be considerably disruptive to social development. What follows could be seen as a political article. However, it is once again an attempt to see through the dense web of our analogies.

(Reading time: 7 minutes)

He’ll never be president

I still remember that summer evening when I realized how bad an American friend felt because she had voted for Clinton. Not because she thought Clinton was so bad, but because she realized that Trump could actually become the candidate. And that a “Clinton versus Trump” would be extremely close in the end. At the time, I replied to her almost loud-mouthed that this would definitely, definitely not happen. Her reply was quite something: “You know, the USA is the land of opportunity. That doesn’t just apply to the good stories”

A bad story

When he was actually elected, I rubbed my eyes like many others. But oh well. Let’s see how it develops. That’s what I thought. There was something for everyone among the many promises and announcements. For me, it was that “partnership is better than war with Russia” or that the Iraq war was the biggest mistake the USA had ever made.

For others, it was probably this wall to Mexico. For still others, it was to clean up the lobbyists in Washington. Others maybe thought it was cool to grab things by the pussy. I don’t know.

And so, like many others, I joined the collective: “He’s an idiot, but x and y aren’t so bad”. The “let’s see how it develops now”.

Programmatic division into “Us and them”

I found the first press conference extremely entertaining because Trump made a bigger fool of himself than he already was. Saturday Night Live couldn’t have done it better. But I stopped laughing when the second press conference revealed a pattern of deliberate programmatic division. There are professionals at work.

The goal is clear: to continue dividing society into members of the movement and the rest of the citizenry until there is only one word left to say. That of the Trump administration.

What do I care about America

Now you might think, what do I care about America. If they want someone there who will get their country into trouble economically even faster than Bush, go ahead. But that falls short, because the world has long since ceased to be divided into countries, into sovereign independent states. And this is particularly true of the Western world.

Economic vs. social globalization

When we talk about globalization, we generally always mean global trade, the commercial dimension of this shift. I see this development and/or the movement behind it as a failure. Because the basic idea behind economic globalization was that a redistribution would take place and that the winners of this development would at least hold the losers harmless. So, according to the theory, everyone ends up with more than before.

Unfortunately, this has not proved to be the case. We see the economic losers of globalization all over the planet. And, of course, this bothers us in the western world enormously, it is not just foreigners far away who are affected, but people everywhere in the capitalist countries. Then there are those who are not victims, but who like to see themselves as victims. And want to revive the class struggle in rich Switzerland, for example. The per se insane political division into left and right is being propagated more than ever, but the boundaries between precisely this left and right are already almost “situationally” fluid.

It is this mass of dissatisfied people who are being mobilized, they say. The Rust Belt Poors – the Hartzers of America. With the not insignificant difference that there is virtually no support in the US.

Social globalization

Social globalization, on the other hand, is irreversible in my opinion. It is human nature to want to connect with more and more people. However, this does not mean that we want to share all our personal achievements with others. But human beings are explorers by nature. And that’s a good thing.

Advocates of strong nation states completely negate this fact. As a rule, they almost deliberately overlook the fact that cross-regional and intercultural exchange is essential in order to progress as a society.

It is quite possible that the rise of new nationalist polemics is in fact a last stand against a more unified Western world. The backlash against this trend will herald the end of the sovereign nation state as we know it. The question is, will we be able to manage this transition peacefully?

And we now have the technological means to drive this social globalization forward. Compare yourself with your father, for example, and ask yourself how many colleagues from “foreign” countries you have and how many he had. The difference is self-evident. This development will accelerate considerably. And that’s a good thing.

War and misery as an accelerant

War and misery only accelerate this natural migration. I know that sounds cynical.

It is all the more perverse that the USA in particular has repeatedly supported all these wars. They were and are not alone in this; the entire Western world has not actually done anything effective against war and misery in foreign countries for decades. Instead of being present on the ground and seeking solutions, sanctions are used and weapons are diligently supplied to the regions concerned.

The fear

For these wars to be possible, fear must be overcome. During the Cold War, this used to mean: “You, the Russians are coming”. In 2001, communism was replaced by terrorism as a source of fear. As if someone was committing terror on a whim. The fact that there are motives behind this, and indeed different motives, is swept under the carpet. And the Western world has been buying it without hesitation since 2001.

If you look at the facts, terrorism is an insignificant problem. In fact, we have far fewer terrorist incidents than in the 1970s or 1980s. In 2010, for example, around 13,000 people died in an act of terrorism. In the same year, around 3.5 million people died from child malnutrition, 1.2 million people died in road traffic accidents and 2.5 million people died as a result of alcohol consumption. A further 700k people even took their own lives voluntarily.

But we hear practically nothing about any of this in the daily reporting. It’s always about stupid, unspecified terrorism. Nobody asks about the background and everyone is afraid.

Muslim Ban

And here the circle closes again. In order to achieve division and ultimately secure power, a small group of people are now imposing these entry restrictions. I see it on the one hand as a measure of fear and on the other as a way of testing one’s own room for maneuver. In any case, there is no factual justification for the measure that would be reliable.

Confidence

Such an act is no longer compatible with the Western understanding of freedom. On the one hand, there is the sovereign nation state on paper, which should be able to do as it pleases. On the other hand, there is the globalized world, which applies and, in my view, hopefully enforces its own values. Either way, borders have no future in the long term.

Wake-up call

I think it’s important that we hear the wake-up call and actually wake up from spectator mode. You and me. Not the others. The majority of apolitical people. But we would do well not to fall into the collective hysteria and apocalypse thinking that is so popular. No, the world will not end because of Trump. Not even the USA will end because of Trump. Confidence is everything. But the Western world has a duty to fight the beginnings.

How this is to happen is questionable. Blatant opposition is counterproductive, as is brute rhetoric. Both play into the hands of dividers. The most obvious thing is to meet these people inclusively. To let them make mistakes and talk them through them so that they can learn from them without losing face. So that all the backward-looking people may learn that 300+ year old approaches no longer lead to the goal today. This is a risky experiment, as it can easily get out of control. But it’s still better than open confrontation, which is bound to get out of control. And which ultimately knows only one loser: the man, the woman on the street.

And: the last option, a kind of operation overload in the opposite direction, does not need to be started because it is already underway. Simply digitally and from the wider society. There are good reasons to assume that we, as a Western society, will not make the same mistakes we made 90 years ago. But yes, you never know.