Corporate supply chains != state.
Robb uses the Wal Mart distribution system as a good example of decentralized hierarchical organization.
What do you think makes up a State? A state is just a parcel of land with defined, internationally accepted borders, internal legitimacy, and external legitimacy.
For a State to “collapse” it has to 1) lose its land, 2) lose its internal or external legitimacy.
A state without internal legitimacy isn’t supported by the people who live within the State. You see this in places like Sudan and Iraq.
For a state to lose internal legitimacy, tons of things have to happen. People have to feel that the State no longer represents their interests, and the people need to suffer drastic decreases in quality of life.
Look at the Great Depression, that was a drastic decrease in QoL for many Americans, yet it didn’t destroy the internal legitimacy of the state.
We’d have to have mass starvation, loss of electricity, loss of communications infrastructure and et cetera to have a State lose its legitimacy. And this would have to be ongoing for YEARS. There are many examples of Nation-States going through long periods like that, but weathering the storm.
Corporate supply chains are exactly why States are so successful. Corporations create them on their own, they are incredibly decentralized because there are tons of competing corporations.
I’m not really sure what point you or these authors you’re linking to are trying to make.
If the Nation-State system can be destroyed by attacks at key infrastructure points then what ARE those key infrastructure points?
But then why is the military hiring a caterer to provide food an example of centralized decision making? Outsourcing of things like catering make the military DECENTRALIZED, not centralized.
Martin Hyde I will use part of the Preface to “Rise and Decline of the State” by Martin van Creveld to answer your questions. I’m not going to address your individual points, please resubmit them. I am hoping that this will more eloquently address my point.
Here is a definition he uses from Chapter 1
The point not being that global-guerillas will take the state down, but that the state as an entity is becoming less relevant. One of the points made in Brave New War is about how the state derives its purpose from state vs state conflict, and that WMDs make state vs state conflict too costly to really be contemplated.
Also:
State != Civilization
It’s an example of systems disruption. Catering is an example of decentralization in a strict sense certainly, but it’s hardly the same as a cellular insurgency.
There has been, within the last news cycle, a perfect… PERFECT example of William Lind’s theories about the fall of the state. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta recently attacked an oil pipeline terminal, they’re making demands and I heard a Nigerian NGO official state that in his opinion the group could totally shut down all of Nigeria’s oil output in three days. The infrastructure is too spread out and indefensible and vulnerable at too many points for it to be safe in the current environment. Nigeria is the world’s 8th largest oil exporter. That kind of attack affects not only Nigeria, but the rest of the world as well. Everybody focused on how this sort of thing could NEVER happen here in the US is missing the point, state boundries and allegiences are losing their meaning the fastest where the state has the least to offer, right now the so called ‘failed states’. It’s now spreading to the third world, for example in Brazil you have prison gangs like the PCC virtually governing huge populations in shanty towns openly in defiance of state authority. I could easily foresee a time when people identify more closely with a trans-national culture or movement than their own national governments even in the first world… look at the rhetoric after the last election in regard to the ‘blue state vs. red state’ grumbling… with the internet and the tools of the global economy it becomes easier for that to be made reality. The very things that are making the world so small are letting previously isolated but like minded groups connect up and organize, eroding the relative value of the state.
I’m guessing a Hollywood disaster movie about gradually shifting economics away from governments to multinational corporations wouldn’t be a big hit, though it might be more realistic than some notion about the “death of modernity”.
Actually, Stephenson’s The Diamond Age describes a 22nd-century in which electronic communication and nanotech-based economics have reached such a level that the nation-states do fade away, because they’re no longer needed.
The whole country of Iraq is one big system disruption right about now. It’s no more indicative of future trends in the stable liberal democraces than trying to predict the weather in China based on a hurricane in Kansas.
Isn’t der systempunktifeineneisterrgangenlolanzenfin a major part of the collapse of the state? I’m confused.
No need for it to be secret.
A few men with guns to briefly scatter the workmen (minimum wage don’t buy suicide), then contaminate.
The food is unusable.
Afterwards, circulate Web rumors that secret contamionation has happened as well, & watch the panic begin.
I remember foot and mouth a few years ago, and how thousands of pigs were burned as a result in a culling, this is pretty typical of what you’re describing, just added with Human intention, yet I still ate bacon for breakfast and civilisation didn’t collapse.
Yep. And there’s no real point to openly contaminate, better to just destroy the food in that case. Plus, you’d have to hit every major food distribution center across the country to actually case real starvation. Even if you just hit half of them, people would still be able to cope.
Most Americans have enough food in their cupboards to last for a 7 day period if they really need to, and by that time the government would be distributing food “certified uncontaminated.”
The food distribution system is just way too decentralized for this to be anything other than fantasy.
In response to mswas let’s just suffice to say I’ve found nothing you’ve said to be persuasive. I understand for whatever reason people are really willing to get married to the idea of the Nation-State collapsing, but everything you’ve talked about exaggerates how easily disruptions are to implement against a stable state and exaggerates how grave an impact those disruptions have. History shows we can take serious disruption and the underlying state-system doesn’t collapse.
Nation-States have been around for like 500 years, I’ve seen little evidence during all that time that even the most serious disruptions you can imagine can undermine the system itself.
Suddenly I feel like dusting off a copy of my Cyberpunk 2020 role playing game and playing some Friday Night Firefight scenarios! Ya with me, chummers?
Marc
Also worthy of mention is Stephenson’s Snow Crash, which basically takes place in the same universe but 100 years earlier. After the fall of the nation-states and the rise of tribalism, but before magic nanotechnology is invented. One of the main causes of the failure of the nation-states is that the tax system collapses when people move their bank accounts into untouchable “off-shore” accounts protected by unbreakable encryption and opt out of the old government regulated economic system. Stephenson would later revisit this universe in the 20th century in Cryptonomicon, where the first data haven is constructed.
I enjoyed the universe Stephenson created but the idea of unbreakable encryption leading to the downfall of governments via tax starvation is a bit of reach.
Well I’m not talking about the collapse of civilization. I am talking about the end of the state.
lokij described what I am talking about rather admirably. We’re talking about social cohesion, not some apocalyptic Mad Max scenario.
While we are referencing cyberpunk novels, all of the above mentioned I have read, Bruce Sterling’s ‘Distraction’ is probably the closest to what I am describing in the near term.
I see it as happening in a graduated fashion. “Decline” more than collapse. A slow geriatric aging rather than a bullet in the brain.
Corporations will still exist, civilization will still exist, there will still be roads, power, infrastructure, but the state as an apparatus will be considerably weakened.
As per my cites to Martin van Creveld, in his model the EU and NAFTA would be examples of the organizations that for whatever reason cannot be called ‘states’.
Much of the world exists in a system that can only loosely be considered states. The Colombian narco-traffickers are the most powerful groups in Colombia, as it is with Mexico.
As for the US, do you feel that the CIA really represents you? Is the DEA fighting for you? Who benefits from the NSA’s info? Who is more likely to see an NSA report, Osama bin Laden, or you?