GOOD TRIBALISM
Some chaos theorists also suffer from a skewed view of modern "tribalism." They fret about its disruptive effects without realizing that, for every newly empowered, destablizing "tribe," there are scores more "tribes" emerging that are harmless if not benign—tribes that will help bring order to the new world.
The first step toward seeing why is to remember that a prime energizer of tribalism is communications technology. For Irish who are serious about their Irishness, there is the Gaelic Channel (Teilifis na Gaelige). And virtually all tribes—from Quebec’s separatists to northern Italy’s separatists to France’s Corsican separatists to Spain’s (and France’s) Basque separatists—are using the Internet for orchestration.
The same information technology that serves these old-fashioned "tribes"—bound by language or religion or cultural history—also serves "tribes" of a newer sort, bound by common interests ranging from the political to the recreational. This trend long predates the Internet and cable TV. Beginning in the early 1960s, computerized mass-mail so lowered the costs of organizing that such once-obscure groups as the American Association of Retired Persons became political potentates.
Since then desktop publishing and other microcomputer technologies have brought the threshold for organizing down so low that few common interests are too obscure to warrant mobilization. Nebraska’s Original Betty Club, confined to women named Betty who live in Nebraska, seeks to boost esteem for a name that, they lament, has fallen out of fashion. The "Christian Boys and Men Titanic Society" is "dedicated to the notion of saving women and children first." The "National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance" is self-explanatory.
As long-distance contact gets cheaper and easier, more and more of these "tribes" are transnational. The European Headache Federation, according to the Wall Street Journal, was founded in the 1990s to "elevate the status of the headache," a mission that entails publishing the "Headache Yellow Pages."
Many transnational groups are of greater geographic scope than the European Headache Federation, and of greater moment. Environmental groups, using "EcoNet," "GreenNet," and other cyberspace channels, were among the first to congeal globally via the Internet. Adherents of the chaos scenario, such as Kaplan, commonly stress the roiling effect of both tribalism and environmental degradation. But the very technology that drives some of the tribalism is helping to solve environmental problems; it is empowering supranational enviro-tribes—technically, "non-governmental organizations," or NGOs— that are shaping policy at the supranational level, where it often belongs. They have had real influence on accords ranging from global warming to overfishing, and have made their presence felt in corporate headquarters the world around. To protest logging by Mitsubishi, the Rainforest Action Network let concerned world citizens use its Web site to fax the car maker, generating so much paper (a tree’s worth?) that Mitsubishi changed its fax number. (Meanwhile, Mitsubishi also had a brush with a supranational feminism tribe. Japanese women’s groups picketed a shareholders’ meeting over sexual harassment at a Mitsubishi plant in Illinois.)
Supranational "tribes" are now agitating in such once-national policy realms as factory working conditions. In the process, they illustrate that governance needn’t always involve governments. Consider the success of the International Labor Rights Fund, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, and other nongovernmental organizations in negotiating a code governing wages, workweeks, and child labor in clothing factories. Nike, Liz Claiborne, L. L. Bean, and other clothiers agreed to the code so their products could sport labels attesting to humane working conditions. Nike, meanwhile, as part of the Federation of Sporting Goods Industries, was also negotiating with such NGOs as Unicef and Oxfam Christian Aid over conditions in sporting goods factories. And the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude, working with religious, labor, and consumer groups, got some rug makers in India to allow surprise factory inspections so that their rugs could carry the "Rugmark" label, signifying that adults making the local minimum wage had woven them.
This is not government as we’ve come to know it; no elected officials, no tax dollars involved. But, to the extent that it works, it is governance, in somewhat the sense that the merging of merchants into the Hanseatic League was. And it is governance aimed at some of the problems in the chaos-theory laundry list, such as the cultural dislocation that comes from the rapid industrialization of traditional societies.
Lest we get misty-eyed over the beneficence of the International Labor Rights Fund and like-minded souls, let’s pause for a dose of cynicism. American labor unions didn’t spend so much time lamenting working conditions abroad before workers abroad started taking jobs from American workers. Now union leaders worry deeply about those conditions— whenever they keep wages so low that American union members can’t compete.
Then again, lobbying has always been self-interested. That’s governance as usual. More interesting is what’s new about the lobbying: it’s transnational. Karl Marx isn’t these days considered a great prophet, and his suggestion that "worker of the world unite" doesn’t seem to have been widely heeded. But economic logic is moving that prophecy toward a modest kind of fulfillment.
After all, even as American worker try to make some Asians jobless—such as children with very low wages—these Americans see eye to eye with other Asian workers, such as the ones who, after transnational regulation, will get the (now higher-paying) jobs instead of the children. And when American unions press for labor accords in trade agreements— when they want NAFTA to ensure Mexican workers the right to organize—they are singing in tune with most Mexican workers. In general, workers in high-wage and low-wage countries have a common interest in elevating pay in low-wage countries (so long as large numbers of workers in low-wage countries aren’t priced out of the market altogether, a threat that doesn’t loom large).
As it happens, NAFTA included no meaningful labor accords; it passed the U.S. Congress on a center-right coalition, so its structure is conservative. But this is no necessary feature of trade blocs. The European Union gets very involved in workplace regulation—and, in general, proves that a trade bloc can embody leftish values.
Will the World Trade Organization ever go the way of the European Union? Will qualifying for membership someday entail more than low tariffs? Child-labor laws? Workplace-safety laws? Right-to-organize laws? And what about environmental law? Might adherence to global environmental treaties become part of staying a member in good standing of the WTO?
None of this is unthinkable, especially if the American left—and the left in other nations—make such changes a condition for accepting WTO amendments that big business supports. We may well someday see workers of the world truly uniting, like environmentalists of the world. The old political debates will continue—How to balance economic equality with efficiency?—but they will be mediated by upranational bodies of governance, whether regional or global.
Indeed, 1999 saw a glimmer of such a day during wrangling over who the next director of the World Trade Organization would be. As the New York Times noted, the United States—under a left-of-center government beholden to labor and environmental groups— favored the candidate more likely to "advocate environmental and labor issues." France did too, even though its farmers feared he would take a harsh view of agricultural subsidies. A European diplomat said of French politics: "This is a case where the labor forces who fear low-wage competition have won out over the agricultural interests." Such interest-group struggles are nothing new. But they didn’t use to involve bodies with names like "the World Trade Organization."
In another sign of consequential global governance, hotels near the World Trade Organization headquarters in Geneva have become a hangout for lobbyists—from Aetna, Citibank, the International Federation of Accountants, and so on. Intense lobbying also attended the 1996 agreement among 160 nations—just about the whole world—on a common copyright code, reached under the auspices of the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization. Meanwhile, lobbyists for Consumers International approached the UN’s Codex Committee on Food Labelling about getting genetically modified foods so labeled. After failing there, they moved on to the Convention on Biodiversity, a transnational group that includes the EU and Japan.
Note the pattern: Again and again, supranational "tribes"—environmental groups, labor groups, human rights groups, trade groups, multinational corporations—abet order, not chaos. Their narrow but long reach moves law and regulation toward global harmony. These different tribes don’t stand in paradoxical contrast to globalization, any more than myriad kinds of cells stand in paradoxical contrast to the larger organism they constitute. In both cases, the fine-grained diversity is integral. The body politic couldn’t reach the global level if interest groups didn’t get there. To say that social complexity grows in depth and scope is to say that division of labor, including division of political labor, grows more fine-grained yet of broader reach. In that sense, supranational "tribalism" is a natural outgrowth of the whole history of humankind.
BAD TRIBALISM MADE GOOD
And what of the more literal, more disturbing forms of tribalism? What of raw nationalism, or the ethnic balkanization of states? These do seem resurgent—not surprisingly, given the end of the Cold War and the march of technology. But at times they fall under new forms of supranational sway. Twice during the 1990s, arguments between nations over disputed islands wound up not in war but in the World Court. And in 1998 a Rwandan mayor was condemned to life in prison for abetting genocide— sentenced not by victorious enemies, but by a UN tribunal.
Indeed, there is growing reason to believe that, even as tribalism, galvanized by microelectronics, balkanizes nations, it will fit neatly into the New World Order. Quebec’s separatists vowed that, if liberated from Canada, their new nation would straightaway join NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. This would be a smart political move—a way for Quebec to bind itself to the United States, Mexico, and the larger world, diluting dependence on its recently divorced spouse. But whatever the motivation, the effect would be to cement Quebec into supranational bodies.
The same logic holds on the other side of the Atlantic. On the eve of European currency unification, polls showed that no nation supported the EU more strongly than Ireland. After all, membership in the EU affords the Irish some economic distance from the resented British. By the same token, if any of Europe’s separatist movements ever gain sovereignty—in northern Italy, Basque Spain, Corsica—expect them to have membership forms on the EU’s doorstep the next day.
Faced with this spectacle, we will once again find it hard to figure out which side is winning: Jihad or McWorld. Would this be a more tribalized or more globalized world? Or, to get back to the very beginning of this topic: How do you do the accounting here? If in 2025 Italy splits in two, but both halves are plugged into a network of supranational governance more solid than anything that exists today—if, indeed, they’ve ceded large chunks of sovereignty by joining it—then has the number of sovereign polities in the world grown or shrunk? There is some point at which supranational governance becomes firm enough so that the things we now call nations are more like provinces. What is that point?
This question helps rectify the anomaly noted above: after the number of polities had fallen for most of human history, it rose during the twentieth century, as empires breathed their last. Now we can see continuity beneath this quirk. For as the number of "sovereign" polities grew, the degree of their sovereignty was waning. These were not, after all, the good old days of the Middle Ages, when states were expected to act as they pleased on the high seas and to treat visitors from other states with caprice. By the nineteenth century, the notion of international law had taken root, and the intangible strength of international norms was growing.
This new support for supranational rules was based largely on growing economic interdependence, which made war more and more a lose-lose game. Indeed, war was not just a lose-lose game, but a lose-lose-lose game—bad for the warriors, but also, increasingly, bad for their neighbors. Kant had seen this logic beginning to unfold back in the late eighteenth century, and had extrapolated from it ambitiously: "The effects which an upheaval in any state produces upon all the others in our continent, where all are so closely linked by trade, are so perceptible that these other states are forced by their own insecurity to offer themselves as arbiters, albeit without legal authority, so that they indirectly prepare the way for a great political body of the future, without precedent in the past."
Not long after Kant dropped this hint about human destiny, Napoleon proved that destiny had not yet arrived. But the havoc he wreaked had its upside. Peace was ratified by the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815, an unprecedented gathering at which all European states tried to forge a structure for lasting order. As it happened, that structure would be used not just to prevent war, but to stifle the liberal revolts of 1848, so the Congress of Vienna is often recalled as reactionary. But it set a vital precedent. In agreeing to hold periodic follow-up meetings on continental stability, it became a primordial version of the "great political body" that Kant envisioned.
And it seemed to help. Much of the nineteenth century was a peaceful time for Europe. Indeed, as technology drove trade to higher levels, peace seemed to some the wave of the future. In 1910, Norman Angell famously explained, in the widely translated book The Great Illusion, that in an interdependent world, war made no sense as an instrument of policy. Just as famously, the world didn’t listen.
After World War I, the League of Nations—a more elaborate version of the "great political body"—was formed to keep the peace. It failed. But today, one world war later, economic interdependence makes war even less rational than before. And nuclear weapons further elevate the irrationality.
Encouragingly, people seem to grasp all this non-zero-sum logic. So far, at least, nuclear powers have tended not to have war with one another. And as for economic interdependence: war have lately been confined to areas such as Africa and the Balkans, where historical factor have prevented rich, fine-grained interdependence from evolving—"underglobalized" areas, you might call them. In a striking departure from historical pattern, wars are increasingly things that poor nations do; rich nations intervene to stop them, not to win them. Barring a reversal of time-honored trends, poor nations will get richer, making war a remote prospect in an ever-larger part of the planet.
"Great political body" number three—the United Nations—is the most ambitious one yet. God knows it hasn’t done quite the job of preserving peace that idealists envisioned. But it has had more glimmers of success than the League of Nations, and has already lived twice as long as the league.
Moreover, expanding non-zero-sumness has in the meanwhile carried the rationale for supranational governance well beyond peacekeeping. Everything from tax policy to accounting standards to environmental policy to policing power is creeping toward the supranational level.
Whether the eventual result will be a single "world government," as woolly-minded one-worlders have long dreamed, is anybody’s guess. Another possibility, and perhaps a more benign one, is lots of overlapping bodies—some regional, some global; some economic, some environmental; some comprising national governments, some comprising non-state actors; and so on. An intermediate possibility is that these sorts of bodies would fall loosely under the auspices of the United Nations (as many inchoate bodies now do).
All kinds of scenarios are imaginable. What is hard to imagine is that this migration of governance beyond national bounds will stop before turning nation-states into something rather like provinces. The migration is driven by clear technological trends that are millennia-old and show no signs of abating: advances in technology—information, transportation, military, and so on—that make relations among polities more non-zero-sum. This logic will draw "tribes" into the New World Order even as they fiercely assert their independence from an old order.
Obviously, some "tribes" are less eager to join than others. But it is unlikely that any nation, no matter how radical its origins, will forever resist globalization. Perhaps the most anti-modern regime in the world today is the fundamentalist Islamic government of Afghanistan, the Taliban. Yet in 1999 the Taliban orchestrated the first large western investment in Afghanistan in two decades—a new telephone system that would finally permit direct-dial international calls. As the Washington Post reported, "Taliban authorities . . . said they hoped [the new phone system] would help bring in more foreign trade and investment, reestablish links with Afghan professionals who fled overseas, bring the Internet to their educational system and improve Afghanistan’s image abroad." This is not a recipe for continued Jihad.
DIFFUSE DESTINIES
In many developed nations, the drift toward world governance is drawing fire. The nation-state, nationalists complain, is sacrificing its sovereignty. This is true; governmental structures—including supranational ones—always lessen the freedom of their constituents. But at the same time, governmental structures expand freedom. If a city’s government is functioning well, its citizens gain the freedom to walk the streets with little fear of assault. Part of the deal, though, is that they don’t have the freedom to assault other citizens. If you like the idea of government, that means you cherish freedom from assault more than freedom to assault.
So it is with supranational governance. Would you like to be reasonably free of the fear of a global depression? Or would you rather preserve your nation’s freedom to raise tariffs at will, or to keep its financial institutions opaque to international view? Do you cherish the freedom to live without fear of dying in a biological weapons attack? Or do you prefer the freedom to live without fear of having your freezer searched for anthrax by an international inspectorate in the unlikely event that evidence casts suspicion in your direction?
Or, to turn such questions inside out: Which sort of sovereignty would you rather lose? Sovereignty over your freezer, or sovereignty over your life?
The loss of sovereignty isn’t some novelty dreamed up by bureaucrats at the UN or the WTO. If we define sovereignty broadly—as supreme control over your fate—then the loss of sovereignty is a fact of history, one of the most fundamental, stubborn facts in all of history. Indeed, to observe that history has eroded sovereignty time and again is simply to restate the thesis of this topic: that history has elevated non-zero-sumness time and again. For to say that you have been cast into a non-zero-sum situation is to say that you have lost unilateral control over your future—that your destiny has to some extent been taken out of your hands and spread among other people, just as part of their destiny now rests in your hands. Both you and they can regain some measure of that control, some portion of that lost sovereignty, but only through cooperation—a cooperation that involves sacrifices of control, of sovereignty, in its own right. The question is never whether you can keep all of your sovereignty; history says you can’t; all along it has been the fate of humankind to have its fate increasingly shared. The question is in what form you want to lose your sovereignty.
Of course, even answering that question wisely won’t bring instant Nirvana. Once we’ve recognized the necessity for global governance, we still have to get from here to there. And that could be dicey. After all, history—and prehistory—attest that evolving from one distinct level of political organization to another often brings "transitional instabilities"— a polite term for catastrophe. Elman Service observed, for example, that "as a theocratic chiefdom becomes a state, it is normally in a state of convulsion, if not of full civil war."
Can we manage to move from the national to the supranational level of organization without convulsion? And is there a price for doing so? Would preserving order amid great flux entail large sacrifices of privacy and civil liberty? These are the subjects of the next topic.
