Return of the pamphlet
...and the dying days of the nation-state?
We may be witnessing a nascent restructuring of world order’s basic elements. The United States is busy transforming itself from the scaffolding of a modern-imperial system of states into just another player in the venerable game. In contrast, the “first post-modern polity”, the European Union, takes another wobbly step on the rugged road to a common strategic policy. Trump is only a manifestation, or acceleration, of this trend, and it’s unlikely to vanish in a post-Trump era. America is not returning as the leader of the free world, if it ever was. These are not merely strategic fluctuations, the regular rise and fall of great powers and the state-systems they oversee. There’s something deeper at play.
War not only creates but abolishes borders, as seen in Libya and in the mess that is the Iraq-Syria-Kurdistan-Türkiye complex, and there are plenty of alternative systems waiting in the wings, not the least of which are the Islamic Caliphate, the EU model, and the networks of “world cities”. Some have postulated a fundamentally un-ordered world, highlighting the difference between messy realities and the neat models we build in a feeble attempt to understand and control them. In fact, it’s a cycle. We build the models, try to impose them on the world; the result is generally ill-controlled chaos, out of which we try to make sense. Unexpected, unintended consequences are the most common kind. Change must happen, since time doesn’t stop. The challenge in this continuation is to manage transformation while avoiding a transformative cataclysm. At heart, it’s about communication.
Before newspapers, there were pamphlets, and in many ways, we’ve come full circle. It’s still far too soon, in historical terms, to discern the full effects of social media on the history of the structure of the political planet. There is a loose historical analogue, though, in the first manifestation of vernacular, accessible means of attracting an audience who are not physically present.
Before the liberal revolution, prefiguring the rise of nationalism, spreading the Reformation, carrying wave after wave of chaotic reconfigurations of society and the universe, came vernacular printing. Gutenberg gets the credit, though as usual, they’d been doing it in East Asia half a century previously. It took some time for it to spread, as conservative forces began to discern the continuation involving independent thinking, while still seeing the new potential for extended social control. So the Inquisitors supervised. By the time of the English Revolution, they had, inevitably, lost control. By then, anyone who could raise a little money could dash off a screed and have it circulating in the coffee-houses of Europe in days, in their city in hours, mailed through the new postal systems. As now, fact-checking was barely a thing. If it had been, the mythological underpinnings of society would have collapsed. Same reason it’s barely a thing now.
But they did collapse, anyway, in slow motion. By the middle of the 19th century big companies had gobbled up the industry, as they do, and mass-circulation newspapers consolidated the position of the nation in the imaginations of the populace. This led, ultimately, to the fragmentation of the European maritime empires. In no small part, as Eric Hobsawm, Benedict Anderson and others have shown so well, the independence movements of the last few centuries have worked because they’ve turned the Romantic notion of the sovereign Volk against the multi-ethnic empires. It was simply the inevitable consequence of, first, the spread of the notion of the nation, and, second, its manifestation in a vernacular culture, meaning someone from Marseille could feel an affinity with the Vendée in a way that had been inconceivable previously.
This story arc, from centralised control of worldviews, through fragmentation due to availability of publishing, back to mass management of identity by mass media, looks to be repeating itself. The disappearance of the newsagent is one sign. A continuation is the weakening of the idea of the nation-state and, consequently, since it’s just an idea, its dissolution. It took three or four centuries for the printing press to realise the division of the world into nations and then into nation-states, after a chaotic period of revolutions, empire-building and systemic wars. The imperialists were no doubt horrified at the thought that any other nation might think itself their equal, but they couldn’t escape the logic of the nationalist dream. Even then, as these new states made accommodations with each other, they resisted the same principles being applied to their dependencies, There was a strange pattern of empires suppressing independence movements, then granting independence anyway – naturally, under more favourable conditions, and with the legacy of their ‘civilized’ institutions. Thus, it took another few centuries and several cataclysmic wars to spread to the rest of the world.
Social media has been around for a couple of decades. The shattering effects analogous to pamphleteering are manifesting themselves, arguably, in the twin phenomena of ever-greater demands for autonomy from ever-smaller groups (including online “virtual states”) on the one hand and a transfer of power away from states, and towards companies, on the other. European empire-building was conducted along the networks built by joint-stock and Royal Charter companies. The great wars of the 20th century put states back in the driver’s seat. As long as the post-WWII structure holds, states are not going away, but this is by no means certain. States may be reconfiguring themselves, acting in the interests of companies, in just the same way that the governments of the Industrial Revolution worked hand-held with early companies. Or they may be sidelined by altogether new sources of identity and belonging.
In both cases, early-modern and current, the shift was accompanied by a thickening of economic and cultural networks on a global scale. At present, promoters of the ‘western’, individualist ethos are fine with companies holding information about them, and acting on profiling, in ways that would horrify them if practiced by states (as they regularly are). At the same time, social media is connecting people on a grand scale, so that identity is being drawn from virtual tribes. The common languages are fragmenting, once again, as are the touchstones of reality itself. People draw their identities and worldviews from information bubbles, siloed virtual communities and online isolationism. These, in turn, arise in reaction to a densely populated arena of ideological cage-fighting. How will the world be governed when people living next door to each other can occupy fundamentally different universes?
Still, it would be foolish to write off the state just yet. It only takes a court order for governments to get hold of all that juicy profiling, even in the best-run democracies, whose intelligence agencies are already insisting on cooperation from big tech. Authoritarian great powers needn’t bother with such trifles as legality, but popular support remains surprisingly important. The nation-state paradigm remains, for the moment, the apex of sovereign legitimization. Besides, not everyone lives on their computer.