What’s Wrong with the World

The men signed of the cross of Christ go gaily in the dark.

About

What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

One Nation, One Vote, One Time

Perhaps some readers will be conversant with a controversy, simmering beneath the surface of our mundane political discourse, concerning a hypothetical/proposed/aborning/fantastical North American Union, modeled after the European Economic Community and entailing similar economic, regulatory, administrative, and legal "harmonizations". The ostensible centerpiece of this union, a 'NAFTA superhighway' bisecting the continent, running from Mexican ports on the Pacific Ocean right through the American heartland to Canada, is said to exist in embryonic form in the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor, a colossal white-elephant boondoggle of the age of globalism. Left-wing and progressive political movements in Canada and Mexico perceive the high-level, international conferences, in which representatives of both government and business participate, as a nascent continental corporatocracy; right-wing populists in America, stinging from the obsession of the American establishment with mass immigration and a New Economy which benefits Wall Street, but not Main Street, perceive in these consultations a plutocratic subversion of national sovereignty. Of course, the principals of these proceedings, who often seem to adopt a "whatever it is, which we're not quite going to say, it isn't what you think it is" posture towards their critics, must exist under the clouds of left and right-populist suspicion arising from growing awareness of the profoundly unrepresentative character of the European Union.

Regardless of one's position on this discrete controversy, it would seem logical - yes? - given the manifest logic of globalization, to contemplate the prospects for deepening integration among the three North American nations. If globalization is what its proponents claim for it, then something akin to what the critics allege either is occurring, or will occur, or is likely to occur, with or without those international junkets for bureaucrats, executive branch appointees, and CEOs from richistan.

Reihan Salam, proprietor and contributor at The American Scene, has posted a response to a debunking-style piece published in The Nation. Christopher Hayes, the author of the Nation article, portrays the movement against the North American Union and NAFTA superhighway as the product of the 'paranoid style in American politics', a stitching together of isolated facts which can be rebutted by simply hearkening unto the words of the people involved in the intergovernmental panels. (Incidentally, for those interested in learning a little something about the debate, this is an interpretation which runs counter to that of The Nation. Links abound, so that the reader can analyze the information and arrive at his own conclusions.) Reihan, noting the dismissive tone of the Nation article, says that the point is being missed:


By now I hope you've read Chris Hayes excellent piece on the so-called NAFTA superhighway, but I fear some of its fans, including Matt Yglesias, are missing a key point: the real bogeyman is deeper economic integration in North America, particularly undemocratic integration. The Canadian nationalist left fears a "North American Union," the American populist right fears it, and the Mexican populist-nationalist left also fears it. The trouble is that some form of integration, particularly integration that pays careful attention to agriculture and intellectual property rights, is likely the only sustainable alternative to mass migration.

And here, alas, is where the intellectual mischief, in my judgment, begins. For there hangs over even a brief paragraph such as this one, an atmosphere of destiny, of fatality, if inevitability: history possesses an immanent compass, and our only choice is whether we will heed it, or make things hard on ourselves by endeavouring to set out on our own. First, consider the presupposition that integration is somehow inevitable; it is after all, the only 'sustainable' alternative to mass migration. Integration is, in other words, the animating logic of globalization; it is going to transpire, leaving to us the option of managing it well or flubbing it badly. After six long years of untethered historicist progressivism, have we not grown weary of the consoling fiction that history not only has a direction, but lets us in on its secret? And if that is not considered apropos, what of the decades-worth of rhetoric that preceded the Bush presidency, replete with talk of a new global order, of trade and international comity born of that commerce and intercourse among nations and peoples? No, the countertrends can only be regarded as speedbumps by those who have already presupposed the answer, begged the question of history. In fact, given that Islam and its restiveness is the principal countertrend, or at least the most visible one, we might state that both forms of progressivism coalesce in the conviction that Islam will accede to the democratic-capitalist order because such accession is ordained by the logic of globalization. There will be An End to Evil because The World is Flat. No, the bottom line on the talk of inevitability is that one cannot conjure fate from series of contingent decisions; every decision which has contributed to globalization has been contingent, and so the process itself, and its outcomes, are contingent themselves. We are either rational beings, or economic processes - mere mammon - sits in the saddle and puts the spurs to our sides.

Second, increasing North American Integration is supposedly the only sustainable alternative to mass migration. Since, however, there is no necessity of either refusing to enforce immigration law or failing to do what sovereign nations do - control their borders, and determine who shall be admitted to the nation - it is difficult to apprehend how economic integration is the only alternative to uncontrolled (yes, I know, they already are) immigration flows. Is the implied argument that Americans will not sit idly by as Mexico collapses into an anarchy presided over by Carlos Slim and drug cartels? It must be, since Reihan does head off in this direction, but, once more, it is difficult to apprehend how Mexico becomes an American responsibility (Are we kidding!? We are responsible for the resentful?). Perhaps it might be argued that America will not suffer Mexicans to endure the deprivations of their own corrupt political and economic systems, that Americans are too altruistic for that. But it seems to me that Americans - majorities of them - have already determined that Mexicans are responsible for Mexico, and that they are desirous of reiterating this point by enforcing immigration law. In any event, it is difficult - I would say impossible - to argue that one nation is morally obligated to undertake wide-ranging and disruptive transformations of itself and its people, merely because a neighbouring nation is sunken in a torpor of sclerotic corruption.

Finally, although we need not grant the necessity of either mass migration or deepening economic integration, what of that bit about the integration itself occurring 'democratically'? It is not merely that what integration we have experienced has not exactly been democratic in impetus - surely not politically, as the requisite policies have never enjoyed majority support outside the offices of favour-owing congressmen, and surely not in some consumerist, voting-by-purchasing sense, for this is a category mistake, plainly and simply, whatever business books and right-wing marketeers may have to say - but that, by the nature of the case, by the logic of integration, it is irreversible. At least if one does not believe in revolutions. Which is to say, that as the process advances, and the deeper it proceeds, the greater the constraints that will be imposed upon deliberative politics; more and more issues and controversies will be stripped from the arena of public debate, more and more issues will simply be considered settled, because the political and economic interests invested in those settlements will be entrenched, structurally. The logic of opposition will not be to challenge a policy or two, or a cluster of policies, but to challenge an entire system, inasmuch as this will be the only possible means of altering or eliminating legions of smaller issues that will rile segments of the population. The logic of both integration and opposition thereto will be increasingly totalized: all or nothing, winner takes all, loser takes it good and hard. This will obtain regardless of whether one contemplates the scenario under the aspect of politics, or under that of economics. The structural tendency of integration, therefore, is towards one nation, one vote/chance/process, one time. A nation can gradually relinquish sovereign powers, but will find it increasingly difficult to reassert or reacquire them, even should this be necessary in extremis; beyond a certain, but indefinite point, it can only regain them by revolution - or by the collapse of the integrated system.

Integration, by its very logic, is undemocratic, unrepresentative, even if it occurs with the "consent" of the people at the time (which it seldom, if ever, has). It is unrepresentative because, by the lights of the profoundest conservatism, it tramples on the wisdom of our ancestors, and preemptively disenfranchises our posterity, and that on the most consequential decisions concerning the ordering of our common life. On top of that, it would require the conservative to become a revolutionary if he is not to be ruled by a despotism, benign though it may be, stamping upon his patrimony - forever.

Comments (17)

What does he mean by this?

"...particularly integration that pays careful attention to agriculture and intellectual property rights..."

I sense here an allusion to something I know nothing about. Is there some special movement among the people he disagrees with to deny "agricultural and intellectual property rights"?

Okay, I read the whole post. I still don't know what he's talking about. I wasn't trying to be sarcastic.

I believe that it was probably a sort of throwaway line; expressions of support for the international expansion of America's copyright and patent regimes are de rigeur. "Intellectual property rights" typically embrace everything from advanced technology to the (obscene and ridiculous) perpetual copyrights that the Congress bestows upon some pop culture artifacts. As for the agricultural rights, perhaps this is a reference to the patenting of genetically-engineered crops, including some of the chimerical ones with spliced-in animal genes. I'd rather these not be developed, let alone marketed and patented.

Now that I think of it, this sentiment is a reflection of that naive American faith that globalization is at once an American project of world-meliorism, and the guarantor of American economic preeminence - the strategy of openness: if we can just preclude other nations from cheating, America will remain the center of the global order. It smells like hubris to me.

It seems as if you buy somewhat into ideas of historical inevitability yourself: integration, globalization, must entail anti-democratic historical energies. But surely the process may cut both ways. Don't we need to be thinking about what forms of integration would be for the better (not that everyone is likely to be a winner on any given issue) and what for the worse?

Historically, the most entrepreneurial and "globalist" cultures - those of the English-speaking world - have also been the most democratic and self-ruling, those with the more successful forms of nationalism. The more insular nations have also been the most bureaucratic and corrupt. Why should we not hope or expect that something similar will obtain in future? While it's true that creating global markets with global regulations does put some restraint on national sovereignty, it may (I'm not saying it must - the EU is indeed a scandal) also free up entrepreneurial energies and create new economic arenas that will create new relationships between national political sovereignty and economic interests, as nations develop themselves and their people to serve specialized market niches according to a logic of comparative advantage.

I think the EU is doomed to failure because it attempts far too much political integration. It is at heart a project of corrupt bureaucrats and aristocratic elites. But I see no evident reason why we can't hope and work for more decentralized forms of self government within a context of global trade regulated by whatever is the necessary minimum of regulatory integration to make global markets work. You haven't addressed the scary alternative which might be a return to a political sovereignty which, among its leading players, exists to take from other nations or regions what they won't give in trade.

It's silly to argue for historical inevitability; it's also hard to argue that the basic purpose or motor of history - creating new forms of exchange to defer violent resentments directed at the present state of things - isn't served by the expansion of exchange, as a general rule that is often broken in various economic-political failures, an exchange that needs be both economic and political, that may at time favor states, at other times corporations, a trade involving both worldly goods and transcendent signs. Economic globalization may well go in hand with a further expansion of the nation-state system as the ideal means of regulating the global economy. At the very least, I can't see how anyone can be sure it won't.

I might also note that the apparent idea here, that individual nations must learn to fend for themselves as more or less self-sufficient economic units, with international trade regulated only by the whims of national sovereignty, would be a nightmare for most nations. The continental US is big enough and advanced enough to allow the idea some local currency. But most countries are so undeveloped and, often small, that their only hope is not to reproduce the relatively complete economic systems of countries like the US, now or at any other point in its history, but rather to become a specialized player in a global trade system. For most countries, it's either that or becoming an imperial power/pawn.

Leaving aside John's specific arguments for a moment (several of which are well-worth considering), I just want to take note of something extraordinary in his first comment. It is not, strictly speaking, an argument but rather an assumption or premise. He states that "the basic purpose or motor of history" is "creating new forms of exchange to defer violent resentments directed at the present state of things."

This is a really remarkable statement. In thinking about it myself, I find it difficult to formulate a satisfactory statement of "the basic purpose or motor of history" without recourse to theology; but I have little difficulty perceiving the inadequacy of John's formulation. He appears to hold a revised version of the doctrine of progress -- the engine of history is the gradual, pain-staking advancement (via "new forms of exchange") of man from barbarism ("violent resentment") to civilization.

Whatever the character of his doctrine, I think that unpacking it would go a long way toward clarifying the dispute over globalism.

I have a half-baked theory of my own that massive globalization will result in a sort of "regression toward the mean" or "evening out." In other words, countries like ours that now have a lot of freedom and prosperity will become relatively less free and prosperous if we lose sovereignty, and will be more harmed by political corruption, and countries that are crushed by poverty, corruption, and a lack of freedom will become relatively more free, prosperous, and less harmed by political corruption. If this is right, we're the ones who have more to lose in this process.

But this, as I say, is a purely conjectural theory I dreamed up two weeks ago.

I think John states very well indeed how liberal postmodernism sees itself.

The deeper past involved brutish conflicts rooted in oppressive and rigid tradition; it is no accident that "medieval" is an epithet. Liberal modernism attempted to emancipate the free and equal superman from these conflicts by disconnecting from the past and raising positivist rationalism to the world-throne in place of kings. The result was a new and unprecedented century of slaughter and degradation under rationalist supermen-led regimes. So liberal postmodernism sees the resolution of questions as itself the engine of oppression and slaughter: the purpose of politics becomes to postpone the resolution of questions, to undermine whatever current power structure is in place and/or ascendant, and through this infinite postponement avoid the tyrannies of the past.

The judgment that I presuppose what I critique, namely, a doctrine of historical inevitability, results from a failure to draw necessary distinctions. It is the proponents of globalization, not merely in the present, but throughout the history of the modern West, who have spoken of their (nightmare) dream of "reason" in terms of destiny, progress, evolution, inevitability, enlightenment. Opponents of globalization and integration would not asseverate that globalization must redound to the construction of undemocratic regimes, precisely because they perceive nothing inevitable in the process of integration itself; it is a contingency, a choice, and not a destiny; from what is contingent in politics there cannot arise what is necessary. Globalization is not necessary, and therefore, neither is the attenuation of representative government. Furthermore, the 'antidemocratic historical energies' are the consequence of the interplay of the processes of integration and structural limitations of the human condition.

The EU remains the foremost illustration of this structural condition, this expression - ultimately - of the finitude of man and his institutions. The EU is antidemocratic, antirepublican, a consummate expression of the managerial ethos in governance, not merely because the architects of union operated in a somewhat clandestine, dissimulative manner, but because, given the heterogeneity of national cultures, economic conditions, political settlements, and national aspirations, the only way union could have been attained was by means of diktat, ukase, and subterfuge. The requisite commonality of belief, sentiment, history - those mystic chords of memory - did not obtain in the case of the European nations, and it is only the substantively thin, and now anachronistic (what with the emergence of Eurabia) belief that integration is the only alternative to national identity (considered the wellspring of Holocaust, in another mutilation of history) that impels the project ever onward into the future of unfreedom. Representation obtains if and only if there exists a commonality of history, memory, culture, and belief. The absence of this commonality entails, both analytically and pragmatically, that any attempted political and economic union will result in the attenuation of representation. This is a uniform lesson of history.

This attenuation can be observed even in the evolution of our own domestic political culture, within which the internationalism of the duopoly does not represent the diversity of opinion extant within the commonweal, and, moreover, seldom commands majority support in the form imparted to it by the establishment. More generally, one need only achieve some level of minimal conversance with the political cultures of the several states to recognize that those smaller political cultures are far more responsive to the concerns of the residents of the several states than the national political culture is to the citizens of the United States. Generally speaking, the political cultures of cities, towns, and municipalities are still more responsive and representative of local concerns and interests - precisely because of the commonality and community of the people themselves. There is a reason that a Vermont town hall meeting is much more small-R republican than any national political proceeding, and that reason is the origin of representation itself in the greater homogeneity of the set of signifiers, and the greater purity of their (more intensive) exchange, within more compact political communities. Aristotle has not been overthrown, and neither will he be. Increasingly international, even global, institutions cannot be representative because they cannot overcome this structural limitation of the human condition. Man is finite, bounded, conditioned - and this is one of the innumerable consequences of this ontological status.

It is true that, historically, the great commercial powers of the Anglo world have instituted more representative political regimes. But this requires a great deal of qualification. in the first place, those representative institutions were purely domestic, with imperialism being the rule abroad. Second, and particularly in the English case, those domestic institutions were not representative in a sense that we would acknowledge, or in the sense required for the present argument: representation was limited to the gentry, who excluded the lower orders precisely because they were engaged in the primitive accumulation that preceded the industrial revolution and the gradual extension of suffrage, and the nobility. Finally, the relationship of commercial interests to the extraterritorial exercise of political power, while arising from a perennial nexus of interests, ought never be mistaken for a representative function. Economics and politics are always mutually contextualizing, to be certain, but in the forms assumed by Anglosphere policies, they have never been representative. This, it seems to me:


While it's true that creating global markets with global regulations does put some restraint on national sovereignty, it may (I'm not saying it must - the EU is indeed a scandal) also free up entrepreneurial energies and create new economic arenas that will create new relationships between national political sovereignty and economic interests, as nations develop themselves and their people to serve specialized market niches according to a logic of comparative advantage.

Embodies a category confusion, a conflation of politics, which at its best is the deliberative pursuit of justice and the common good, and economics, which is the process of the provision of the necessities of life, and the mere wants which make life more pleasant. The former is, or at least ought to be, a rational endeavour, in which the reasoned sense of the people enlists their public-spiritedness, their patriotic love of place and tradition, to form and preserve their common environment. The latter involves two modes of justice, that of exchange and distribution. The latter will inevitably be determined by considerations we would regard as political in nature - this is the condition of our existence. But since there is little discussion of this sort of justice, the assumption being that just exchanges, in which the values are equivalent (or perceived to be equivalent to the participants, depending upon one's chosen theoretical illusions) because their occurs no force or fraud, yield distributive justice automatically (everyone receives what he deserves), the field of economics is largely the arena of preference-satisfaction. Which is to say, it is the satisfaction of largely sub-rational, a-rational, or rationally indifferent choices. New relationships of economic interests and national governments are unrepresentative, not merely because this is the case pragmatically, as witness the plutocratic tendency of modern Western political economy, but because entrepreneurship, however defined and practiced, and deliberation as to the common good, are two different things. The notion, widespread among certain sectors of the political right, that markets are more purely democratic that political institutions, is a supercilious, patronizing myth, which elides the distinction between the servicing of desire and the representation of interests amenable to rational articulation. That market populism is the opiate of the masses living in the shadow of plutocracy. Desire is not reason, and the common good is attained by means of the latter - this is why new economic arrangements and new relationships between those arrangements and the nation-state will not be representative: it is pragmatically and analytically impossible for them to be so.

As for the talk of comparative advantage, what transpires today is not the evolution of new forms of comparative advantage, but arbitrage, purely and simply. Moreover, the logic of globalization as we experience it in America condemns, not merely the left half of the bell curve, but increasingly, large swathes of the right half as well, to declining standards of living. Just as we import unskilled Mexicans to displace higher-cost unskilled whites, blacks, and native-born Hispanics, we increasingly import professionals to displace our higher-cost engineers, doctors, and so on. And third-world nations that develop by specializing may realize gains in standards of living and quality of life, but they are still imperial pawns of the international financial/economic establishment, as evidenced by the conduct of the IMF and World Bank in imposing nearly-uniform requirements upon all recipient nations - a process both resented and sometimes injurious. Argentina, anyone?

This is scarcely to argue that nations must become wholly self-sufficient, though globalization, by enabling the third-world to industrialize, placing greater burdens on finite resources, will eventually drive costs to the point at which greater self-sufficiency once again becomes imperative. No one on the paleo right advocates an American juche ideology. Please, this is a caricature. To the contrary, the argument is that trade relations are beneficial, provided they are structured so as to secure, from the standpoint of domestic producers and labourers, the exponentially greater claim these have upon the commonweal than any foreign interest, GDP calculation, or multinational corporation/conglomerate/middleman function. To this end, trade arrangements ought to be concluded between discreet nations, and not through international bureaucratic intermediaries, and ought to be considered adjustable, revocable - not as stages in a process of integration, harmonization, and homogenization, as they are today.

Finally, I perceive, whether intended or not, a sort of Franz Fanon "Wretched of the Earth" undertone to this doctrine of historical progress. This process will neither defuse international resentments - on the contrary, it has already exacerbated them, as witness the rage of Islam - nor yield an advance from barbarism (the new forms of barbarism come to us under the aspects - setting aside the question of Islam - of technology and high finance/capitalism itself, which rends the social fabric and the culture in pursuit of its abstraction of greater efficiency). In fact, it will engender a mode of existence in America more nasty, solitary, and brutish - and perhaps shorter as well, for a variety of reasons - and some proponents even admit as much. (Lydia, your theory is spot on; but I'll have more to write about this in the coming days.)

He appears to hold a revised version of the doctrine of progress -- the engine of history is the gradual, pain-staking advancement (via "new forms of exchange") of man from barbarism ("violent resentment") to civilization.

Whatever the character of his doctrine, I think that unpacking it would go a long way toward clarifying the dispute over globalism.

-Well, my ideas about the deferral of resentment being the motor of history come from the discipline of Generative Anthropology of which I am an amateur aficionado. It's a discipline that, I believe, is not at odds with much theological understanding on the origin and purpose of man, having followers who are both believers and not, who use theology and don't. In this sense - providing a ground on which religious and secular people of good faith can meet - it is a remarkable movement in the humanities. The basic idea behind the discipline is to hypothesize what must have been minimally involved in the emergence of symbolic language, taken as the defining quality of our species, and then to study history as an ongoing representation, in particular traditions, of the ethical and esthetic forms that are an extension of that originary event (for we hypothesize that language must have emerged in a communal event). What propels this cultural evolution is the need to maintain a sufficient level of reciprocity (to defer resentment) that allows the community to continue to share in ethical understandings and avoid ripping itself apart.

Now you raise the question of whether this is another doctrine of progress. It is a certainly a theory of cultural evolution, and while it entails certain assumptions about what kinds of cultures prove more fit at surviving (being militarily and economically productive) it is not a crude progressive dogma. For example, it is rigorously anti-utopian. Certainly we wouldn't agree with this formulation - "pain-staking advancement (via "new forms of exchange") of man from barbarism ("violent resentment") to civilization" - for we take modern civilized man to be full of resentments. Modern market and consumer society is seen to have developed because (even as it promotes desires and hence resentments) it is suited to mediating and deferring (ever temporarily) resentments.

Unfortunately I seem to have less time today than I hoped to continue the comments I gave last night; but I hope to return to the thread later this evening and dive into Maximos's comments

aising positivist rationalism to the world-throne in place of kings. The result was a new and unprecedented century of slaughter and degradation under rationalist supermen-led regimes. So liberal postmodernism sees the resolution of questions as itself the engine of oppression and slaughter: the purpose of politics becomes to postpone the resolution of questions, to undermine whatever current power structure is in place and/or ascendant, and through this infinite postponement avoid the tyrannies of the past.

-Just to clarify, I am not sympathetic to positivism as a philosophy or Gnostic religion. Nor do I care much for coy postmodern undecidability, though I'll give it a nod over positivism in many respects because there really are some irreducibly mysterious our paradoxical qualities to human culture. To speak of culture as essentially a deferring mechanism, as I do, is not to equate it with postmodern relativism. Great acts of love, courage, reason, and decision making are acts of deferral. The fundamental human questions are not resolvable in this world; that's why the tensions they create can only be deferred and not settled by man once and for all in some utopian final solution.

The purpose of politics, in my opinion, is to make decisions, take sides, hopefully to help preserve, but this means also renew, the ethical traditions one values; but there will always be a need for more decisions, more politics. The potential for a final, world-ending conflict is now forever with us. We must struggle continually to defer it, finding new ways to transcend the different shapes and forms the conflict will take. History or tradition is fundamentally unstable - our understandings on this question may be at the heart of any differences between us. But the last thing I have any sympathy for is the postmodern war against all Western traditions, or the conspiracy theory of history - the reduction of all history to relations of victim/oppressor. That is the one thing I have fought against since I first started to study history at university in the relatively early years of postmodernism. History is the means by which we all come to share in figures of transcendence (not reducible to oppressive figures of hegemonic victimization) that help us keep our society or world from ripping itself apart.

In reply to Maximos:

[globalization] is a contingency, a choice, and not a destiny; from what is contingent in politics there cannot arise what is necessary. Globalization is not necessary

-in general, I think I share your view of the contingent nature of history and the primacy of the political over the economic. However, to say, flat out, at this stage in the game, that globalization is not necessary is doubtful. Our respect for contingency must entail respect for certain existential realities from which contingency emerges. A world of 6+ billion people could only have come into existence with a fair amount of "globalization" in matters economic and technological, and all politics concerned with keeping anywhere near this many people alive will also entail some kind of respect for economic "globalization", as an already existing reality, which is not to say anything in particular is inevitable. And if we are to massively reduce our population in the near future, as some of the Green misanthropes propose, that will entail a globalized tyranny or war the scope and scale of which is not something I want to contemplate.

- I also share your disdain for the EU; however it is surely not the only model of economic integration. For example, Canada and the US are highly integrated economies but we attempt nowhere near the kind of political or regulatory integration they have in Europe. We retain distinct political identities and our integration probably works all the better for this.

Representation obtains if and only if there exists a commonality of history, memory, culture, and belief. The absence of this commonality entails, both analytically and pragmatically, that any attempted political and economic union will result in the attenuation of representation. This is a uniform lesson of history

-I somewhat sympathize with the first sentence; but the idea is too static. In fact, representation is often achieved through a process of risk taking, floating trial balloons, baiting, etc. In other words, new representations (hence representatives) can bring people together in new ways when people see in the proposed representation some things they can variously use, making it into a compact to transcend a present conflict/limit. Representation emerges from troubling events in ways that are not simply reducible to some previous status quo or underlying power relation, precisely because a successful representation transcends an existing reality even as it emerges from and re-presents that reality.

More to the point, I don't think any successful economic integration can or will entail endless political integration. The EU seems to be heading to bureaucratic tyranny, not a productive integration of economic forces. In fact I think strong national identities, in respect of the primacy of the political over the economic, will be necessary to forge the compacts with which a successful economic integration can happen.

Increasingly international, even global, institutions cannot be representative because they cannot overcome this structural limitation of the human condition. Man is finite, bounded, conditioned - and this is one of the innumerable consequences of this ontological status.

-again I have some sympathy with this idea and I don't see much use for institutions like the UN anyway. But it is nonetheless true that we live today in relatively less compact societies than did our predecessors. In some respects we can see that this impinges on the possibilities for republican self rule. In other respects we can see our times as being more democratic. In any case, the decline of compactness is primarily, I think, a matter of the political and economic need to increase the degrees of freedom within our societies; it is not so much a question of international trade though it may become increasingly so.

in the first place, those representative institutions were purely domestic, with imperialism being the rule abroad.

-it's not so simple. The British empire was divided into domestically self-ruling Dominions (like Canada, French and English) and colonies under direct tutelage. But even in the latter, there was some degree of local representation before colonial authorities and the Brits generally assumed that they were leading their colonies eventually towards some kind of ability for self-rule, India becoming the prime example. Even in Africa, it can be argued that the Brits left more political skills behind them than did the other imperial powers.

Economics and politics are always mutually contextualizing, to be certain, but in the forms assumed by Anglosphere policies, they have never been representative.

-well if the goal of your argument is to defend an ideal of AMerican republicanism, you will of course find things lacking in the English system. But it's a stretch to say the English have never been representative. Compared to, say, the French nation/empire they have been, and in the end they did much better than the French who started as a much more powerful, populous, rich country. In any case, an American should appreciate one thing about the English: the American Revolution was not simply a product of American will. The refusal by the English to allow American representation in their political system was the product of their English desire to remain in control of their parliament. Insularity and a preference for local self rule is not simply an American quality.

New relationships of economic interests and national governments are unrepresentative, not merely because this is the case pragmatically, as witness the plutocratic tendency of modern Western political economy, but because entrepreneurship, however defined and practiced, and deliberation as to the common good, are two different things. The notion, widespread among certain sectors of the political right, that markets are more purely democratic that political institutions, is a supercilious, patronizing myth, which elides the distinction between the servicing of desire and the representation of interests amenable to rational articulation.

-Well I'm quite willing to agree that politics must be seen as primary and the real source of democratic activity and that entrepreneurship is not directly about the common good (though entrepreneurs do take personal risks that create opportunities for other people who don't have to take risks. All kinds of young people today can afford to play at politics precisely because they don't have to urgently go about providing for the bare necessities, thanks to the wealth entrepreneurship has created over the years). But I think politics is rather more irrational than you claim - since it turns on uncertainties and the ultimate end of politics is more politics - and I'm not so willing to see economic interests in terms of zero-sum games or to assume that plutocrats get their way with government. Inevitably governments must mediate among many powerful agglomerations of interests, e.g. one economic sector vs. another. It is more often a case of one industry and all its workers and allied interests vs another industry and workers as it is a case of big business vs. the common man. And if anyone generally wins out it is the bureaucratic classes, not business interests. Anyway, the very wealthy in our society don't seem to get too serious about their economic interests because they don't have to (they are primarily political beings and flatter their vanity): they vote for left-liberal parties disproportionately and fritter away their money on trendy liberal causes largely detached from reality.

So as I see it, it is not a question of governments simply serving economic interests and this not being democratic. I think a wise democracy can go some way to creating conditions by which it can both harness and unleash entrepreneurial energies to its own, ultimately political, ends. Likewise, established big businesses can and are often directed to serve popular political opinions and interests. Corporate leaders are, as I say, primarily political not economic animals even as it is also often political to pretend that the only thing you care about is the bottom line, about shareholder value, and acting accordingly. But how can this be generally true? Corporate offices are highly politicized arenas. While this politics is in large part about making alliances to make money (and not about national democratic life), corporate politics, while indebted to making money, is ultimately primary to making money (the political borrows from and owes the economic with interest; but the economic is not an ultimate end in itself, no more than Jewish money lenders once controlled the world). What's more, national politics creeps into corporate politics in all kinds of ways because status in corporations depends on it. So, for example, we now have CEOs in short skirts who have gone to all the right schools, which we would not have if making money in China or India were the only thing that mattered.

As for the talk of comparative advantage, what transpires today is not the evolution of new forms of comparative advantage, but arbitrage, purely and simply.

-it is neither pure nor simple. You speak as if there were no creativity, no new forms of production and productivity in the economy and so everything is arbitrage (which of course goes on but not as readily as some have thought at times - companies have pulled out of cheap labour environments because they couldn't find the necessary productivity). Surely you don't really believe that.

Moreover, the logic of globalization as we experience it in America condemns, not merely the left half of the bell curve, but increasingly, large swathes of the right half as well, to declining standards of living. Just as we import unskilled Mexicans to displace higher-cost unskilled whites, blacks, and native-born Hispanics, we increasingly import professionals to displace our higher-cost engineers, doctors, and so on.

-Well, there are losers, no doubt, but winners too. I don't think you have so many Hispanics in America because you don't have the democratic means to get rid of them. You do have those means if you want to exercise them as the latest defeat of open borders bill, in face of all the usual talk about its inevitability, suggests. That debate also suggested to me that somewhere around half of Americans don't want to deport too many Hispanics. They want the cheap labour because it makes them wealthier and there are a lot of jobs Americans would rather not do. Why protect jobs, like factory work, which corrode the humanity of those forced to do repetitive tasks day in day out if you have other options? Declining standards of living in America? As a generality, I think it would be hard to prove on a strictly material basis. Yes, if you value things like a traditional family life, you can make the case. But this only begs the question of cause and effect. The corrosion of family life is as much a result of postmodern political/cultural/spiritual values as it is of economic forces which adapt themselves to those declining values. I know of a few people who have decided to have large families, to hell with everything else. And they find a way to make it happen. But most people don't because they want to have all the consumer goods, the careers, the free time, etc.

Argentina, anyone? So you can't borrow money without turning it to productive uses and not expect to get reined in... Still, often your only hope for freedom is to be able to borrow money internationally. How much did America borrow from Europe to finance its development in the nineteenth century? Proportionately less than Canada I'm sure, but I don't think it was negligible especially if one counts the investment of families in immigration.

by enabling the third-world to industrialize, placing greater burdens on finite resources, will eventually drive costs to the point at which greater self-sufficiency once again becomes imperative.

-you may well be right, but how can we really know? Who knows if a hydrogen economy is possible, e.g.?

To the contrary, the argument is that trade relations are beneficial, provided they are structured so as to secure, from the standpoint of domestic producers and labourers, the exponentially greater claim these have upon the commonweal than any foreign interest, GDP calculation, or multinational corporation/conglomerate/middleman function.

-fair enough, so it all comes down to pragmatic politics, the art of the tradeoffs. Just don't forget that we middlemen contribute to the commonweal too.

trade arrangements ought to be concluded between discreet nations, and not through international bureaucratic intermediaries, and ought to be considered adjustable, revocable - not as stages in a process of integration, harmonization, and homogenization, as they are today.

-maybe, though harmonization is often a way of lessening the reach of bureaucracy, national and international. And there has to be some way of respecting investments in international trade, protecting them from political expropriation without compensation. What seems to be developing today are regional trade blocs; so it is not simply a question of bilateral vs. global agreements. It may well be that we will soon discover definite limits to the latter.

Finally, I perceive, whether intended or not, a sort of Franz Fanon "Wretched of the Earth" undertone to this doctrine of historical progress. This process will neither defuse international resentments - on the contrary, it has already exacerbated them, as witness the rage of Islam

It's been a long time since I was forced to read Fanon, and it did not leave a favorable impressoin. But yes, the modern global economy creates all kinds of resentments, but it also defuses them. One day you can find a Saudi prince funding terrorism, the next day he might be shopping in Paris or whoring in Spain or bragging about his great AMerican airplane. But more to the point, and quite aside from the many liberal political fantasies involved in Western history, why would there have been so much political energy to transform traditional socieities in the West if they too did not create all kinds of resentments? Ultimately history is defined by the possibilities it provides for people to flee the limits of the systems they, rightly or wrongly, grow to resent. To say this is not to encourage resentment or liberalism, but simply to recognize a certain human reality. Today I think resentments of the existing system will lead us back towards certain orthodoxies and traditions, including a respect for nationhood, but these cannot be realized in quite the same way they were in the past. We will have to renew our traditions creatively, not simply repeat them as would now be impossible. And in this renewing we will have to enter compacts to promote our political and ethical interests that involve people from outside our nations.

A world of 6+ billion people could only have come into existence with a fair amount of "globalization" in matters economic and technological, and all politics concerned with keeping anywhere near this many people alive will also entail some kind of respect for economic "globalization", as an already existing reality..

This is true as far as it goes, and it is critical that the "globalization" in the statement remain in the quotes, inasmuch as the international dispersal of technologies and economic practices which enable the perpetuation of a world inhabited by 6+ billion people occurred, principally, prior to the advent of the contemporary process of globalization. Integration and harmonization of regulatory, legal, and administrative regimes were not necessary in this process. Globalization as we now know it is something sufficiently distinctive as to preclude drawing conclusions from earlier periods of negotiated trade arrangements.

In fact, representation is often achieved through a process of risk taking, floating trial balloons, baiting, etc.

Representation is a pluriform process. It is true that cultural interactions will engender various modes of representational exchange, the mutual adoption of cultural modes, motifs, signs, etc. But operating parallel to this process of cultural borrowing and interpenetration is a process of differentiation and intensification, whereby, in order to demarcate cultural boundaries and preserve a shared, inherited identity, a group will distinguish itself from other groups, discriminate between them as being in or out-groups (with degrees of association, perhaps), and develop more intensively its own system of cultural representation, its own set of signifiers. Man, being a finite, conditioned being, cannot actualize the multifarious potentialities open to him at any moment, when this is considered abstractly; the same reality obtains with respect to cultural and ethnic groups. The preservation of an identity, and its articulation as a means of creating a sense of place - that is, of a delimited space, figural and literal - is a matter of both judicious borrowing and modification, as circumstances warrant or mandate, and differentiation. It is profoundly unnatural for human beings to consider all options as being open to them, to disdain all fixities and stabilities by which orientation in the world in achieved; it is the very condition of there being individuals, groups, and cultures that these be some distinguishable thing, and not other things. Of the two processes of representation, which exist in tension, the record of history, and the experience of the present, are one in evincing the primacy - the greater vitality and potency - of the differentiating, intensifying process. In fact, when immersion in a mass, cosmopolitan environment seemingly deprives an individual of the opportunity to establish such an identity, that individual will either suffer alienation and disorientation, or will create or seek out a simulacrum of group solidarity - an artificial community/identity.

The dual processes of cultural representation/signification entail certain consequences for the structures of political representation. An increase in the ethnic and cultural diversity within a nation results in the transformation of its political culture in the direction of factionalization, with each group coming to embody a discrete and permanent set of interests; it therefore becomes the task of enlightened statesmanship to mediate between these competing and conflicting group claimants, which mediation will be justified as requisite to the preservation of social peace, and oriented towards the enhancement of the prestige, influence, and power of a technocratic, managerial elite. This is a principal reason for the narrowness of the American political consensus, the consensus that it permitted expression in the positions of the duopoly; this is also the reason multicultural advocacy proceeds by indoctrination and ukase: the process of differentiation and intensification creates groups that will not consent to be absorbed into larger cultural units, bearing interests that do not admit of a general societal resolution, 'necessitating' decision-making at a remove from the intractable conflicts of divergent representations. This attenuates both effective cultural representation in the political sphere (for some) and political representation generally, as the requirements of mediation and social harmony are taken to outweigh the implementation of determinate political preferences.

Or, most succinctly, an exchange of cultural signs which resolves a conflict, or enhances a given culture, does not entail a unification of homogenization of cultural, economic, and political representations.

In any case, the decline of compactness is primarily, I think, a matter of the political and economic need to increase the degrees of freedom within our societies.

This is a restatement, or, if you will, a re-presentation of the originary motive of the liberal political compact: liberalism appeals to a higher political authority, usually the center, as over against the rightful local authority, in order to secure certain rights against that locality; most frequently, this appeal was necessary, in the minds of the liberal (or merely "liberal" and opportunistic - the two are inseparable), because the local community had adjudged the objects of the liberals as injurious to the common good. Hence, in order to secure a dispensation from the rightful authority of the community, the liberal appealed to the center. Stated differently, the liberal compact prescribed freedom to perform certain actions, while proscribing the freedom, whether of individuals or communities, to perform contrary or adverse actions. However, at one level of analysis, this entire disputation revolves around the question of whether the liberal privileging of those freedoms is warranted, whether those are the freedoms most conducive to the attainment of Good. This is not a question of need, but of which freedom?, a question that the liberal compact begs.

But even in the latter, there was some degree of local representation before colonial authorities and the Brits generally assumed that they were leading their colonies eventually towards some kind of ability for self-rule..

With the exception of Canada, British imperial administration was precisely that, regardless of whether - and on this score, I am highly dubious - eventual independence was envisioned.

But it's a stretch to say the English have never been representative.

The argument is not that English politics have been bereft of the representative function, which would be a foolish and ignorant argument indeed, but that that particular matrix of political and economic power constitutive of the modern British order was unrepresentative, as it was essentially a government of, by, and for the Whig gentry and burghers, the rising capitalist class, with the lower classes believed to threaten this emergent order excluded from the franchise until - voila! - the system was well entrenched, in the Nineteenth century. The contemporary matrix of economic and political power which is constitutive of globlization is similarly un- or anti-representative, though it need not rely on such a crude instrument as legal disenfranchisement; the narrowness of the political consensus between the dominant parties suffices to exclude threatening and dissident doctrines from the national discourse. That matrix also creates 'facts on the ground', structural realities that would constrain any hypothetical decentralist politics, as localists and patriots sought to reacquire the freedom of action that is self-government. Call it a path-dependency.

But I think politics is rather more irrational than you claim..

Far be it from me to discount the presence of the irrational in politics. The argument was more precisely defined that this: the political carries within itself the possibility of becoming a deliberative pursuit of justice, the common good of the community; this is a rational endeavour if it occurs, and this is something that the economic, as mere preference-stroking, can never attain. In a rough sense, but a sense more reflective of our common human nature than late moderns would concede, this does correspond to the distinction between what we have in common with the lower animals and what is proper to man, qua man.

Inevitably governments must mediate among many powerful agglomerations of interests, e.g. one economic sector vs. another.

Something of the sort occurs often enough, but to concentrate on this micro-level would be to miss the macro-level, to miss the forest for the trees. On the meta-level of American political economy, the dominant economic interests of the nation, and the expressed policies of the government, have been mutually contextualizing since - at a minimum - the aftermath of the Civil War. When that matrix of interests demanded tariffs, they were implemented; and when American businesses reconstituted themselves as multinational corporations, the doctrines of free trade became regnant, and the writ of the land. The American political establishment has been harnessing certain entrepreneurial energies for better than a century-and-a-half of our national history. And of course this is anti-representative, as demonstrated by the history of American populism, certain strains of progressivism, and now politically marginalized, though not unpopular, strains of dissent, both left and right-oriented.

Likewise, established big businesses can and are often directed to serve popular political opinions and interests.

There is a qualitative difference between a business's serving some public interest incidentally, as a consequence of some regulation or gesture of goodwill, and a business's doing so by the logic of its architecture. The former is merely a compensation for a structural imbalance, real or perceived, while the latter is the consequence of a judgment that a certain structure is consonant with the good.

What's more, national politics creeps into corporate politics in all kinds of ways because status in corporations depends on it.

Corporate embraces of various feminist and multiculturalist nostrums demonstrate that legitimacy is a commodity, with such gestures being the currency of the realm. A certain critical mass of public sentiment, concerning the illegitimacy of a corporation's personnel policies, would threaten the standing of that corporation in certain communities.

You speak as if there were no creativity, no new forms of production..

Of course it is the case that creativity still finds scope for expression, and new modes of production are generated. However, the combination of high-technology, high finance and arcane debt-structuring, consumer credit, real-estate speculation, and the trading of services is insufficient as a foundation for the economy of a first-world nation. And once new forms of high technology are developed, there is no real necessity of their manufacture occurring in the United States. There is, moreover, no rational reason, as opposed to sheer chauvinism, to believe that America will always remain preeminent in such fields. So, arbitrage is a more consequential element of globalization than most supporters would concede; the logic of the system is that things will be done wherever it is least costly for them to be done.

They want the cheap labour because it makes them wealthier and there are a lot of jobs Americans would rather not do.

Americans are more than willing to accept such forms of employment, provided that their remuneration is commensurate with the American way of life, American cultural expectations and practices (ie., we do not live with 20 people, of various generations and families, under one roof). More precisely, upper-middle-class and wealthy Americans embrace the cheap labour because it increases their relative wealth, and their disposable income; immigrant labour does not increase the well-being of the majority, as it - depending upon the economic sector & etc. - either depresses wages or results in the socialization the costs of the externalities. In other words, it is a de facto regressive tax/subsidy.

Why protect jobs, like factory work, which corrode the humanity of those forced to do repetitive tasks day in day out if you have other options?

A diversity of employments should be preserved and secured because this is imperative if a) an economy is to be well ordered and balanced, secured against the effects of shifts in demand that might affect one or two economic sectors, b) the diversity of aptitudes among the population are to find employment outlets, c) the left half of the bell curve is not to be consigned to the meaninglessness of retailing one another cheap, Chinese-manufactured junk, and d) the nation is to achieve some degree of insulation from the inevitable effects upon commodity prices of rising world demand. Globalization is predicated upon the assumption of cheap, abundant oil, with attendant low transportation costs...

But this only begs the question of cause and effect.

The existence and operation of one causal pathway does not discount the existence and operation of others; the causal chains are not mutually exclusive: multiple causes contribute to economic stagnation and declining mobility. Besides, globalists themselves, when the context is propitious or the realities too patently obvious, will concede that the macro-effect, economically speaking, will be a leveling down of first-world living standards. This is simply a matter of mathematical averaging.

So you can't borrow money without turning it to productive uses and not expect to get reined in...

What constituted productive and situationally appropriate uses for Argentina were not those which would be such in America, the point being that the categorical nature of the neoliberal economic programme is often more procrustean than liberating, and in this respect, conduces as much, or more, to the continued dominance of Western interests than to the well-rounded development of recipient nations.

but how can we really know?

Resources are finite, particularly the oil upon which the global economy is predicated. As regards hydrogen, I'm a sceptic, and for three reasons believe this to be a non-starter: 1) The conversion to a hydrogen infrastructure would require tens of trillions of dollars than no nation can afford, 2) Hydrogen requires great pressurization in generation and for storage, making this imprudent for any number of practical and strategic reasons, 3) Hydrogen requires more energy for catalyzation/generation and storage than it yields; we could attempt to square the circle by constructing hundred of enormous nuclear power facilities, or by mastering fusion, but I'd not wager on either.

Though harmonization is often a way of lessening the reach of bureaucracy

Harmonization merely results in the elaboration of a layer of bureaucracy and administrative mediation in addition to those which already exist, as evidenced by the EU and the international trade-dispute bodies which already exist.

And there has to be some way of respecting investments in international trade..

The risks are inherent in the business. In any event, it is mystifying why people should consent to the irrevocable transformation of their cultures and societies, inclusive of the diminution of the representative functions of their political institutions, in order to secure the economic interests of the international plutocracy. This is merely another regressive subsidy of sorts.

But yes, the modern global economy creates all kinds of resentments, but it also defuses them.

Given the persistence of cultural particularity, which is a function of human nature, and one of its goods, as man is finite and conditioned, we have no rational reason to believe that the defusing of resentments will suffice to secure our communities from the resentments generated. Those Saudi princes, debauched though they are, condone with winks and nods a religious culture which bids some of the best and brightest of the Muslim world to fly airliners into skyscrapers. Again, why the bare fact of the existence of those resentments - many of which we ourselves engender by means of globalization - should entail irrevocable transformations of our societies is mystifying.

why would there have been so much political energy to transform traditional socieities in the West if they too did not create all kinds of resentments?

As I indicated above, in my discussion of liberalism, certain resentments are either illegitimate, or of a lower order of significance than others, on account of their less direct relationship to the Good. Those political energies were real enough, as were the resentments; it does not follow that they were legitimate, their objects normative, and their means laudable. Let us not presuppose that history has disclosed to us a story of progress from darkness to light.

As regards hydrogen, I'm a sceptic, and for three reasons believe this to be a non-starter...3) Hydrogen requires more energy for catalyzation/generation and storage than it yields

In addition to this, the transportation costs would be pretty high, since the density is so low. I also seem to recall from a seminar I saw on this topic, that a second-law analysis makes hydrogen pretty a sketchy candidate for a replacement to the nation's energy.

It is true that cultural interactions will engender various modes of representational exchange, the mutual adoption of cultural modes,
motifs, signs, etc. But operating parallel to this process of cultural borrowing and interpenetration is a process of differentiation and intensification... the record of history, and the experience of the present, are one in evincing the primacy - the greater vitality and
potency - of the differentiating, intensifying process.

- the way I think of these things, every representation entails both processes; there can only be a sharing of a sign, a recognition of a
shared significance, if there is not also simultaneously some social difference that creates the possibility of reciprocity. Two men equal or same in all respects have no basis for exchange of anything.  Differentiation is the essence of representatiion. Two men who salute together their national flag will intuit that they are
both signifiying to each other their good faith to engage in some kind of reciprocity, premised on their social or economic differences, however slight, a reciprocity of which the flag is a symbol or guarantee. To engage in exchange with anyone, be he a co-citizen other, or a foreign national Other, is to recognize dand exchange ifferences. The greater our systems and networks of exchange, the more differentiations must be in circulation, as in a modern supermarket where all kinds of national cuisine are made available. And the greater the freedom of every individual in this exchange to
differentiate himself from his neighbor. At the same time, any shared sign of national identity is in this age endlessly contested because
we all know it has potentially life and death consequences for how our nation relates to other nations. Foreign conflicts are simultaneously occasion for civil wars, so, long story short, there is always a lot going on with any sign.

But as you rightly say, one cannot realize any kind of satisfactory personhood without having a more or less sound idea of what your identity is. We have to be limited in some way. But I think in understanding how identity can work in our world, and sharing your recognition that multiculturalism - the bureaucratic manipulation of group identities in service of technocratic rule - is a scandal for any self-ruling democracy, I must put more emphasis than you on the individual who, in contrast to centralized elites, must become ever more responsible for taking a lead (for others to emulate) in representing himself and his society. It's not that he can do this without participating in the concrete and traditional institutions of civil society and family; he cannot simply be a denizen of consumer society and find a satisfactory productive identity, though he will use the many product signs of the marketplace to help articulate his identity. But if our institutions and groups are going to be truly organs of representative self-rule, we cannot think of our situation, our place in the world, as akin to that of the
sacrificially-determined group identities of traditional society. Our institutions have to be means for individuals to come to some always
reworkable consensus about what a person must minimally do to become one of us as a member of a self-ruling nation primarily bound by its
constitution and political traditions. We can no longer simply hope to close the gates around the tribe. We must look to individual performances. We must grant our fellow citizen respect as an individual variously different from us as long as he practises the arts of individualism that make it possible for us to engage him in free market exchange. This, it seems, is the only way out of the multicultural impasse if we want people capable of self-rule and not simply unquestioned deference to the ritualized boundaries of the tribe. Neo tribalism if we pursue it seriously will require a massive reduction in the earth's populationn.

the liberal compact prescribed freedom to perform certain actions, while proscribing the freedom, whether of individuals or communities,
to perform contrary or adverse actions. However, at one level of analysis, this entire disputation revolves around the question of
whether the liberal privileging of those freedoms is warranted, whether those are the freedoms most conducive to the attainment of
Good. This is not a question of need, but of which freedom?, a question that the liberal compact begs.

-I agree with this. What you call the liberal compact, what I often call Gnosticism, has had its time in the sun. It's done what it could
in facilitating things like the rise of modern science, and is really now bereft of further projects and is showing also how corrosive of
certain necessary realities it has been, never more so with the pervasive anti-Western sentiment of the liberal academy and media. We
are going to have to return to a political discussion that pays much more attention to the conditions for reproducing basic institutions,
like the family and neighborhood, conditions that many interpretations of liberalism, victimary politics, and "human rights" erode. But again I return to the idea that the point of the Western family - I think this is inherent to Judeo-Christian religion - is to produce individuals capable of a certain extra-familial freedom, capable of forming new compacts with various others that extend the power of the community as a whole, making it less compact

I am highly dubious - eventual independence was envisioned.

-it was a point of debate, but the white man's burden led in this direction at some uncertain future date. A place like India had to be
modernized and, as it were, nationalized in order to make it economically more useful. And there were also liberals denouncing empire in general and assuming free trade could develop right away through colonial independence. In any case, the English in large part were never very willing to forego their insular nationalism for a fully imperial identity; empire appealed to aristocrats in need of jobs and status for family members. But it's not like they wanted to
create a great imperial metropolis in their own country. The members of the various self-ruling white Dominions were much more keen to advance ideas of Imperial Federation than were the English. Relatively few Canadians or Australians, etc., were able to make careers in London. The English generally wanted the global trade with a minimum of necessary political involvements. Controlling the seas was one thing, getting involved in every local dispute another. There was not the equivalent of the French project to make every imperial locale a site for learning high French culture.

On the meta-level of American political economy, the dominant economic interests of the nation, and the expressed policies of the government, have been mutually contextualizing

-yes, but this in itself does not disprove the validity of the representational system; it rather suggests what might happen when political markets are reasonably free and open.

And of course this is anti-representative, as demonstrated by the history of American populism, certain strains of progressivism, and now politically marginalized, though not unpopular, strains of dissent, both left and right-oriented.

-while I tend to agree with you that the liberal order has entailed all kinds of centralizing moves that have favored bureaucratic elites, we must keep in mind that no system of representation can be stable, that resentment corrodes any order and if there are alternative economic possibilities, why should we expect America to have remained the kind of agrarian society the populists desired? Their marginalization does not, it seems to me, prove that modern trends were anti-representative, though they no doubt were to some extent, because modernity evolved its own forms of representation, and we are doing this as well in the internet age. A relatively free political marketplace will marginalize some, for better or worse, and it's not obvious to me how the marginalized can prove their marginalization is a result of a loss of representational freedom as opposed to its expansion.

legitimacy is a commodity, with such gestures being the currency of the realm

-no doubt a business man can think in these simple terms; but legitimacy is ultimately an ethical question that cannot emerge directly or seemlessly from economic relations but is a function of the primary political and esthetic exchange on which the economic market depends. Material forces, alone, are not the primary motive (causal) force in history. That’s a Marxist fantasy. They are more effect than cause though certainly the effect can be considerable. They work to realize political and ethical desires, for better or worse. New technologies, for example, are not introduced unless there is some pre-existing desire or rationale for their creation and implementation, a desire that (once a man has natural appetites/instincts assuaged) must relate to the ethical, to one's understanding of the sacred in fact.

the combination of high-technology, high finance and arcane debt-structuring, consumer credit, real-estate speculation, and the trading of services is insufficient as a foundation for the economy of a first-world nation. And once new forms of high technology are developed, there is no real necessity of their manufacture occurring in the United States. There is, moreover, no rational reason, as opposed to sheer chauvinism, to believe that America will always remain preeminent in such fields. So, arbitrage is a more consequential element of globalization than most supporters would concede; the logic of the system is that things will be done wherever it is least costly for them to be done.

-this may all be true,( though I can’t be sure. The future is really unpredictable) Except for the part about the logic of the system. Politics and ethical-esthetic creativity will always set the ultimate terms for the marketplace. So, as you say, nothing is inevitable.

A diversity of employments should be preserved and secured because this is imperative if a) an economy is to be well ordered and balanced, secured against the effects of shifts in demand that might affect one or two economic sectors, b) the diversity of aptitudes among the population are to find employment outlets, c) the left half of the bell curve is not to be consigned to the meaninglessness of retailing one another cheap, Chinese-manufactured junk, and d) the nation is to achieve some degree of insulation from the inevitable effects upon commodity prices of rising world demand. Globalization is predicated upon the assumption of cheap, abundant oil, with attendant low transportation costs...

-again, this may all be true but it does not convince me that maintaining the more low-skilled manufacturing jobs is in America’s interest. I'm also unsure what the effect of rising energy costs on globalization will be. TO some extent it will likely favor more localized forms of production; on the other hand it will also favor certain efficiencies of scale and global specialization.

3) Hydrogen requires more energy for catalyzation/generation and storage than it yields; we could attempt to square the circle by constructing hundred of enormous nuclear power facilities, or by mastering fusion, but I'd not wager on either.

this is the best argument against the hydrogen dreamers. But, while I share your doubts about feasibility, I really don’t know if someone will be able to develop some new way of harnessing, say, solar energy to produce hydrodgen, maybe by using some kind of organism and biological process. Anyway, once a range of alternative energies are developed, and efficiencies sought in energy use, the result may well be to maintain the means for cheap flow of goods around the world for many hundreds of years to come. Then again, maybe not.

Harmonization merely results in the elaboration of a layer of bureaucracy and administrative mediation in addition to those which already exist, as evidenced by the EU and the international trade-dispute bodies which already exist.

it need not entail these things; its not hard to find businesses that laud developments for lowering the costs of doing business. The numbers of regulations that one has to meet in various countries can be reduced and in many areas I just don’t see how this is a threat to national sovereignty. One could just as well argue that a nation, being able to free up resources from certain regulatory bureaucracies having to do with standards for goods, packaging, etc., will find other ways to use its finite resources that make it more politically effective in other areas of life.

we have no rational reason to believe that the defusing of resentments will suffice to secure our communities from the resentments generated.

-well the question certainly cannot be reduced to rationalizations since it concerns the open-ended future. Ultimately it is indeed a question of faith and of people’s sense of membership in various human communities, as well as their faith in human anthropology in its universal sense. Armageddon could come tomorrow; then again, what’s the good of believing it? Humanity has so far managed to survive itself; maybe with the right faith we will continue to do so.

certain resentments are either illegitimate, or of a lower order of significance than others, on account of their less direct relationship to the Good. Those political energies were real enough, as were the resentments; it does not follow that they were legitimate, their objects normative, and their means laudable. Let us not presuppose that history has disclosed to us a story of progress from darkness to light.

-fair enough; but keep in mind that the question of the good and true must be twofold: there are pragmatic historical truths and ultimate anthropological or theological ones and we cannot simply favor one over the other. Surviving the other’s resentment is a pragmatic necessity, hence some kind of historical truth, even when he’s in the wrong in some other ultimate sense, not that we can know exactly what that is in this incomplete world. On the ultimate questions raised here, you've convinced me, or furthered my understanding, that much about the liberal order is counter to the needs of maximizing (especially political) exchange and representation, especially at the local level of the self-ruling community. But you've not convinced me that it is possible to argue against the need for increasing reciprocity and exchange, both political and economic, as a general historical rule. Globalization, whatever that is, cannot be just one process. It will, as you also argue, be many; and surely the various logics of these will not all be converging on some common interest.

Thanks for taking the time; I look forward to your future writing on the subject.

Sorry about the mixed fonts, etc. I've been editing on an unfamiliar computer.

The greater our systems and networks of exchange, the more differentiations must be in circulation, as in a modern supermarket where all kinds of national cuisine are made available. And the greater the freedom of every individual in this exchange to
differentiate himself from his neighbor.

This, on the manifest evidence of experience, is a purely formal freedom. The existential reality of this proliferation of symbolic differentiations is that the differentiations themselves - as signs of culture, ie., something authoritative and identity-bestowing - become commodified; all that is sacred is profaned, and all that is holy dissolves into the air. They become articles of exchange simply, and lose the capacity to impose binding interdicts and discriminations, by which power alone they retain both reality and resist commodification. In other words, we no longer inhabit cultures, but consume them as disposable, incidental goods, goods which possess value only instrumentally - towards the satisfaction of individual preferences - and not in themselves, which is the only sort of value a culture can possess if it is to endure. In a broad, almost metaphysical sense, culture is corroded and finally dissolved by The Market, which is all that eventually binds us together; bearing in mind the primal significance of religion, it follows that The Market is sacralized, made an article of religion, something presupposed, but never questioned. And by The Market, I mean something more than mere monetary exchanges, of course; I mean The Market as a mode of existence, a manner of being: the primacy of the self-creating individual, for whom no cultural form or interdict is finally authoritative, for whom they are all provisional, save the imperative of choice.

Either cultures - tribes - possess the authority to limit the cycle of exchange, or they dissolve, and only individuals remain. The actual peril of globalization is not that this will literally transpire, as I have already indicated; the peril is that certain cultures will be dissolved, while others, because they are harder and more compact, will attain primacy. These other cultures are not ours, and this is the problem.

But if our institutions and groups are going to be truly organs of representative self-rule, we cannot think of our situation, our place in the world, as akin to that of the
sacrificially-determined group identities of traditional society. Our institutions have to be means for individuals to come to some always
reworkable consensus about what a person must minimally do to become one of us as a member of a self-ruling nation primarily bound by its
constitution and political traditions.

This begs the question, presupposing that representation must be a matter of the individual exchange of signs, and the individual negotiation of terms of belonging. Tribal identities are ultimately ineliminable; they are integral with the good of human nature, which cannot develop virtues and goods save by delimitation: I cannot love mankind, I must love these people here. They will persist. If, therefore, they are neglected, there will occur a failure, a diminution, of representation. Negotiation of minimal standards of membership - this is a perfect image of American citizenship, intended or not - are merely acts of intended deferral, whereby the day of reckoning for declining tribes appears to be pushed further into the future, while objectively, it is hastened. Minimal standards entail a merely formal American identity: bound primarily by constitutional and political traditions.

We can no longer simply hope to close the gates around the tribe. We must look to individual performances. We must grant our fellow citizen respect as an individual variously different from us as long as he practises the arts of individualism that make it possible for us to engage him in free market exchange.

This, whatever the intention in its formulation, is a sophisticated restatement of the liberal compact itself: the tribe is no longer primary, or intermediary between the individual and some wider reality; the individual is originary relative to all (now contingent) social values, and we must respect his individual choices provided that their expression still permits us to engage him in the market of exchange. Individual choices cannot threaten the market, which is to state that identities must be permeable by market forces; they cannot be compact and stable, but must be negotiable and somewhat ironic - roles. Moreover, this duality of individual and the political center - which is the only force capable of liberating the individual from the claims of the tribe or community - is replicated in the process of globalization; the consequences of this universalization of the liberal compact will be the commodification of cultures, with an eventual return of the repressed - cultural and tribal identity - that will redound to the detriment of the West.

A relatively free political marketplace will marginalize some, for better or worse, and it's not obvious to me how the marginalized can prove their marginalization is a result of a loss of representational freedom as opposed to its expansion.

It remains a loss of representational freedom, both as a matter of symbolic exchange and as a matter of politics, so long as those marginalized do not accept the terms of the new representations. The populists, for example, had every reason to repudiate the new terms of the Great Barbecue of the "Gilded Age", given their own substantive commitments. New forms of representation may be undesirable on any number of substantive and normative grounds; such forms, many of them actually illegitimate, could well proliferate, while not altering the fact that those committed to certain norms are thereby excluded. Expansion can be loss, because expansion is always directional.

Post a comment


Bold Italic Underline Quote

Note: In order to limit duplicate comments, please submit a comment only once. A comment may take a few minutes to appear beneath the article.

Although this site does not actively hold comments for moderation, some comments are automatically held by the blog system. For best results, limit the number of links (including links in your signature line to your own website) to under 3 per comment as all comments with a large number of links will be automatically held. If your comment is held for any reason, please be patient and an author or administrator will approve it. Do not resubmit the same comment as subsequent submissions of the same comment will be held as well.