--- On Sun, 1/2/09, Bonobashi <[email protected]> wrote:
> From: Bonobashi <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [silk] Bruce Sterling's State of the World chat
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Sunday, 1 February, 2009, 4:01 PM
> --- On Sun, 1/2/09, Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> > From: Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]>
> > Subject: Re: [silk] Bruce Sterling's State of the
> World chat
> > To: [email protected]
> > Date: Sunday, 1 February, 2009, 2:33 PM
> > ss wrote, [on 2/1/2009 1:02 PM]:
> >
> > >> 6. The Westphalian system. Why are so many
> great
> > military powers losing
> > >> a war in Afghanistan? Afghanistan isn't
> even a
> > nation-state, yet it's
> > >> defeating all comers. Why do we even pretend
> to
> > have nations these days?
> > >> Hollow states, failed states, non-states...
> The
> > European post-state!
> > >
> > > ROTFL
> > >
> > > Sadly underinformed. Like most Americans who
> write on
> > the subject. But in
> > > 2009, it's getting better.
> >
> > In order that I better understand your statement, can
> you
> > explain further?
> >
> > Sterling was claiming that the Westphalian System was
> (i) a
> > form of
> > consensus reality that (ii) could cause global
> disruption
> > if it unravelled.
> >
> > <q>
> > Let's consider seven other massive reservoirs of
> > potential popular
> > dread. Any one of these could erupt, shattering the
> fragile
> > social
> > compact we maintain with one another in order to
> believe
> > things contrary
> > to fact.
> > </q>
> >
> > Do you disagree? Why? And what, exactly, is
> "getting
> > better" in 2009?
> >
> > Udhay
>
> The Westphalian system, as you may recall, is historical
> shorthand for the concept of nation-states; this complex of
> treaties which effectively ended the devastating 30
> Years' War is considered to be an important step towards
> the full formation of nation-states. The biggest single
> take-away for Europe was the principle of cujus regio, ejus
> religio; my memory is dim, and I may have got it back to
> front, but it more or less meant that the religion of a land
> would follow the religion of its leader/ruler.
>
> Besides bringing the war to an end, the treaty also marked
> the point of terminal decline of two major systems of
> mediaeval rule, the Habsburg rule of Spain and the Low
> Countries, and the Habsburg rule of the Holy Roman Empire.
> Both were personal rules, where the justification of many
> regions being under the same administration was that they
> were ruled by the same single individual, irrespective of
> their other affiliations, location, past history, and so on.
> This was effectively signalled to be ended by the Treaty,
> and the modern nation-state, not dependent (except for poor
> Belgium) on the person of the ruler but on the concept of
> certain geographies forming natural nations, was
> inaugurated.
>
> This is opposed to what is going on, and had gone on
> earlier under the Khilafat, under Islam. There was a tension
> between the nation-states that can be seen to exist in the
> 'Islamic' world (Iran, Turkey, Egypt - the list goes
> on) and the concept of over-arching sovereignty belonging to
> the representative of the Prophet designated the Caliph.
>
> In general, from the seventeenth to the twentieth century,
> the military power of the world was resident in
> nation-states, even in conglomerate nation-states blocs such
> as Soviet Russia, which could be seen as a set of vassal
> states dominated by a single nation-state of the Westphalian
> kind.
>
> What Sterling seems to be saying is two different things:
> one is that it is inconceivable to the
> conventionally-educated western mind that the nation-state
> should be defeated by an alternative model of organisation
> and deployment of military power, but that it is what seems
> to be happening in Afghanistan. It is shocking, but it may
> be the new reality, and 2009 will mark this reality coming
> to dwell in the thinking of the 'real world',
> meaning more or less the Caucasian world and the honorary
> Caucasians, the Japanese.
>
> The other is that whether or not this was strictly so,
> there was a general consensus that no other form could
> prevail in the forms of warfare prevalent, so all who sought
> to impose their will on others sought to do so within the
> nation-state model. This is no longer true. Now people are
> beginning to recognise that other models exist, which can
> beat nation-states going to war.
>
> What Shiv seems to be saying is that it's funny that it
> takes the West so long to figure things out, it was evident
> years ago, but the West chose to ignore it, or didn't
> bother to understand it (='underinformed' (sic),
> should have been misinformed, in my opinion, but
> underinformed has an element of laziness which perhaps Shiv
> preferred to burnish and push forward) but at least they
> seem to be getting it at last, at long last. From that point
> of view, 2009 will be better, because once they accept that
> there are alternative military models outside the
> nation-state, they can think about how to cope with these.
>
> My interpretation.
>
> I shall now get the popcorn and watch Shiv demolish
>
> (a) Bruce Sterling;
> (b) Western civilisation and the Westphalian fallacy
> (irresistible, sorry);
> (c) Udhay;
> (d) Me,
>
> not necessarily in that order.
>
Well, perhaps not mediaeval; post-mediaeval may be slightly better.
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