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Beyond Empire
Stephen Greco Observes New Critical Masses Among Previously Marginal Voices
Empires have always been business deals in which the client nations were overcharged. Yet empires prove expensive for the vendors, too. Ask the Greeks, the Romans, the Mongols, and the British, who spent fortunes trying to keep their far-flung back yards under control. Now, after the fall of the Soviets, we can see that empires are not only expensive but impracticable anymore. The reason is people—the unprecedented number of them on the planet, and the relationships among them that occur more effectively now that there are so many of them.
Today's world of six billion people has quite expectedly seen an increase in the number and intensity of conflicts over resources. Yet somewhat unexpectedly, the so-called population explosion has also afforded critical mass to many constituencies that had long been smaller and thus marginal. What makes the present moment so significant is that the innovative "multi-race" and "post-doctrine" thinking of some of these constituencies promises to yield evolutionary advantages as critical to the survival of the human species as blood clotting and sharp eyesight–advantages like new ways to publish a newspaper, new ways to build a business, new ways to govern.
For instance, more people than ever are more certain than ever that national safety can be pursued through mutual persuasion than through rule of force from above. And they are being more vocal about it. Conflict isn't the only thing that "scales up," as they say in business. Good scales, too.
What helps is a combustible mediasphere, which itself achieved critical mass only with the planet's most recent billion souls. It has forever changed the way people relate to each other and to their national bosses. A new kind of citizenry is consolidating itself right now, with each cell phone call, wireless internet connection, public access TV show, and pirate radio broadcast–and it is freer, because information, and thus will, is freer. When the world contained one, two, and three billion people–in 1800, 1927, and 1960, respectively–it was easier to peddle servitude. Nowadays, we have a vast number of people who feel entitled to know how much "membership" in an empire will really cost them. By 2012, in a world of seven billion, that number will be even vaster and the entitlement even more ingrained.
Some bosses clearly still hope to build an empire, though they seldom use that word. Some conquer regions far from their "homelands," while others profess globalism that is nothing more than imperial economics enforced with the big stick that Teddy Roosevelt advised American leaders to carry while they speak softly. Meanwhile, new voices are discussing political, economic, and cultural aggregates built on affinities, not agendas– the common good over a sanctimoniously commodified unity–and many believe that world polities can reinvent themselves before the current bosses, facing extinction, knock over the checkerboard.
What succeeds empire? Time will tell. And time does tell, for those who are willing to listen, and look around, and be surprised. Today is less like yesterday than it has ever been. When people are not busy predicting, they find it easier to discover. Fresh attitudes only now gaining scale and traction–transglobalism, transculturalism–promise much for the future. The very value of these attitudes derives from the fact that they are not inherited. They must be discovered. Like physicists probing high-energy plasma for yet another subatomic particle, we citizens of a teeming planet must actively seek news of the next dominion. And we must seek it not only in places that have long enjoyed critical mass–like Delhi, London, Mexico City, New York, Paris, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Tokyo–but in those places that are reaching it even as we speak: Accra, Addîs Ababâ, Ammân, Cape Town, Changchun, Curitiba, Denver, Esfahân, Fortaleza, Guatemala, Hangzhou, Havana, Jiddah, Kânpur, Katowice, Luanda, Medan, Nairobi, Nanjing, Rhein-Main, Saint Louis, Santo Domingo, Sûrat, Taegu, Tel Aviv, Zibo...
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