Jean-Marie Guehenno, the Undersecretary for Peacekeeping of the United Nations, wrote a book called "The End of the Nation State" in 1996, which I found after writing this diary. I felt like I was channeling him!

Align culture with our nature. Ot else!

How do you see this coming battle between the fundamentalist segment of Islam, Humanist Europe, and the schizophrenic USA, torn between Christian Fundamentalism (no more interested in the dominance of individual rights than Islam) and its founding documents, now being rapidly destroyed by corporate golems acting as overseers for a self-centered oligarchy?

I think Europe would do well to extricate itself from this conflict and get on with business like China, India, Russia... Why did you leave them out of the picture, by the way?

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

I follow your deductions, but get stuck in the rough-edge categories you set as opposites:  The US vs. Islam, fundamentalists vs. founding documents, etc.  If I thought "humanism" wasn´t going to win, I´d give up.  

The obvious part is that economic-and-political power-mongers have played the religious extremists against the middle and let them step over the boundaries of the economic and political, as if they were interchangeable.  Blending religion with econ-politics is the explosive that has destroyed any balance.

The power of change is in people´s hands, but I´m afraid the apathy of those "consumer addled minds" will take time to reactivate the majority needed.  Given time to elect better leaders, fundamentalists will be set back to their limited fringes.  


Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. -Charu Saxena.

You're mixing up two different issues, both of them important: the end of the Nation-States and the confrontation between secular democracy and faith-based political movements.

First, the end of the Nation-State era. Nation-States were institutionalised by the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. In a way, they created a framework guaranteeing a greater political and social stability/cohesion, hence allowing the development of the economy and the industrial revolution. The Nation-State model is no longer the relevant level for the regulation/governance of the globalised economy and for tackling global problems such as pandemies and global warming. The deepening of inequalities within the countries is a sign of its obsolescence. The current trend is the emergence of continental blocks (EU, Mercosur...) and, paradoxically, the empowerment of the local level (big cities and regions).  I agree with you on one point: the United States look like the last attempt to "save" the Nation-State model.

Your second issue is not clearly expressed. Islam is not the only religion based on submission to God. For most of its history, Christianity also promoted the submission to God and its representatives on Earth (some of them still dream of re-establishing it).  It is not a fight between the United States and Islam, but a fight between secular democracy and faith-based political radical movements.


"Dieu se rit des hommes qui se plaignent des conséquences alors qu'ils en chérissent les causes" Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

Ormondotvos...I notice this is your first diary on ET...thanks taking the time to write! And welcome to the fray!!

"Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia

> And the United States of America, the former colonies of the British Empire, became infected with this meme of human rights, a very powerful one.

This is plainly not true. The USA has no conception of human rights. For instance, Americans do not even recognize human rights. Set down the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in front of them and they will sputter that most or all of them aren't human rights. This is because Americans automatically translate universal human rights into civil rights. It's a false cognate between the American language and the English language. The term 'human rights' simply doesn't exist in American.

> How do you see this coming battle between the fundamentalist segment of Islam, Humanist Europe, and the schizophrenic USA

Which battle and in what terms? Military, economic, social, legal?

> Will liberal humanist citizen be able to educate and motivate a large enough majority of voters to stem the tide?

No, absolutely not. Will humanists be able to educate the children of these people to stem the tide of barbarism? Almost certainly.

You've got the history wrong. As Melancathon points out, the modern state system has its origins in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War. But these weren't 'nation states' in the modern sense of the word. First of all nations as such didn't exist back then for the most part,  and secondly these states were often multinational. Seeing the Enlightenment as something that emerges to challenge the nation state is exactly backwards. The nation, in the sense of a mass collective identity dominating all others really takes off in the wake of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. It was a byproduct of the emergence of a public sphere and civil society autonomous of state and church.

At that point it is more associated with the revolutionary movements subverting the old order than with a prop for the state since the primary group identities of the ruling elites in most of Europe then are as royal subjects, as socio-economic castes, and religious. That remains the case until the mid nineteenth century - the movements for German and Italian unification, for Polish, Hungarian, and Greek independence are seen, and see themselves, as of the left, attacking the oppressive social order of the non-national elites in the name of the nation as a whole. That would quickly change over the next couple decades as states and ruling elites embraced nationalism as a source of legitimacy, while the new Marxist left tentatively retreated from nationalism (though only tentatively and as the anti-colonial movements showed, nationalism could remain a powerful left wing force even with a Marxist cast).

I also don't see any reason to see national identity as particularly bad. Group identities are going to exist and they can be harnessed for good and bad ends. And what this has to do with capitalist exploitation or the concept of corporate personhood is unclear to me.