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The Global Tribe - Economic/Political outlook for then next 25 years.
zeeny
Registered User regular
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This sprung out from the apocalypseTrump administration thread. Let's see if there is an interest in getting a discussion going.
In the last 75 years in the Western World*, helped by a huge economic output the world has grown more and more connected, to a point where people's identities have become much more tied to their interests/beliefs, sometimes truncating national borders. While the legal Nation has not eroded, the concept of a Nation has started playing significantly less importance in people's everyday lives. The Cultural similarity of Western countries have significantly helped this process, but next steps and even the current status now seem in danger.
What we would like to discuss:
Is it even possible to globalize identity at a world level?
What are the next steps in the political/economic Evolution of the World?
Will we continue to accept more and more others as being part of us or will we revert and go regional, nationalistic or even tribal?
What would moving in either direction mean for a consumerist/capitalist society?
What would it mean for developing countries?
Low effort op, will improve depending on interest.
Short comment tree:
In the last 75 years in the Western World*, helped by a huge economic output the world has grown more and more connected, to a point where people's identities have become much more tied to their interests/beliefs, sometimes truncating national borders. While the legal Nation has not eroded, the concept of a Nation has started playing significantly less importance in people's everyday lives. The Cultural similarity of Western countries have significantly helped this process, but next steps and even the current status now seem in danger.
What we would like to discuss:
Is it even possible to globalize identity at a world level?
What are the next steps in the political/economic Evolution of the World?
Will we continue to accept more and more others as being part of us or will we revert and go regional, nationalistic or even tribal?
What would moving in either direction mean for a consumerist/capitalist society?
What would it mean for developing countries?
Low effort op, will improve depending on interest.
Short comment tree:
TryCatcher wrote: »Look, that Star Trek one global goverment future is not going to happen. Right now, Globalism seems as away from human nature as Communism, sorry to say. "Citizens of the world" are setting up to be laughed out of the room as quickly as the Soverign Citizen Movement. Humans are tribalist creatures, and is time to deal with it.
Not really, no. We do so many things against our evolutionary instincts, that it's actually kind of expected that for progress to continue, a global "tribe" is the next step. Anything else stops capitalism dead in its tracks and reverts society to a previous state.
Unless you have a world wide autocratic regime with a single head of government for life and no legislative body of elected representatives, this will not happen.
Think of the US government as a microcosm of a world wide federation system. Each level of elected representation is going to encourage meeting, as close and realistically as possible, the needs and desires of a given constituency. Any system with elected representation at the world level is going to have conflict between different constituencies in regards to policy. And each constituency is going to have a unique (at least in their mind) identity.
So what you're asking for is some method to eliminate any sense of identity from every single human and install a benevolent dictator.
No, I really am not. Please, do not interpret my words in such a patronizing way.
I find identity a very core concept to liberal ideologies, but I also find it has historically been very, very fluid in what it means to the people it's important to. Europe from 100 years ago is not the Europe from today and while the cultural similarity plays a huge role, it certainly seems like a path to follow.
Maybe you are right and a global tribe will suffer from stability issues, but my argument was actually an economic one. If global tribe is not the next step, I do not see a future in which capitalism succeeds(no scientific progress will be able to bail it out).
I'd gladly take the discussion to another thread.
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I don't think a global and local identity are incompatible. I disagree with NSDFRand's statement that "this will not happen" unless we have a single dictator, and I think his comparison with the US is a perfect reason why that's true.
I'm a New Yorker. It gives me a certain perspective and certain interests. I don't care about defending oil the way a Texan living in oil country might--but I do care about fossil fuel's effects on the environment. Further, I'm an upstate New Yorker, which gives me even more local interests. I want to make sure guns aren't banned (at a state or federal level), because they are actually very useful in a lot of the area's farm lands. I care about horse rights, because they're the livelihood of my home town. I have a million other non-regional identities.
And yet I still consider myself an American.
I also disagree with the idea that maintaining the status quo (or regressing) is antithetical to capitalism. Protectionism is (kind of), but even total global free trade does not imply a world government or world identity.
In the past we lived in a geographic 'bubble', but now more and more we live in a cultural 'bubble' that we each choose.
I agree with the first part of your post, but I do not actually equate free trade with capitalism in this instance, I should have been careful how I phraased it.
The idea of an investment cycle from capitalism is what I was addressing.
Right now, we're at a stage where a large majority of the populace be it via social security, pensions or others, are bona-fide investors. I do not see how growth can be obtained at a local level that could allow for those investment cycles to continue(we seem to notice higher & higher capital requirement for scientific breakthrough, which is historically the way to achieve growth), so, in my mind, a political segregation will have to lead to huge changes in how we run our economies.
Free trade, I don't care about much, to be honest.
We identify with the cultural bubble, but physically we don't live in it, so extra tolerance seems to be required. Jury's out on if we can get there.
The second side of this is the pace of technology. Now Thomas Friedman is generally a hack, but his general thesis in "The World is Flat" was not misguided. Instantaneous communications and free trade lower global barriers and reduce the importance of the state, as does the fact that I could get on a plane in an hour and be in London by my dinnertime. It renders the sanctity of states somewhat absurd.
The big question, the one thing which has really tested the liberal world order, is migration. It's easy to pledge your support for a Responsibility to Protect until you're in the thick of it and have a million refugees on your border demanding entry, food, and medical treatment. Comparative standards of living are the current thing which make borders important, because if we had a global Schengen Zone, then who would want to live in Zimbabwe or North Korea? Everyone aside from the local elites would be gone within a year, and make that everyone else's problem.
It's easy to peg the response in the West as mostly down to xenophobia and white fragility, but that's because the west hasn't experienced the problem on a truly grand scale, it's a pittance and the reaction has been mostly overblown (aside from issues of some of the migrants bringing truly incompatible values with them, like the mass molestation incident on New Year's in Cologne last year). Imagine poor Lebanon, whose population as a whole is now like 20% Syrian refugees, which helped paralyze the country until only a few weeks ago, and hell, they still haven't had elections since 2010 or so.
So i think there needs to be a certain amount of economic convergence before there can be a truly global identity and a move towards a one-world-state.