A frail but possible future...

A frail but possible future... (...a futurist's dream)

In the not too distant future, a historian wrote some notes in preparation for a book about the cause of the end of nation-states.

The end of nation states came about during, what is now known as, the demographic wars. It was not wars fought by armies with lethal weapons, but it was wars orchestrated through the skilful use of demographic fluctuations to destabilise national units and power structures to gain some form of control of both physical, monetary and intellectual resources.

In a sense, these wars was a natural progression from a sparsely populated and largely isolated pre-industrialised world to a populous and connected world.  But why things turned into demographic wars was and still seems to be poorly understood by most people of which this author is just another labouring student.

There were certainly many reasons why the chosen weapon of these wars was the demographic makeup of populations within national units.  But one reason that stands out is the reality of nuclear and biochemical weapons of mass destruction.  These human inventions, decisively demonstrated that war by physical force has largely become redundant.  As a means to exert power over people or resources, weapons of mass destruction was too powerful, too destructive and too easy to copy and control by very few people.  This was simply because of the mutually assured destructive (MAD) power of nuclear and biochemical weapons, as well as the fact that the moral commitment that was required to ensure the success of the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons failed. With weapons of mass destruction, that eventually became accessible to various groups and nations, regardless of their standing in the global community of people, everyone soon realised that simply the show of force can not truly resolve conflict or subdue belligerents without the threat of total destruction.

It took some time and some very unnecessary proxy wars, by conventional means, and an era of unprecedented terrorism to realise that the more "civilised" weapons to use in the face of WMD's (weapons of mass destruction) are in fact the, mostly covert, manipulation of the make up of population characteristics, that include aspects like race, creed, political ideology, level of development, industrial intentions, or welfare intentions, within traditional national units.  Some lumped this strategy under the banner of a specific belief in the hegemonic nature of the Western Enlightenment Liberal Democratic conviction of individualism and liberty, but human nature, so to say, exposed the demographic subtleties of the real force behind our recent power politics.

It could therefore be said that this MAD reality of the 20th century's weapons of mass destruction ultimately forced the hand of the power brokers of the world to find other means of coercion and that is one of the reasons why the application of power became almost obsessed with the use of demographic fluctuations to achieve the control that was in the past mostly assured through the show of physical force.

At first, the demographic wars was very successful in ensuring that very little opposition existed for the liberal democratic hegemonic aspirations of the traditional powerful western, and quasi westernised nations as they executed their globalisation strategies. But then the counteroffensive happened and the aim was at the very heart of the national unity of the old powerful nations, and again it was the use of demographic fluctuations that successfully destabilised these old and diminishing powerful nations.

The last offensive led to, what was by then, the only certain outcome of the demographic wars.  It led to the total collapse of the traditional nation-states in favour of small identity or ethnic units formed around various enduring and unifying interests. During the time of the last demographic war, the focus was on the utilisation of what little national power was left in a globalised world to meet the challenges posed by dangerously large super-structured monolithic ideologically defined nations. To achieve success, the demographic "weaponry" had to rapidly adapt and improve. By that time the dispursed national units quickly and almost organically, re-grouped into identity groups, of various sizes and characteristics - able to mobilise in ways that no mechanistic or ideological super nation could compete with. Instead of having a centrally organised structure with clear boundaries, the new post-nation state entities organised through collaborative decision-making, utilising advanced data manipulation and analysis tools.

It is now well known that post-nation state and post-universal ideology entities were only able to successfully form into powerful acting units because of the natural gravitation towards the most fundamental, most permanent characteristics by which individuals naturally identified themselves.  That unifying force turned out to be their ancient characters formed by their pre-industrial civilisational character.

And so came the end of nation states to pass and the birth of an almost organic system of identity or ethnic units was celebrated by the new inclusive sense of humanity. This fledgeling human organisation was not born without challenges or in a vacuum of competing interests.

But in the end, the post-nation state world managed to stave off a series of class wars through the ability to successfully manage and optimise the flux of transactions and agreements between individuals and identity or ethnic units of various types and classes.  This agile and cooperative state of affairs, fortunately, became part of the globalised sense of identity and belonging, which in turn actually happened in reaction to ideological disruptions caused by older versions of "demographic weaponry".

The only way global resource wars were averted during this time was a combination of interconnected markets and ultimately the abundance of energy through clean technology including new generation, not-weaponisable, nuclear power.  It is now no secret that the advent of nuclear power and information & communication technology allowed for the successful transition away from nation-states, allowing for complex coexistence never before possible.

Instead of information & communication technologies becoming the means to oppress the members of large nation-states, the demographic wars ensured the collapse of the large ideological national units that would have been oppressed by ideologues, technocrats or more traditional oligarchs.  And so,  what could have been the worst oppression of human dignity became the very systems that ensured the successful management of the enormous flux of transactions between individuals and all identity groups of various classes.

What would have been impossible without modern communication & information systems became the victory of organically organised and aligned identity-based societies.  The first ideas and preparation of these identity or ethnic units were already clear for many observant people to identify, even during the early stages of the demographic wars.

A final note on this period of modern history is the fact that most technologies and philosophical advances during this time also converged on methods able to sustainably exploit basic resources and nurture shared knowledge to produce products and opportunities for any size of organically or naturally formed cooperations, capable of sustaining communities of various sizes. These communities are made up of various identity or ethnic units transacting as individuals and groups - cognizant of each other's contributions and challenges to the beauty and dangers of our shared existence in our collectively cherished biosphere and the resource-full universe.