Perched at the edge of the abyss

If you were at the border of the roman empire when the first German tribes started to move in, would you know that everything you knew was about to change? If you saw the Spanish vessels coming on the horizon would you envisage the massacre that was about to take place? If you heard about the fall of the Bastille would you image that all you once hold sacred would become a thing from the past? And now are we living at one of those times? Can we say what come next?

The (not so) modern nation-states
(soundtrack)

Capitalism is extremely dependent of flows (i.e. flow of capital, goods, services, workers) the faster it occurs more wealth it generates. In the last 30 years the world has seen an intensification of those flows and the figures generated by then are rocketing out of the charts. Along side with that the problems we face, nowadays, often escapes the capability of governments to deal with it. Can local governments not be a barrier to those flows and not become obsolete and irrelevant?, it is the question that keeps resonating in the mind of those who are pay attention.

The last and current US governments have been sabotaging every attempt to create organizations that regulates nation-states (i.e. by not signing the Kyoto Protocol, attacking Iraq without the approval of the Security Council, creating barrier to liberalization of commerce), because this is what nation-states, especially the biggest one, are used to a land with no law. All our societies are based and regulated by laws, but countries are not, they are used to solve their problems like thugs outside a bar. Nevertheless can a world more and more integrated cope with that hooligan’s logic?

After the dawn of a new millennium NATO, a reminiscence of an even darker time, is discussing whether it should or not be placing missiles facing Russia. Don’t they know most of the energy that warm the halls where they have this great ideas come from those frozen fields? Or “El presidente” Hugo Chavez and his vicious speeches against the country that buys most of his oil. Those are example of how this bar-fighting-behavior is irrelevant and have been keeping the eyes of people away from more pressing matters like inequality, terrorism, piracy, global warming, and so on.

Borders (the real and virtual ones), as well, have become a major nuisance to people and business around the world, capital and information run free on the other hand people and goods do not. What is the logic behind having a border? Is it to protect me? But from what? Human beings that, although do not speak the same language and do not have the same customs, share the same dream of a better world? Can’t they come up with a better excuse?

Nation-States are becoming a thing from the past as they once have made the absolute-states. So what will take its place?

A good example of what I think it should look like the next step (although still far from perfect) is the European Union. A continent that have been for centuries the center stage of wars and massacres (that would have shamed even the devil itself) and that still hold some grudges at each other, however have managed to put it all behind and decided to share their future as one. The process of how the EU achieved its actual stage should be copied not only to integrate a continent but to integrate the world.

We as s specie that share the same fate should put aside things that really aren’t important and start to focus on things that really matter.

Economic Growth and sustainability, are they at the same side?
(Next post)

Information Society, the birth of the quantum man.
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