[p2p-research] Ugarte trilogy, 1. From Nations to Networks

[Michel Bauwens]

,Dear friends,

as you perhaps already know, I recently made a very important discovery with
a group of spanish(-speaking) authors, who recently translated three very
important books for the understanding of the network society.

I'll share the processing of these books separately, here is the first one,
from http://p2pfoundation.net/From_Nations_to_Networks



   - Book: From Nations to Networks. by David de Ugarte, Pere Quintana,
   Enrique Gomez, and Arnau Fuentes.

URL = http://deugarte.com/gomi/Nations.pdf





Key thesis summarized in this citation:

“Esperanto, the bearer of a universal humanist ideal, showed in practice,
probably definitively, that the alternative to surpassing nationalities does
not lie in universalist cosmopolitanism, for the only way of being human is
to have a tribe, but in making the community real and tangible, and thus
truly human.”

David de Ugarte et al.:

“In the first part of this book, we will try to understand nations, as well
as the tools and symbols from which they were imagined and experienced.

In the second part, we will follow the experiences of 19th- and 20th-century
segregationists, those who did not accept the passage to a world that
resembled a jigsaw with hundreds of coloured pieces, and tried to split away
from the inevitable internal homogenisation which it generated.” (
http://deugarte.com/gomi/Nations.pdf)


  [edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/From_Nations_to_Networks?title=From_Nations_to_Networks&action=edit&section=3>
] Introduction

>From the prologue by Josu Jon Imaz :

“The speed of the transformation process of social links, from
territory-based forms to network-based forms, has increased geometrically in
the last decade. This is the phenomenon that is analysed with an
extraordinary precision in the pages of From Nations to Networks.
Territorial links become more flexible, and networks and communities are
created in which geographical connections are sometimes replaced by
affinities, common interests and shared aims. The concept of belonging does
not disappear, but is extended to spaces with higher degrees of freedom. It
is as if until now we had been flat figures living in a two-dimensional
space divided by black lines, with domains painted in different colours, and
suddenly we had become three-dimensional: now we are larger geometrical
bodies, with more complex shapes. We still interact with the plane that
intersects with us, as we are still ascribed classical national identities,
but we acquire further nuances and dimensions. And we even discover links
that bind us beyond belonging or not to the same colour of the plane in
which we had previously lived, and which now is one more among the infinity
of planes which we can regard as part of ourselves.


The network is the mechanism that strengthens the power of a research group,
the market ranking of a company's products, someone's schedule or his or her
degrees of relationship. I have recently spent half a year in a university
in the United States, during which time a large part of my personal and even
professional relationships became virtual. The network was part of my life,
the created network had become part of my own identity and I myself was
undergoing a certain deterritorialising experience. Due to academic and
professional reasons, in the eighties and nineties I lived six years abroad.
But I was only able to experience the phenomenon of network participation
referred to in this book this past year. Why? Because of the development of
a technology that enables full articulation of a network, a technology that
fifteen years ago was still in its early stages.

…

New spaces tend towards the disappearance of centres and the creation of
networks. They are no longer configured following the model of old clusters,
but rather start to look like an extensive mesh.

There is more network enmeshment and less "slopes" and "gradients" for
countries and environments that wish to enter the system. And for those of
us who work towards a fairer society, this means new opportunities for the
80% of mankind which has been displaced from development spaces in the last
century.


The authors are right in that this is probably only the beginning, and it
will be the confluence and interaction of the new trans-national
conversational spaces and economic spaces with a similar domain that will
make new identities fully emerge. Also, the linguistic communication space
will play a crucial role in these identities, as this book also stresses. We
cannot yet fully apprehend what political structures will emerge from these
network realities, but it seems likely that they may contribute to a lesser
dependence on the territory and revalorise spaces of personal and political
freedom.” (http://deugarte.com/gomi/Nations.pdf)


[edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/From_Nations_to_Networks?title=From_Nations_to_Networks&action=edit&section=4>
] Identity and Sovereignty

David de Ugarte et al.:

“The central thesis of this book is that the passage from a society with a
decentralised economy and communications – the world of nations – to the
world of distributed networks which arose from the internet and
globalisation, makes it increasingly difficult for people to define their
identities in national terms. That's why new identities and new values are
appearing, which in the long run will surpass and subsume the national and
statalist view of the world.


Identity springs from the need to materialise or at least imagine the
community in which our life is developed and produced. Nations appeared and
spread precisely because the old local collective identities linked to
religion and agrarian and artisan production no longer adequately
represented the social network that produced the bulk of the economic,
social and political activity which determined people's environment.


In the same way, for a growing number of people, national markets are
becoming an increasingly inadequate expression of all the social
relationships that shape their daily lives. The products they consume are
not national, nor are the news contexts which determined the great
collective movements, or, necessarily, most of those with whom they discuss
the news and whose opinions interest them. National identities are becoming
both too small and too large. They are becoming alien.


It's not a rapid collapse. We must not forget that nations arose from real
need, and, despite that, their universalisation took almost two centuries
and was quite difficult to say the least, as it met with all kinds of
resistances. The abandonment of real communities where everyone knew
everyone else's faces and names in order to embrace a homeland, an abstract
community where the others were not personally known, was a costly and
difficult process.


And in fact it's quite likely that the national State and nationalities will
stay with us for a long time, in the same way as Christianity still exists
and some royal houses still reign, even though nowadays national identities
are politically dominant and determining, and the world is politically
organised into national States, not on the basis of dynastic relationships
or faith communities.

Many historians, politologists and sociologists nowadays foresee and even
advocate a privatisation of national identity, a process which would be
similar to the passage of religion into the personal and private domain that
characterised the rise of the national State. But the issue is that such a
privatisation, such a surpassing, can only take place from a set of
alternative collective identities.


And what's really interesting is that identitarian communities and virtual
networks that seem capable of bringing about such a process are not only
defined by their being trans-national, but they also display a nature that
is very different from the respective natures of the great imagined
identities of Modernity, such as nation, race, or the Marxist historical
class. Their members know each other even if they have never physically met.
They are in a certain sense real communities, or, more precisely, imagined
communities that fall into reality.”

…

The nation is still presented as a "natural" fact that we unconsciously seek
in every "complete" political unit: a unified language, a unitary
map/territory, a media-defined public sphere, and ideologically defined
political subjects.


The nation, as a form of political organisation and identity, was much more
powerful, encompassing and massive than any of its predecessors because its
symbols linked institutions and power to everyone's identity, to the extent
of sustaining the configurative and determining power of the nation.


In the end, what is essential about the nation is its exclusive claim over
its identity as configurative, as generating co-nationals. It is the nation
that makes the nationals, not the nationals that make the nation. People
belong to the nation; they are a construct, a product of the "national
reality", not the other way round. The nation reinterprets the past looking
back on its own historiography, which goes far beyond the time when it was
first imagined. In fact, it is the nation that gives rise to History as a
supposedly scientific and detached narrative, with the explicit aim of
conferring unity through time to the units that emerged from contemporary
maps.


>From Thiers to Stalin, the first form of nationalist imperialism was exerted
over the past, as a way of grounding the conversion of people's identities –
people who had ceased to be the subjects of History in order to be
considered the products of the recently discovered national History. Culture
was redefined by the nation and from the coffee house: ceasing to be a
personal symbolic sediment in order to become a supposedly constituent
political phenomenon. “

In conclusion:

“In this brief biography of the national imaginary, we have seen how it
emerged from a real need to imagine the new production and socialisation
community generated by the market, as well as from the increase in labour
division that became more evident and spread practically all over the planet
between the 17th and 20th centuries. We have seen how that imagination took
shape and reached its materialisation in the form of the national State born
in the French Revolution and the American wars of independence. And finally,
how its conversion into a culture state, constituting personal identities
and the framework for all conflicts, established it practically into our
day.” (http://deugarte.com/gomi/Nations.pdf)


[edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/From_Nations_to_Networks?title=From_Nations_to_Networks&action=edit&section=5>
] From failed segregationism to failed micro-states

Part two of the book has a fascinating history of 19th cy. Segregationist
attempts, i.e. refusals of the nation-state such as Mormonism and
alternative Zionisms, and of 20th cy. Libertarian and other microstates.
Their common mistake is to want to ground alternative socialities in
derivatives of imaginary nation-states. But early attempts at internet
‘societies’ like Freedonia are also failures, because they lack a viable
shared economy, which coincides with the human network.


Thus, after this vital and interesting history of post-national attempts,
comes a very interesting passage:

David de Ugarte et al.:

“The Freedonia story represents the transition and continuity between the
Randian segregationism and the new world of trans-national communities. The
segregationist temptation appeared repeatedly in virtual networks in the
second half of the nineties. It was the easiest option. When network life
occupies the identitarian space and explains more about who we are and who
we speak to than the nation, the immediate temptation is to replicate the
national model, seeking a territory and building a customised micro-state.
Segregationism was always there, underlying, inviting us to occupy a distant
island or build a floating city where the real community can be accommodated
and new forms of social organisation can be tried. And the myth of Mormon
success is still powerful.


But the 20th-century groups were no longer like 19th-century ones. Randian
attempts are unlike those of the Mormons, a presential and real community.
With their form of shareholders' society, Randian experiments resemble more
the failed colonisation societies than John Smith's persecuted and cohesive
religious parishes, where, despite their being more people, everyone knew
each other, worked alongside each other, and personally trusted each other,
generating, in so doing, an economic basis and emotional tries which were
strong enough to support the gigantic efforts and sacrifices which proved to
be necessary. Actually, when we think about it, Sealand, once the mythical
layer of Cryptonomicon and Wired is stripped, is nothing but the adventure
of a family of British squatters who kept some bad company.


Freedonia, the first internet-era community that sought its own
territoriality, was, in its naivety, both a forerunner and a frontier. Its
scarcely 300 members led a real and intense political life. They built a
conversation that provided them with an explanation and a meaning. They
shared their daily lives and built a common identity which bound them
together more than their respective national contexts. Briefly put, they
constituted a trans-national community. But they never had an economic
basis, a map, a common space between the conversation flows and their own
way of making a living.


It is true that a community can be based on collective conversation and the
consequent political play. In an extended and interesting experiment51,
Dutch ethologist Frans de Waal showed how a group of chimpanzees all whose
members enjoyed unrestricted access to food not only preserved power
structures, but experienced them more intensely than ever. Politics does not
arise in politics as a result of scarcity: it is not only an organised
struggle for the surplus, as Marx thought. It is there before and after
abundance.


But maintaining a conversation and social game does not equal supporting a
human community. Beyond conversation, nothing generated the need or the
possibility of a headquarters territory in Freedonia. There was no
persecution forcing them to do so, not a prior economic activity among its
members which justified their settling in a specific place. Randians
likewise lacked both. That's why Freedonians and Randians sought their
destiny from the settler's logic. Believing that the territory would
generate its own economic structure, an economy hardly sketched out from
libertarian principles which would ground a community which would not longer
be trans-national or virtual but territorial. This is a mistake.

…

Segregationism fails. Without a shared economy, there is no human community
which will endure in time. That's why unfaithfulness, transitoriness, and
temporary alliances are, as Juan Urrutia points out52, common to all network
conversational identities.

After Freedonia, trans-national conversational communities evolved
dramatically, both in number and in form. Some of them, like Second Life,
included as an extra attraction a small parallel economy – which
artificially produced scarcity – and a certain political space. But, for the
time being at least, they are merely a game and a representation, a pastime
and a simulation of a world which can already be intuited but which must
come from elsewhere.


New identities will only emerge when trans-national conversational spaces
are superimposed onto economic spaces within a similar domain and they
interact.


On different scales, from the networks constituted by tens of thousands of
Neonomadic individualists to the great corporate Venices, this is exactly
what we are starting to see this decade, and what prefigures the forms of
the great future postnational map.” (http://deugarte.com/gomi/Nations.pdf)


[edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/From_Nations_to_Networks?title=From_Nations_to_Networks&action=edit&section=6>
] The increasing unfreedom of states vs. the experienced freedom of networks

David de Ugarte et al.:

“By the end of the eighties, the relationship between economic freedom and
political freedoms seemed unquestionable. Who could deny that, from the
point of view of Eastern Europe, democracy, development, and capitalism went
hand in hand?

The Tiananmen Massacre, far from contradicting the general framework, seemed
rather to confirm it. Reforming currents and democratic demands – it was
said – emerged from the emerging prosperity which could already be felt in
the experimental poles of the free market.

Outside the communist world, the Taiwanese and Korean transitions seemed to
reaffirm this idea: economic freedoms and free trade where the doorway to
development and the matrix for strong democratic reform movements which, in
turn, generated institutional frameworks generating more capitalism and more
development.

Democracy, development and capitalism seemed to be as inseparable as they
were evident. It was the time when Francis Fukuyama published his book The
End of History.

But let us examine what remains nowadays of the "dragons". Singapore, the
enterprise-cum-authoritarian State, not Havel's Czech Republic, seems to be
the new beacon for the developing world, a beacon very well-liked by
totalitarian states in the midst of economic reform.

…


Today Vietnam and China have the highest growth rates, while the world
pampers China after symbolically recognising it as an equal in the Beijing
Olympics. The "Russian model" fits naturally into this map, and is spreading
throughout the once Second World like a plague: limited pluralism,
plebiscitary populism, the cult of providential leadership, a war-like
language, the development of the authoritarian patronage of an increasingly
autonomous State.


In parallel, in the countries once known as free, the trend, encouraged from
the United States and the European Union, seems to be towards the
establishment of control societies53 fed by the fear to the consequences of
globalisation, articulated by an increasingly disciplinarian State, and
identified once more with a Neo-Puritan political culture.


This global political framework contrasts with the social experience of a
new kind of identities born in the new distributed and de-territorialised
social networks -- identities which therefore arose from a certain
experience of abundance and pluriarchy.The clash would result in a
revaluation of the new de-territorialised lives, a certain awareness that
from this kind of life one can not only experience but consolidate a space
of personal and political freedom which surpasses in a tangible and specific
way the space offered by States.”


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