Empire without Emperor

Empire without Emperor

Empire without Emperor

The wired world ­ interconnected, þuid, time-compressed, virtual ­ can be a miserable dystopia where we live in isolated cells breathing air so Þltered and puriÞed we can no longer survive outside, as in E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops." Or it can be a utopia in which we communicate online, creating bonds to better humankind.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno, author of The End of the Nation-State, describes emerging forms of social organization and suggests some unsettling, and thrilling, possibilities.

Guéhenno is a political scientist and former French ambassador to the European Union. The metaphor that permeates this book is the network, a woven, þattened tapestry without center. Memes move around this complex form and make control impossible. "It is a question," he says, "of conveying information in all directions and, in so doing, to exist like a huge cybernetic machine." Information infrastructure supports this world because it is the emerging self-organizing shape of the global culture, and no one will rule.

Nations will disappear (global business has rendered them obsolete). What he calls a new empire ­ similar to that of Rome, but without an emperor ­ is emerging. In a world where power, influence, and information are networked through alliances, friendships, business relationships, and common interests across national boundaries, there can be no hierarchy and no center. He draws an explicit parallel to the Internet with its þexibility and resistance to nuclear attack. In the new social net, he says, "the circuits, the networks, recompose themselves around the affected zone in an almost biological fashion."

It's happening all around us. Big business is already giving way to a complex of many businesses, large and small, interacting with many customers and suppliers in alliances, partnerships, special-interest groups, cultural and linguistic identities, market segments, and even, sometimes, geographic areas. "Power no longer consists of knowledge," Guéhenno says, "but in functioning as a link between bodies of knowledge."

The network is inÞnitely reinterpretable. Its birth occurs without blood (well, not much, anyway). National borders disappear in a swirl of fractal global relationships. "In a system that is no longer governed by a pyramidal and centralized hierarchy, one can certainly hope that no breakdown, no sabotage is decisive." One can hope, indeed.

The End of the Nation-State, by Jean-Marie Guéhenno, translated by Victoria Elliott: US$19.95. University of Minnesota Press: +1 (612) 627 1970.

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