new media and the end of the nation state

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Abstract

This study uses the fact that effectively instantaneous communication is

now possible at any distance to ask if the nation state’s geographical boundaries

mean that it no longer has a role in the world. Drawing upon secondary historical

sources and the work of contemporary political theorists, including Jürgen

Habermas and John Rawls as exemplary analysts of power and morality, it finds

that the liberal form of the nation state has proved the most effective, because it

supports institutions whose principal value is in facilitating organized debate

through the rule of law. This function is largely independent of geographical

limitations, so is as valuable as ever. However, in parallel with developments

inside the nation state, this century has also seen increasingly sophisticated

communication between them. Electronically mediated communications, new

media, help to give people a worldwide perspective. This will likely lead to new

forms of governance, as historical evidence suggests happened with phonetically

written and printed media before. Therefore, this thesis suggests that the benefits

of the liberal polity should be extended and applied to global governance by

retaining nation states, though protecting and coordinating them through a

separation of powers created by de-merging the United Nations into its



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functional components, each with a governing body made up of a representative

of every nation state.

Acknowledgments

Many people deserve my sincere thanks for making this work possible.

First, all my teachers at Harvard. Jeffrey Wolcowitz, who taught me that

economics does not have the answer. Edmund Spevack taught me that if one

perseveres, one succeeds against administrative intransigence. Arthur Dyck

showed me the difference between ethics and morality. Delba Winthrop helped

me see the hollowness of virtue as a political concept. Marc Busch showed me

the limitations of the anarchic perspective on international relations. Murray

Levin showed how American politics are much more interesting in practice than

in theory. Harold Bolitho helped me to see that common processes exist across

very different cultures. Allan Ryan introduced me to international law. Charles

Segal introduced me, briefly, to Greek tragedy. Susan Russinoff reassured me

that logic was my outstanding strength. Most of all in this category, I must thank

Steven Young who introduced me to much of contemporary political theory and

effectively directed this thesis project. I would also like to thank Pratap Mehta



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for acting as co-director, and everybody in the ALM office for their outstanding

professionalism.

I must also thank Colin Eden and Kees Van der Heijden at Strathclyde

University, who introduced me to the concepts of self-reinforcing systems and

dialog for understanding the world on a human scale.

I am grateful to my friends who read and commented on early drafts,

particularly Ros, Neil, and Andy. Finally, I thank my family, who provided the

right support at the right time, and without whom this would not have been

possible. I thank God for you all.



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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments..............................................................................................iv

I. Introduction......................................................................................................1

II. The Origin of the Nation State.......................................................................7

III. Power: The How of the Nation State ..........................................................34

IV. Morality: The Why of the Nation State ......................................................56

V. New Media and the Future of the Nation State ........................................76

VI. Conclusion...................................................................................................105

VII. Afterward....................................................................................................111

References ..........................................................................................................113



Chapter I

Introduction

In 1948 George Orwell1 prophesied that, within forty years, electronically

mediated communication would be used by totalitarian governments to oppress

their citizens. Orwell’s vision is the image to which people turn to express a

common fear that technology, communication technology in particular, will be

used by governments to oppress their citizens.

However, just over forty years after Orwell’s prediction, the world saw US

law enforcement officers routinely assaulting a citizen named Rodney King,

because they were filmed using a personal video camera. Despite first being

acquitted, public pressure forced another trial that resulted in conviction. Is it

not citizens who are empowered by the new media?

This suggests a more general question to use as a focus to explore the

single most obvious phenomenon of the modern social world, the nation state;

will new media bring about the end of the nation state, because they make

geographical boundaries irrelevant? The nation state’s pervasiveness makes a

comprehensive examination practically impossible, so an idealized thought



2

experiment such as this is necessary to understand what it is and why it exists. In

other words, what the end of the nation state is.

The main feature of the nation state, and what distinguishes one from

another, is a fixed position on the surface of our earth. However, as a social

phenomenon the nation state exists principally in the realm of human

interaction. Therefore, one promising approach to understanding it is to test the

importance of geographical borders, by examining the impact of a technology

that makes physical barriers to communication largely irrelevant: electronically

mediated communication, referred to here as new media.

To develop a robust understanding of the nation state I undertake a

theoretical triangulation, by examining it from three perspectives: historical,

critical, and moral. After a survey of works considering the formation of the

nation state, the historical perspective, I turn to political theory. This offers two

central traditions for understanding the nation state, firstly as an existing social

power structure, and secondly as a force for good: the how and the why. It is the

former that is here termed critical, the latter moral.

Both the critical and moral perspectives are considered because in this

type of inquiry it is impossible to separate the empirical from the normative.

1 George Orwell, 1984 (London: Basil Blackwell, 1949).



4

To an extent, I follow the model of contemporary international relations

built by Kenneth Waltz,2 namely looking for patterns, or symmetries, at the

largest social and geographical scales. However, this essay quickly diverges

from that approach. International relations theory seeks patterns of balancing

cause-effect feedback loops that work to maintain the integrity of the system, in a

similar way to which a thermostat maintains a constant temperature. However,

in the longer term it is the reinforcing, positive, feedback loops that are of

greatest interest. These are commonly described as either vicious or virtuous

circles, depending on the perceived value of their effects. It is through these

reinforcing cause-effect cycles that people experience social and political change,

i.e., history. This project is looking for deeper patterns compared to those sought

by contemporary international relations theory, ones that better explain

developments in a broader historical context.

This means exploring the logic that underlies the development and

function of the nation state. This logic must explain the interaction between

complex systems that are an emergent phenomenon. It must find principles that

do not exist within the system’s members, but that arise through the interaction

2 Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1959) 188.



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of those members. Although simple, the logic may lead to incomprehensibly

complex action in the system as a whole. There may be many logics, but at this

stage it is enough to identify one and demonstrate its usefulness in its

explanatory power, rather than providing a comprehensive comparison with its

alternatives.

To connect this approach into existing political theory, and to provide a

firm grounding from which to develop the critical and moral viewpoints, the

works of two major contemporary philosophers are considered in detail. Both

have recently come to the view that laws and institutions guaranteeing reasoned

debate are central to modern life. From the continental critical tradition, Jürgen

Habermas’ idea of procedural democracy is considered. From the more

normative perspective of Anglo-American moral philosophy, John Rawls’

concept of public reason is studied.

I contend that the liberal form of the nation state has been historically the

most successful. The critical perspective suggests that this is because as an entity

it is able to accumulate knowledge of successful practices, i.e., to learn. The

moral perspective suggests that it is the best form for the autonomous

individuals who constitute the nation state, because it secures for them the most

life choices, and that this in turn ensures its stability. In general, this suggests



6

that the effect of new media will be to enable more rapid learning, as information

can be disseminated without regard to national boundaries, and far more

quickly than in the past, and could conceivably compromise the nation state

itself.

Using the understanding developed in exploring the liberal nation state,

the argument presented here suggests a new approach to global governance, one

that does not replace nation states, but acts to coordinate and protect them. A

central tenet of liberal political theory is the limitation of power through the

separation of powers. Therefore, a single source of global governance threatens

the creation of an autocracy. If many nations pursue this path, an Orwellian

nightmare of oxymoronic war between the United Nations and the United States

becomes conceivable. Alternatively, new media can help facilitate processes of

worldwide interaction, between cooperating international institutions and

individual people. Applying the logic of the liberal nation state suggests de-

merging the UN, to change the focus of international relations from competing

nations to cooperating institutions. In this way a more secure and prosperous

world will emerge, giving more people real choices in their lives.



Chapter II

The Origin of the Nation State

To perceive clearly the two dominant organizing principles of modern

history means looking back to the middle of the seventeenth century. Within

months of each other, two events occurred that in retrospect can be seen to usher

in the modern world. However, both were only steps in long processes, both

took place at opposite ends of the European continent, and both were apparently

completely independent of one another.

In Westphalia in west-central Germany a treaty was signed, concluding

the Thirty Years War. With hindsight, its most important effect was agreement

that the treating states would not involve themselves in one another’s internal

affairs. The principle of sovereignty had been born.

In Westminster, west of the City of London, King Charles I of England

was beheaded by parliamentary decree. Sovereignty was thereby shown to rest

not in a royal person, but in a parliament, composed of the people’s

representatives, and ultimately in the people who constituted the nation.

More than simply yielding the rise of these principles, the modern world

has been fundamentally shaped by their interaction. To understand the origins



8

of these events we need to go back again over a thousand years, to the end of the

Roman empire.

In 312 CE a remarkable division occurred. The Emperor Constantine

proclaimed the Edict of Milan, granting “a free and absolute power to the

Christians, and to all others, of following the religion which each individual

thinks proper to prefer, to which he has addicted his mind, and which he may

deem the best adapted to his own use.”3

Although ostensibly granting the freedom to follow any religion, the

specific mention of Christianity points to its real significance. Whether or not

Constantine’s acceptance and effective conversion to Christianity was politically

inevitable, the event marked an acceptance that Christianity had grown to

become a major force in the Roman world. Even though it became a fundamental

part of the political world, the Church retained some degree of commitment to

an otherworldly perspective, primarily through individuals who conceived of

themselves as in the world but not of it. Brown describes one event that

exemplified this, where “Ambrose kept the emperor Theodosius among the

3 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. Dean

Milman, vol. 1 (London: Ward, Lock, not dated) 488-489.



9

penitents – the ruler of the world stripped of his robe and diadem – for having

ordered the massacre of the people of Thessalonica.”4

The change in the political landscape to a dialog between the secular and

the spiritual proved deep and long lasting. Davis at the beginning of his history

of Medieval Europe suggests that:

The history of the Middle Ages is in large measure theattempt of the Church to consecrate the State and make itacceptable unto God. It is also the record of its failure, becauseChurch and State could not agree as to what were the things thatwere Caesar’s and what were the things that were God’s.5

By establishing freedom of religious worship, alternative moral schemes

became legitimate. However, initially the more significant effect was that

separate political entities could develop under a common religious system. This

created the common moral and cultural environment in which separate nation

states began to develop. However, even more than this, the essential unity of the

Church, partly what defined the medieval age, enabled it to be an effective

participant in a dialog. And despite a subsidiary role as an Italian city state, the

Church’s pervasive but non-military approach meant that confrontations led to

what were, in the long run, creative dialogs, not destructive conflicts.

4 Peter Brown, Late Antiquity (Cambridge MA: Harvard Belknap, 1998) 40.

5 R.C.H. Davis, A History of Medieval Europe, 2nd Ed. (London: Longman, 1988) 18.



10

Two things distinguish Europe before 1500, its religious homogeneity

and its large number of effectively independent political units. One estimate

counts five hundred “proto-states.”6 Yet everyone was nominally Christian,

including the absolute monarchs, and owed their spiritual allegiance to the Pope

in Rome. It was this combination that made it unique.

This is a distinct contrast with other great civilizations. For example,

China had its state religion of Confucianism in which everything was under the

Emperor, and supported the status quo.7 India had a caste system that was a

fundamental part of what is now called the Hindu religion.8 Classical Greece and

ancient Rome integrated their mythology with the state. What was good meant

what was good for society, with the gods at the top of the social scale. There was

scant opportunity for challenging the system.

In political terms, Europe after the Roman empire became a continent

without fixed borders, with no dominant center of power. The pervasive

political system of the early middle ages was feudalism. This was motivated by

6 Charles Tilly in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe

(Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975) 15.

7 John King Fairbank, China: A New History (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,

1992) 52.

8 Romila Thapar, A History of India, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Peguin, 1966) 48.



11

military demands, and required little in the way of administrative arrangements.

The lowest ranks of society, those closest to the land, gave part of their produce

and their labor to their lord. Each lord in turn offered himself and a retinue to his

lord, up to the king. This clearly gave the lords directly under the king

considerable power; from time to time Kings were overthrown, or the succession

decided by alliances of the most powerful nobles.

As monetary markets developed, nobles preferred to send money rather

than lead men to support their king. Rulers liked this because it meant that their

lords did not have so much direct power. A lord withholding money was an

inconvenience, a lord marching his army towards the monarch was positively

dangerous.

As wars came to depend on financial resources rather than directly feudal

ones, Kings found another source of military power: borrowed money. More

heads of state started to borrow to finance their wars, and gave as security the

promise of future tax income. Consequently taxes became pervasive, not simply

called on in the run up to war, but necessary to pay for money already spent in



12

previous ones. In 1517 the Church lifted its ban on usury, and finance became a

legitimate industry.9

Because every ruler felt the need to keep up with their rivals, war became

more expensive, and demanded increased productivity. To continue to protect

the territories that were the source of their defensive resources, rulers needed

tighter control over their domains, which required bigger armies. This posed a

greater threat to their neighbors, who felt a need to respond to the increased

threat. The system became self-reinforcing. Mutual respect, mainly through a

mutual religion and culture, was the only counter balance, and was only partly

effective.

Across Europe the situation came to a head when one power emerged as

likely to be able to dominate the continent as no power had done since the

Romans. The Hapsburg, Charles I, was already King of Spain when in 1519 he

was elected Holy Roman Emperor. Kennedy10 cites the creation of the Hapsburg

Empire in the first two decades of the sixteenth century as creating a power

block across Europe that threatened every other kingdom. To match the

9 William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance:

Portrait of an Age (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993) 50.

10 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military

Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987) 32.



13

resources that the Hapsburgs could muster through the sheer size of their

dominion, other kingdoms were forced to rely only on their capacity for

organization. Ultimately, the Hapsburgs’ weakness was a failure to improve

their internal wealth-generating capacity as fast as their rivals.11

England and France chose different approaches to generating the

resources required, described in great detail by Ertman.12

But both felt the threat

of the Hapsburgs, and both had to mobilize to meet it. This required the levying

of considerable taxation. France’s imposition of autocratic control from the

center, based on the authority of the King, stood it in good stead for 250 years.

The Hundred Years War between England and France had ended in the

middle of the fifteenth century. In England, the continuing need for new taxation

to support the war had continued the trend of closer parliamentary cooperation.

The monarchs found taxes easier to collect with the consent of parliament, and

parliament enjoyed the respect given it by kings for its consent. This tradition

had little influence on the subsequent Tudor dynasty, which emerged from

obscurity after the internecine Wars of the Roses had decimated many blue-

blooded families. They sought to secure their position by emulating their

11 Kennedy 55.



14

European peers, resorting to loans and selling public offices.13 This proved to be

only a way of postponing problems.

War with Spain and France in the 1620s14 provoked a financial crisis in

England. Parliament expected to be involved in a more fundamental way than

the Stuarts, who succeeded the Tudors, believed the dignity of their royal

position allowed. Civil war was the result.

This was a truly novel phenomenon, according to Christopher Hill. For

the first time in history, it was not one powerful family fighting against another,

nor the mob releasing their built-up anger against their rulers. It was the people

and their representatives in parliament, with an unprecedented legitimacy,

organizing to defeat the old world of hierarchical government. They were no

mob. Their most powerful weapon, partly the invention of Oliver Cromwell, was

their New Model Army. “The New Model, as it was to declare proudly in June

1647, was 'no mere mercenary army', it was the common people in uniform …

and the free discussion which was permitted in this unique army led to a

12 Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and

Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 90 - 223.

13 Ertman 179.

14 Ertman 183.



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fantastically rapid development of political thinking."15 However, the novelty

was far from clear for the people of the time. “None of the participants knew that

what they were living through was a revolution. The word was to acquire its

modern meaning only in and because of the English Revolution. … Englishmen

had to face totally unexpected revolutionary situations in the 1640s and 1650s,

with no theoretical guidance. … They had to improvise.”16

So where did the people go to find inspiration?

The Bible in English was the book to which they naturallyturned for guidance. It was God’s Word, whose authority no onecould reject. And it was central to the inheritance of the ProtestantEnglish nation. It was available in print only because of theconflicts and martyrdoms of the English reformation, an essentialpart of the Revolution’s pre-history.17

Liah Greenfield, in a major study of nationalism, explains why its impact

was so powerful:

In the years of the great upheaval that brought Englishmento assert themselves as a nation in the Puritan Rebellion, theybelieved themselves to be the second Israel, constantly returning tothis metaphor in parliamentary speeches and pamphlets, as well assermons. The Old Testament provided them with the language in

15 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English

Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975) 25.16 Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994) 8.

17 Hill, English Bible 8.



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which they could express the novel consciousness of Nationality,for which no language had existed before. This language reachedall levels of society and was, as a result, far more important in itsinfluence than the language of Renaissance patriotism known onlyto a small elite.18

William Tyndale had been strangled and burnt at the stake in the

courtyard of Villvorde Castle, Belgium, in October 1536. His crime: translating

and publishing the Bible in English, so that even “a boy that driveth the

plough”19 could read it. Just over a century later, Charles I was beheaded at

Whitehall. His crime: asserting a fundamental difference in rights between ruler

and ruled. As he said from the scaffold, “A subject and sovereign are clear

different things.”20 The English people found in their Bibles an identity and a

self-confidence that expressed itself in the idea of nationhood. The grandchildren

of those who, because of the power of the printing press, were the first to read

Tyndale’s translation, created a brand new political order. Different variations on

the theme were tried over the next 300 years, but ultimately the English, liberal,

conception won out.

18 Liah Greenfield, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge MA: Harvard


19 David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994)

1.

20 John Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge




17

Before considering what the liberal conception of government is, we

briefly return to the background to the other part of the mid-seventeenth-century

paradigm shift, national sovereignty. The Reformation also gave rise to this, but

in its Germanic birthplace. What is now Germany was subsumed in the Holy

Roman Empire, in practice a loose confederation of principalities. The

Reformation changed all that: as each prince decided for or against Rome, a clear

division appeared.

Weak central authority and external threats allowed things to simmer

until 1618, when the Thirty Years War broke out.21 Although the conflict

involved most of Europe at some time, it came to an end in Germany with the

Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Gilpin describes its significance:

The Congress of Westphalia brought together for the firsttime in history all the major powers of an international system. Therules agreed on covered the broad range of religious, political, andterritorial matters at issue in the Thirty Years’ War. The statesmenwho gathered at Westphalia reordered the map of Europe andestablished a set of rules that brought relative peace to Europe forthe rest of the century.22

The common, and original, aspect of both of the major events of 1648/9

was the participants’ recognition that power was not the only political argument,

21 Kennedy 39.



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though at this stage it was only implicit. Reason said peace had its benefits, and

reason was set to work to secure them. However, some continued to advocate

the need for one central authority, one of the best known being Thomas Hobbes.

His Leviathan of 1651 argued that there were only two political choices, hierarchy

or anarchy.23 Unfortunately, he could only do this by assuming, or seeing no

need for, the rational behavior of the sovereign. Hobbes’ solution was to use the

sovereign’s behavior as the definition of rationality. In the Westphalian system

too, only two choices were perceived, but in this case anarchy was chosen.

Even in England, Hobbes’ argument had some support in political reality,

for a time. Following the civil war, Cromwell became Lord Protector and ruled

through his New Model Army, rather than parliament. When his son proved

unable or unwilling to continue in his place, the restoration of Charles II and

succession by his brother James II seemed to some, including the kings

themselves, to mark a reversion to autocracy. Events proved them wrong.

People who had gone to war and executed one king for placing himself above

the law were in no mood to let others forget. The constitutional settlement of

22 Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1981) 36.

23 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) 227.



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1688 and 1689, which followed James II’s flight, placed William and Mary on the

throne, on the condition that they recognized the sovereignty of parliament. A

third way between anarchy and hierarchy was beginning to emerge.

In John Locke the new system found its most articulate spokesman. His

Second Treatise of Government proclaimed the new political ideal of liberty where

ruler and ruled became one, because all are equally subject to the laws created

by representatives responding to the needs of the people, and impartially

administered by individuals whose personal interest in cases was limited to

seeing justice done. Locke sets out his vision most clearly by contrasting it with

the state of nature that existed before civilization; in the language of his day,

what the state of nature wants, or lacks:

First, There wants an establish’d, settled, known Law, receivedand allowed by common consent to be the Standard of Right andWrong, and the common measure to decide all Controversiesbetween them. For though the Law of Nature be plain andintelligible to all rational Creatures; yet Men being biassed by theirInterest, as well as ignorant for want of study of it, are not apt toallow of it as a Law binding to them in the application of it to theirparticular Cases.

Secondly, In the State of Nature there wants a known andindifferent Judge, with Authority to determine all differencesaccording to the established Law. For every one in that state beingboth Judge and Executioner of the Law of Nature, Men beingpartial to themselves, Passion and Revenge is very apt to carrythem too far, and with too much heat, in their own Cases; as well asnegligence, and unconcernedness, to make them too remiss, inother Mens.



20

Thirdly, In the state of Nature there often wants Power to backand support the Sentence when right, and to give it due Execution.They who by any Injustice offended, will seldom fail, where theyare able, by force to make good their Injustice: such resistancemany times makes the punishment dangerous, and frequentlydestructive, to those who attempt it.24

Locke had also understood that government depended on consent.

Although in the emerging nation states individuals could do little by

themselves, in relations between states there were few disincentives to attempts

by an individual state to apply brute force to benefit themselves. In both cases

little initially changed in day-to-day affairs, but perceptions had changed. The

idea that individuals, both people and states, had a right to exist and to

determine their own destiny had entered the common consciousness, and would

prove impossible to dislodge.

In the international arena, the Peace of Westphalia instituted the doctrine

of a balance of power. This meant that governments were continually seeking

alliances with the sole objective of providing security for their states. Europe

was to be racked with wars for the next 300 years, because of the logic this

doctrine produced. Half a continent away, the English Civil War pitted one view

of government, namely royal sovereignty, against another, which came to be

24 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge




21

known as liberalism. This began the age of ideology. Almost three hundred

years after its victory in England, the liberal nation state had largely won out

internationally.

Is it possible to explain why liberalism was able to develop from the

tension between territorial and popular sovereignty? The conflict that was

endemic to the age of ideology is normally associated with destruction and

negative consequences. Although the immediate results were often catastrophic

for many of the individuals involved, the eventual result has been a level of, in

broad historical terms, unprecedented material wealth, health, and range of life

choices for the vast majority of Europeans.

At the social and political center of improvements in Europeans’ quality

of life has been the nation state. After the Reformation of the sixteenth century,

Europe’s only unifying force became a broad cultural outlook and some

expectation of co-existing political entities. Although states were often at war,

there was a common outlook, inherited from Christianity, that people shared to

some degree a common humanity. A mutual outlook, together with established

patterns of international trade, enabled communication of people and ideas

between self-sustaining states, allowing for the sharing of different techniques of

administration. The result was a laboratory for experimenting with different



22

forms of government. In the process the medieval dialog between the spiritual

and the secular was transformed into the modern one between power and

morality.

The creative potential of the modern dialog between the individual and

the state, or morality and power, helps to explain the source of the vast resources

necessary to fight the ever more costly wars of the early modern period. It was

not just a case of redistribution, extracting ever more from the rural population.

Europe possessed the same basic natural resources it had for thousands of years,

since the dawn of humanity. To some extent there was a growth in population,

but what was new was a capacity for invention. It was the way the resources

were organized that created the wealth to conduct war, and growing

opportunities to leverage all human activity.

Ultimately the productivity of all activities could be radically improved,

freeing people to spend time on wholly new activities, and produce ever more

ingenious tools and techniques. The availability of new devices to purchase, and

new opportunities to experience, offered choices to people whose lives had been

indistinguishable for generations. It was worth risking new ventures, even on the

smallest scale, without the benefit being purloined by one’s landlord. The

opportunities were there for any with the wit and nerve to take them. It is no



23

coincidence that the cradle of liberty became the seat of the industrial revolution,

the greatest trading nation in history, the first global power, and the only empire

to cede its power relatively gracefully.

European history following 1689 can be seen as the spreading and

working out of these ideas. What emerged as the winner of centuries of war was

not one dominant power, but rather the liberal state, because it innovated most

effectively, by incorporating cooperation and competition within itself. This was

made possible by institutionalizing sustained debate, without the constraints of

a hierarchy that makes it in most people’s interest to suppress the criticism that

provokes innovation.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, war continued to be

both a substantial draw on resources, and the primary role of the state. But

people knew that they had a choice. In thirteen of Britain’s north American states,

a demand for no taxation without representation forced a showdown with the

King’s forces. This demand could not be denied by the British Parliament,

leading to a half-hearted war, and the founding of the United States of America.

French hegemony on the European continent was an expensive position to hold.

Ironically, a geo-political policy of supporting the rebelling American states

against the rival British proved to be too much for the ancien régime, and another



24

nail in the coffin of political absolutism. A bankrupt Louis XVI called a meeting

of the Estates, hoping to raise funds.25 Instead, after the mob went on a rampage

and stormed the Bastille, he lost his kingdom and his head.

The results for liberalism were not wholly good. To the cry for liberty

were added others for equality and fraternity. The less desirable but no less

distinctive characteristics of liberalism were starting to become clear. It was not

an unqualified good. There was no end to inequality from the opening up of

trade and competition. As everyone became their own master, many felt a sense

of alienation because of the consequent loss of community feeling.

The French Revolution itself showed a similar pathology as the English

Civil War. The invincibility of a well-led citizen army demonstrated by

Cromwell was shown again as Napoleon stormed across Europe. This created

ripples that, although not necessarily inevitably, gave the finely balanced inter-

state relations a good stir, and took almost a century and a half to finally bring

peace to Europe. Shattering the Prussian-led alliance of Germanic states created

a reaction that could only be satisfied by a united Germany. Unification was

engineered fifty years later by Bismarck, for whom a major lever was the

25 Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980) 36.



25

instigation of an invasion of France, which was repeated twice more in the

succeeding seventy years.

The world had continued to change however. Liberal government was

different. When Napoleon finally met his Waterloo, the British parliament

wanted peace rather than retribution or domination. They sought a return to the

principles of Westphalia, through the Congress of Vienna.26

Towards the end of the final 150 years of European instability, the effects

of liberalism started to reach their limits. Wars became truly global, and death

was mechanized, to use Reinhold Neibur’s haunting phrase.27 On the positive

side, a genuinely new and more hopeful phenomenon occurred. The long

tradition of concluding conflicts with treaties was challenged at the end of World

War I. With the creation of the League of Nations the first forum for world-wide

political dialogue was born. However, popular support for the harsh terms of

the Treaty of Versailles made the League practically irrelevant. Fortunately,

World War II concluded differently. For the first time in the post-medieval

world, a major conflict dividing Europe ended with no treaty. In its place the

United Nations was given space to evolve the resolution of international

26 Kennedy 137.



26

conflicts, so that they would not degenerate into another war to be settled by a

treaty; another treaty not easily subject to change as circumstances changed.

With hindsight, the demise of treatying was a far more significant turning point

than the end of the cold war for ushering in the new world order.

But is there really such a thing as a new world order? For many, any such

thing must start with the end of the nation states that were such an integral part

of the old world order. There appears to be little danger of their demise. This is

one aspect of the question this project seeks to answer: can there be a new order,

one where war is not a constant danger, but one that still involves nation states,

the instigators of wars?

Two suspicions motivate this question. One is that the nation state is so

deeply embedded in our world that it is impossible to root out, so a place must

be found for it if we are to have our new world order. The second is that we are

already in the new world, but its differences compared with the old are not yet

clear. History often only becomes clear in retrospect. To most of those who live

through it, life is life, not substantially different from everybody else’s. As Hegel

27 Reinhold Neibur, A Christian Interpretation of Ethics (New York: Harper and Row,

19543) 116.



27

wrote, “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”28

Wisdom is often a retrospective art. If this is the case, then familiar events need

to be set in a different narrative.

Whilst the plenipotentiaries of Westphalia proclaimed the primacy of

sovereignty, English liberals, Whigs as they were first known not long after these

events, were developing the concept of liberty. Two different, but interacting,

processes have been evolving in parallel ever since. It is my contention that they

are driven by the same underlying logic, the logic of organized debate. The next

task of this essay is to draw on contemporary political philosophy to try to

develop this logic.

Political theory has, on the whole, concentrated its interest on the nation

state, or its predecessors. More recently the international system has received

some attention, but with a somewhat limited theoretical sophistication. For

example, writers of such diverse opinions as the neorealist Kenneth Waltz29 and

the neoliberal institutionalist Robert Keohane30 see the international arena as one

28 Georg Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1967) 13.

29 Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979)

117.

30 Robert Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political

Economy (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984) 245.



28

where power is the overwhelming factor, leaving little room for action based on

reasoned debate.

In searching for a deeper understanding of relations both within and

between nation states, two major contemporary characterizations of the

organized debate that exists at the core of the modern Western nation state will

serve as our primary focus: Jürgen Habermas’ idea of deliberative democracy,

and John Rawls’ concept of public reason. To help introduce them, this chapter

concludes with a brief sketch of the history of political theory.

Habermas follows in the illustrious tradition of German political

theorists, the first and probably most significant of whom was Immanuel Kant,

who sought to provide the solid foundation that Locke’s theory lacked. Locke’s

political theory relied on an ill-defined concept of natural law. This contrasted

with his great psychological Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which built

on a more solid idea, to some extent in conflict with natural law, that human

understanding develops purely through experience.31

31 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1975) 104.



29

Kant suggested the idea of autonomy, a radical and profound idea that in

many ways provided the foundation required.32 The autonomy of individuals

meant for Kant that because each person is capable of rational thought they can

choose their own path in life, and because of this they are ultimately responsible

only to themselves for choosing their ends. However, a rational end must not be

subject to contradiction, so no one can choose an end that makes anyone else a

means, as this would contradict the other person’s ability to determine their own

end. Charles Taylor finds that, although for Kant it is impossible for a political

community to make its members moral, nevertheless because individuals can

only make moral decisions for themselves:

living in a political society is a moral obligation for men. Itmay seem strange that being a member of a political society shouldbe a moral obligation when it cannot in turn aim to improve usmorally. But there is no contradiction. Political society, byregulating external conduct, does keep the peace between men,and can establish justice; and all this we are plainly obligated tofurther.

But political society is more directly relevant than that toour moral life. In entering this society we put ourselves underlaw.33

32 Immanuel Kant, “Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals,” in Classics of Moral and

Political Theory, ed. Michael Morgan (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1992) 1021.

33 Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Science: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1985) 327-328.



30

Kant makes it clear that rational autonomy only makes sense in a context

where communication, and coercion, is possible. Autonomy does not stand by

itself; it only has meaning for open systems. If a system is closed to any external

influence on it, saying it is autonomous carries no extra meaning. Autonomy

becomes significant when it is an attitude one is able to take when one engages

in debate. This was Kant’s focus. For him, publicity was the critical requirement

for a just society.34

However, autonomy is about more than communication. It requires there

to be some element of choice, a freedom of action. Hegel criticized Kant by

maintaining that an individual is a part of a society, and could only become

autonomous as a member of a rational community. Through groups within the

population, an ongoing rational debate existed, and through this debate reason

would come to prevail. Hegel’s student, Karl Marx, believed Hegel’s

communicative reason to be less important than the process of material

development. Marx’s focus recovered a concern for the physical individual

subsumed by Hegel in the development of Geist, or the idea. Although Marx

34 Immanuel Kant, “On the Proverb: That May Be True in Theory, But Is of No Practical Use

(1793),” in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History and Morals, trans. Ted Humphrey

(Indianapolis / Cambridge: Hackett, 1983) 82.



31

believed the process of material development involved individuals’ inevitable

alienation.35

Habermas takes Marx as his starting position, but looks back to Kant,

seeking a degree of participation for the individual. He finds it in their having

some choice over communication and action, though only to the extent made

possible by the language and social conditions of the society in which they live.

This recovers Kant’s autonomy, contemporaneously with Hegel’s dialog of

ideas, and Marx’s material dialectic.

Rawls’ starting point is also the role of the individual, although in his case

within a utilitarian liberal state.36 Here the individual only exists as an

indistinguishable voter or consumer. Finding this unsatisfactory, Rawls too

looks back to Kant’s autonomous individual, but seeks to embed hem in a

hypothetical pre-process, which will suggest how a society can be chosen that

does justice to each individual, for both themselves and their fellow citizens.

Although it would be an oversimplification to make it a firm distinction,

Habermas can be characterized as exploring the issue from the outside,

35 Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels

Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978) 74.

36 John Stuart Mill, “Utilitarianism,” in Classics of Moral and Political Theory, ed. Michael

Morgan (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1992).



32

questioning how the system works. Rawls’ perspective is more the view from

the inside, asking why free-willed, autonomous individuals would choose to

limit their own behavior, and what principles of social cooperation such

individuals should accept.

How does this relate to the concept of sovereignty with which this chapter

started? Because sovereignty is clearly a form of autonomy. If sovereignty and

liberty are both forms of autonomy, how are a nation state’s relations with its

peers similar to, and how are they different from, those of the citizens of a liberal

state? To answer this, we first have to understand liberty. This is the subject of

the next two chapters.

New media enters the frame only in the final analysis. It has a dual

existence, as a test and as a fact. As an idea it is simple: unlimited

communication. But communication exists in a context, and it is upon this that

we concentrate. The context is the diverse world in which we live, a world that is

divided into nation states. These nation states are far more than just lines on a

map. As has been shown in this chapter, they resemble living organisms in their

own right. They may not breathe air, but they do inhale and exhale goods and

services, and engage in ever more sophisticated intercommunication. They are

probably the most complex artifacts ever created by human beings. Though



33

created and maintained by people, they are far beyond the capacity of one

individual to understand in their complexity. But they do offer a regularity, a

symmetry, that hints at a deep and beautiful logic ready to be uncovered.

In this chapter we have sought to understand the past, so that we can

move on to understand the future. To understand means to perceive the logic

clearly enough to distinguish its significant features, without drowning in too

much detail. We now turn to understanding the logic of liberty and sovereignty.



Chapter III

Power: The How of the Nation State

How is it that the liberal nation state has become the dominant form of

large-scale political organization in our world, one that is so different from that

of the original nation states two and three centuries ago? Most systems die when

the environment they originally existed in starts to change. Liberal nation states

show remarkable longevity. The United Kingdom and United States have

sustained political continuity for over 200 years. Their achievement of not

merely surviving, but positively thriving in vastly changed circumstances, is

second only to Homo Sapiens.

To start to answer this question we have to understand the essence of

organization, power. Put simply, it seems that the liberal system creates a

momentum that draws power into its organizational structure, away from any

one individual. It uses the energy generated by its momentum to smother extra-

systemic threats, and counter-balance internal shifts. This chapter takes the first

step towards understanding the success of the nation state, by suggesting that it

possesses a model of itself, embedded within itself. This model is linked into the

nation state’s acting elements, so that by changing the model it changes itself.



35

The model exists primarily in the form of legislation that both directs and

constrains the action of the diverse organizations that make up the institutional

structure of the state. Although the rule of law has been a feature of human

societies for as long as the historical record exists, what distinguishes the liberal

form of the nation state is that it incorporates legal mechanisms for debating the

effectiveness of legislation, and effecting promising improvements. This

provides the liberal nation state with two clear benefits over other forms: it

promotes social learning and it is more effective in mobilizing resources.

To explore this concept we will build on the work of one of the leading

contemporary political theorists, Jürgen Habermas. His recent book, Between

Facts and Norms,37

places the legal system firmly at the heart of the liberal nation

state. Habermas’ theoretical approach appears to prevent him from asserting this

connection between legal systems in general and nation states specifically,

although it is not clear why. It may be in order to treat a legal system as a self-

standing theoretical concept, or it may perhaps be to avoid the issue of what

exists beyond the nation state. Nevertheless, the legal system does appear to be

a model embedded in the heart of the liberal nation state. It is with the goal of

37 Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law

and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996).



36

understanding what it means to say this that Between Facts and Norms will be

examined.

Habermas’ intellectual family background, the critical tradition, takes an

outside view. It examines political structures to understand how they work, with

a view to suggesting radical ways in which they can be transformed. Habermas’

magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action,38

reconciles individual human

consciousness and choice with the social construction of reality, whilst

recognizing the effect of social norms. He identifies coexisting and competing

lifeworld and system mechanisms as his logical principles. They appear to be

socially and politically non-specific, not relating to anything observationally

identifiable.

The lifeworld is the sum of the understandings and interpretations of a

society, within which individuals are able to discourse with each other in order

to create the best world for themselves. In parallel with this debate a number of

self-contained mechanisms are necessary to maintain society, but have a life of

their own. The economic system and the legal-administrative system are

Habermas’ primary examples. These systems are to an ever-growing extent

38 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., trans. Thomas McCarthy

(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984, 1987).



37

taking over parts of society. They exist on their own terms, and in imposing

these terms squash reasoned debate. This process Habermas labels colonization.

In his view, these systems should be governed by the people who are affected by

them.

In what could have been an effort to remedy the lack of specific social or

political elements in The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas chose to

instigate a research project to examine the philosophy of law. The conclusions he

arrived at were published as Between Facts and Norms. Because here he asserts

that no domain is immune to regulation through the legislative process, he

appears to go a long way to refuting his previous claim of lifeworld

colonization. Perhaps this explains why, in his preface to Between Facts and

Norms, he refers to a loss of orientation in politics.39 Perhaps what Habermas has

actually observed is that, with the end of the Cold War, there has been a shift of

political debate away from major questions of ideology to the more mundane

coordination of regulatory activity.

Between Facts and Norms examines the political mechanisms of

constitutional states. Habermas cites the United States and Germany as being the

39 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms xlii.



38

two liberal systems with which he is familiar.40 In these nation states the law has

a pivotal role: it “represents the medium … for transforming communicative

power into administrative power.”41 This means that, linking this insight back

into The Theory of Communicative Action, “The idea of the constitutional state can

therefore be expounded with the aid of principles according to which legitimate

law is generated from communicative power and the latter is in turn converted

into administrative power via legitimately enacted law.”42 Perhaps less obvious,

and only implicit, is the completion of the circle of influence. Administrative

power is the mechanism that regulates the generation of communicative power

from legitimate law.

The legal system Habermas has in mind extends from the process by

which legislation is enacted, right through to its implementation by the

administrative functions of government. It is not a fixed system, but one that

responds to external criticism, although in a rational and organized way. The

legal system is in fact at the heart of what Habermas calls a discourse theory of

democracy. Taking a similar view to Hegel of civil society, “the discourse theory

40 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms xl.

41 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms xxvii.

42 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms 169.



39

of democracy corresponds to the image of a decentered society.”43 However, the

legal system is not completely diffused throughout society, because it “has been

differentiated as an arena for the perception, identification, and treatment of

problems affecting the whole of society.”44

To perform this role, the legal system must be more than an operationally

closed system, i.e., autopoietic. Habermas cites Luhmann’s work in this area.

Autopoietic systems regulate themselves, and only relate to the outside world in

a reactive way. Because it provides a mediating role, the legal system must link

to other systems, and society as a whole

To understand why a public sphere for dealing with problems across

society is so important to Habermas, it will be useful to compare his views with

those of the writer who is sometimes considered the foremost exponent of power

in the twentieth century, Michel Foucault. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault maps

out the evolution of the law’s punishment of criminals. In going to the core of the

legal system’s power, he examines how the prison system was brought about. By

doing this he seeks to understand the source of its power. He is particularly

anxious to uncover power’s relation to knowledge, and comes to conclusions





40

similar to Habermas, namely that power depends on justification in terms that

are reasonable to the people involved:

We should admit rather that power produces knowledge(and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or byapplying it because it is useful); that power and knowledgedirectly imply one another; that there is no power relation withoutthe correlative constitution of the field of knowledge, nor anyknowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same

time power relations. These “power-knowledge” relations are to beanalyzed, therefore, not on the basis of a subject of knowledge whois or is not free in relation to the power system, but, on thecontrary, the subject who knows, the objects to be known and themodalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effects ofthese fundamental implications of power-knowledge and theirhistorical transformation. In short, it is not the activity of the subjectof knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful orresistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes andstruggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that

determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge.45

Habermas recognizes this in Between Facts and Norms. “The ‘self’ of the

self-organizing legal community disappears in the subjectless forms of

communication that regulate the flow of discursive opinion- and will-formation

in such a way that their fallible results enjoy the presumption of being

reasonable.”46

However, one idea distinguishes Habermas in his critical tradition

45 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan

(New York: Random House, 1978) 27.




41

from Foucault, in what could, stretching the label to its limit, be described as the

existentialist tradition.

Where Foucault sees individuals as being totally at the mercy of the

society in which they exist, including its value judgments and its definition of

what is reasonable and normal, Habermas perceives that there is a subsystem

that can criticize the system as a whole and act to influence it in a self-conscious

way. This is what he calls the public sphere, and why he places so much

emphasis on it. And, “because it provides a safety mechanism for solving

problems that threaten social integration, politics must be able to communicate

through the medium of law with all other legitimately ordered spheres of action,

however these happen to be structured and steered.” In turn, “[t]he political

system depends on the performance of other systems, such as the fiscal

performances of the economic systems, in more than just a trivial manner.”47

In addressing the issue of how the legal system achieves its effectiveness,

Habermas finds a reconciliation between the liberal and civic republican

traditions for understanding the liberal state. It is perhaps because of the

widespread use of the word liberal in this context that Habermas uses the term

constitutional state, where liberal state is used in this essay.



42

Habermas is not convinced by the civic republican tradition’s explanation

of the liberal state, that it emerges independently of any single individual, but

from the combined desires of all individuals. He believes that “what ultimately

enables a legal community’s discursive mode of sociation is not simply at the

disposition of the members’ will.”48 But, neither does he subscribe to the liberal

view that the rights of each individual must be paramount: “In justifying the

system of rights, we saw that the autonomy of citizens and the legitimacy of law

refer to each other. … This mutual dependency, or circular reinforcement, is

manifested in the genesis of valid law.”49 So, both the liberal state as an

independent entity acting within its territory through the agency of law, and the

autonomous individual, can only exist together. He asserts that “the consensus

fought for and achieved in an association of free and equal persons ultimately

rests only on the unity of a procedure to which all consent.”50

Ultimately, the liberal state and the autonomous individual both secure

the process of organized debate, and through it reinforce each other’s autonomy:







43

According to discourse theory, the success of deliberativepolitics depends not on a collectively acting citizenry but on theinstitutionalization of the corresponding procedures andconditions of communication, as well as on the interplay ofinstitutionalized deliberative processes with informally developedpublic opinions…. Discourse theory reckons with the higher-levelintersubjectivity of processes of reaching understanding that takeplace through democratic procedures or in the communicativenetwork of public spheres. Both inside and outside theparliamentary complex and its deliberative bodies, these

subjectless communications form arenas in which more or lessopinion- and will-formation can take place for political matters,that is, matters relevant to the entire society and in need ofregulation. The flow of communication between public opinion-formation, institutionalized elections, and legislative decisions ismeant to guarantee that influence and communicative power aretransformed through legislation into administrative power.51

Habermas prescribes to the public sphere a domination over other

influences such as the financial and administrative systems. However, in practice

the political process does not simply dominate them, but seeks to influence

them, as well as others such as the international system.

Nevertheless, this procedural perspective produces two important

consequences for contemporary political debate. First of all:

The normative key is autonomy, not well being. … Thecomplementary blind spots of the social-welfare and liberalparadigms of law stem from the same error: both paradigmsmisunderstand the legal “constitution” of freedom as




44

“distribution” and assimilate it to the model of the equaldistribution of acquired or allocated goods.52

Debates around distribution miss the point. Material goods gain their

value from the way they give individuals more choice, or supplement their

autonomy. Pursuing redistribution, even material accumulation itself, is

misguided. Increasing autonomy is the more relevant goal. Material goods are

only an issue within that context.

The second consequence is related to the first, but emphasizes the point

that, as well as individual autonomy, the autonomy of the state is also an issue:

The web of legal communication is even capable ofembracing complex societies as a whole. The proceduralist legalparadigm, I should add, results from a contest of paradigms. It

presupposes that the welfare and liberal models of law constitutethe realization of rights in overly concrete terms and conceal theinternal relation between private and public autonomy, a relationthat must be interpreted from case to case.53

State autonomy is exercised through institutionalizing ongoing debate.

Neither individual freedom from government, nor an individual right to welfare,

is more important than the other. Both apply, and this makes blanket principles

too blunt an instrument to apply to the complexities of real life. This produces

52 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms 418-419.




45

the need for what Hart, in The Concept of Law, called the open texture of law, “a

core of certainty and a penumbra of doubt.”54 It is because of this that each

individual case should be decided using stated principles, even though in many

cases this will not lead to a single right course of action. To make sure that a

decision can be questioned if some believe a better answer to exist, procedures

to support a debate need to exist.

It is through fundamentally embedding processes that maintain

organized debate in the liberal state, that cooperation and competition are both

able to exist together in one organization. Legal systems, in the broadest sense,

that institute legitimate boundaries of political debate, and convert the decisions

reached into state activity, are the institutions that facilitate these processes. The

resulting body of law constitutes an evolving model of action for the state. The

model is enacted in states ultimately by the courts of law that define the

boundaries, but most of all by the individuals who choose to obey the law in

their everyday lives. It is this structure that uniquely differentiates the liberal

state and gives it a preeminent adaptability.

As a corollary, linking back to the issue of sovereignty, Habermas

explains the mystery of sovereignty: “For in a constitutional democracy, as the

54 H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) 123.



46

dwelling of a self-organizing legal community, the symbolic location of

discursively fluid sovereignty remains empty.”55 Where Locke characteristically

failed to address the issue, and Hobbes, Kant, and even Hegel felt sovereignty

had to be assigned to some concrete body, Habermas has understood that it

exists in the community’s, in practice in the nation state’s, ability to continuously

organize itself to maintain its existence. Sovereignty, as a manifestation of

political power, is more of a life force than a territorial right.

In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas comes to terms with the complexity

of power and the importance of history in molding the liberal state. But he also

provides a mechanism through which history, as social and political change, is

brought under “control.” This is control in the loosest sense, that of the system

maintaining its existence in the face of change, as a self-regulating system. That

is, in cybernetic not mechanical terms. In many cases change is pursued actively,

though often the consequences are indeterminable in advance.

Where in all this is nationalism? It might be argued that this is a

fundamental element of the nation state. However, Habermas refutes this




47

emphatically in a more recent article.56 The nation element of the nation state

“projects the nation as an imaginary entity that is grown and which, in contrast to

an artificial order of enacted law, presents itself as a matter of course needing no

justification beyond its sheer existence.” Although there is no explicit reference

in the article, the contrast is clearer when compared with the role of law

elucidated in Between Facts and Norms. “National consciousness jells around a

common descent, language and history” and “may very well be … an artifact.” 57

Unlike the active role law plays at the center of the nation state, nationalism is an

effect, not a cause. It is not the distinctive national history, which people

inevitably “discover,” that is necessary for a functioning state as much as a

viable legal and institutional framework.

Adding some historical context will make this clearer. Anderson, in

Imagined Communities, looks for nationalism in the coming into existence of nation

states in America and Europe. In South America, nation states started to emerge

from the Spanish Empire early in the nineteenth century. Each had been an

administrative unit from their incorporation into the Spanish Empire from the

56 Jürgen Habermas, “The European Nation-State – Its Achievements and Its Limits. On the

Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship” in Mapping the Nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan

(London: Verso, 1997) 281-294.

57 Habermas, “The European Nation-state” 288.



48

fifteenth century.58 There was no attempt to create a “United States of South

America” because the area they covered was simply too large; the technology of

the day did not make it possible. It was not possible to imagine it as one nation,

because there was no awareness of events on the other side of the continent. A

nation can only exist where individuals are conscious of a common history

unfolding.

Apart from geographical distance, a major barrier to this common

consciousness is a different language. It would not be difficult to take this fact,

and try to use it as a justification for saying that a community with a common

language should be a nation. Hobsbawm identifies three components of this

ethnic-linguistic argument for statehood, all of which were unheard of before the

nineteenth century. Firstly, for “the two most prominent non-state national

movements … it was the only thing that made them German or Italians.”59

Throughout the medieval and early-modern periods both had been made up of

independent, or at least distinct, principalities. Only the elites who conducted

inter-state diplomatic and commercial business had any common identity,

58 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism, Revised Edition (London: Verso, 1991) 52.

59 Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 102-103.



49

primarily through their language. Second was the rise in interest in folk history,

such as vernacular languages, originally simply for its own sake, but later

relabeled culture and used to justify calls for national self-determination. The

last reason was the invention of theories identifying nations with genetic

descent.

However, in addition to Hobsbawm’s components, two other factors can

be identified. First, both German and Italian unity can be seen as a response to

the Europe-wide situation. To have a voice one needed to be a significant player.

No principality was in a position to treat with Britain or France on an equal

footing, but Germany and Italy as unified entities were.

The second factor had two effects. Economic growth was leading to not

only more complex societies, but also to a need for more efficient administration.

Centralization was proving an effective means of managing the growing

complexity, which created a benefit from size. Both Germany and Italy were to a

large extent under the shadow of what had become the Austro-Hungarian

Empire, still ruled by the Hapsburg family. This was proving too large and

diverse, and too politically rigid, to cope with the demands of economic growth.

The principalities themselves were too small, so new inventions of Germany and

Italy were the natural consequence.



50

It was issues of state driving issues of nationhood, not the other way

around. Looked at in this way, nationalism was an effect rather than a cause,

which emerged from the driving forces of conflict and organization, or

competition and cooperation. Although this may have been its conception,

nationalism and its close relative ethnicity have taken on a life of their own, with

devastating consequences. Fortunately, though at great cost, when German and

Italian nationalism led to rampages through Europe, similar to those Cromwell

and Napoleon had led, they were eventually rooted out and replaced by liberal

systems acutely aware of the threat nationalism posed.

Protection against the enemies of reason is provided through an effective

constitution. Habermas depicts the role of the constitution as not principally to

protect individual rights, as modern liberalism would maintain, but also as

more necessary than civic republicans would allow. It is also a retreat from his

earlier promotion of radical democracy, where decisions simply emerge from

the population at large, much as civic republicans would have it. A constitution

is not subject to the immediate popular will, as civic republicanism suggests, it

is integral to there being a popular will. It guarantees that reasoned debate can

take place.



51

The term democracy is closely linked with that of liberty, and indeed they

are often used together. During the Cold War it was often contrasted with the

communist system, but in fact the communist system was democratic, in the

sense that it held elections. It was not liberal, because power held sway over

reasoned law. Democracy itself has a chequered history. Socrates was a victim of

a democratic state, Athens. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth century it

was a term one only used against one’s opponents. Dunn reminds us that

democracy is a word of Greek origin, and “populist politics were necessarily

very firmly vernacular … as opposed to Greek. The intellectuals’ politics by

contrast were either very firmly autocratic, or committed ... to the effective

concentration of power.”60

The argument so far has shown why democracy in its

simple form is too simplistic, and why the liberal revolution of the seventeenth

century was so revolutionary.

Although modern liberalism emphasizes individual rights, Locke placed

less significance on these than on a fair procedure. His stress was not on the

particular rights of the individual, as much as in the need for the rule of law.

This was also clear to his contemporaries. Even before Locke penned his treatise,

the Habeas Corpus Act had come into force in 1679. This Act, taking its title from

60 Dunn 7.



52

the Latin for “you may have the body,” allowed any individual to demand that a

magistrate produce an imprisoned person and state the charge under which they

were held. It is testament to the stability of the liberal democracy that this act has

only been suspended once in British history, during the French Revolution and

subsequent Napoleonic wars. Macaulay sums up the importance of this Act:

From the time of the Great Charter, the substantive lawrespecting the personal liberty of Englishmen had been nearly thesame as at present: but it had been inefficacious for want of astringent system of procedure. What was needed was not a newright, but a prompt and searching remedy; and such a remedy theHabeas Corpus Act supplied.61

Does this prove a need to replace the nation state with the constitutional

state? Not for Habermas, because “compared with nationalism constitutional

patriotism for many people appears too thin a bond to hold together complex

societies.”62 A constitution is only part of the political sub-system. It still leaves a

need for an identity that encompasses the whole system. Over time, a

continuous identity becomes the history of the nation state itself.

61 Thomas Macaulay, The Illustrated Macaulay’s History of England: The Magnificent

Journey of the British People from Serfdom to Parliamentary Government, ed. John Canning

(London: Guild, 1988) 100.

62 Habermas, “The European Nation-State” 289-290.



53

This creates two issues. First, on what does a new nation state have to

draw? The only possible answer is that every case is different. What is crucial, is

to understand how important this is to what could be called the health of a

nation state. The effectiveness of a nation state’s institutions to support reasoned

debate will to a large part depend on the extent to which those institutions are

seen as integral parts of the national identity. If they are not seen as fundamental

it may be possible to mobilize people against them, with almost inevitably

disastrous consequences.

The second issue is one that can be addressed once political debate is

established: how a nation state develops its identity. A nation state is not the

same as it was a hundred years ago. Just as in the same way I am not the same

person I was ten years ago, I incorporate that person, but I have also included

new experiences, and changed, hopefully grown, in the process. Though I may

even repudiate words I spoke and actions I performed then, the fact that I did

speak and act in that way is a part of me. The words I speak and actions I

perform now, in the same way, will affect my identity in the future. For the

nation state, as for the conscious person, identity is history, ingrained in its

model self.



54

To provide the resources to allow the national identity to grow, Habermas

suggests a need for social and cultural rights, as well as political ones. Making a

distinct effort to celebrate minority cultures helps the nation state to develop, by

providing the resources for continuing debate, in the form of novel perspectives

and approaches. All the members of the community become aware of the rich

diversity of perspectives available to draw on in understanding and tackling the

new and the perennial problems with which every nation state has to deal.

Perhaps it is in this way that the civic republican goal of strengthening

community finds its solution, though ironically in challenging not encouraging

commonality, to generate diversity.

How does all this help our understanding of the impact of new media on

the nation state? Communication clearly plays a central role in the coordination

from which the nation state emerges. A common language mediated through the

printed word enabled the growth of unprecedented levels of complex

intercommunication. Leaving aside the not insignificant issue of language, new

media makes knowledge available worldwide, and much more accessible than

previously. This makes liberal states likely to be even more successful, as they

will be able to draw on a far wider base of experience, thus learning more

quickly.



55

Although language and power structures have a certain arbitrariness,

owing to historical accidents, over time, debate builds on what has gone on in

the past, allowing the system to adjust itself, and enabling continuous

improvement or learning. Foucault’s weakness is to fail to recognize the benefit

of coming later rather than sooner in a liberal state. Ultimately, it is the liberal

state’s capacity to learn that gives it its strength, and enables it to function more

effectively than autocratic hierarchies, which coordinate action but suppress

rather than institutionalize the debate that enables learning.

It also raises the question of how new media will affect relations between

nation states. To help answer this, the next chapter examines the perspective of

individual people in their relations with their peers. It completes the summary

of the background against which the impact of the new media will be examined.

Having done this, the following chapter will ask if it is possible to treat relations

between individual states in the same way as those between individual people,

if so, how this could be done, and what we should expect the effect of new

media to be in all this.



Chapter IV

Morality: The Why of the Nation State

Just as power is the choice that people appear to have when viewed from

the outside, the subject of the last chapter, so morality is the choice that we feel

we have on the inside when looking out. This chapter considers why anyone

should choose to accept the limitations and responsibilities placed on them by

the liberal state. The answer of the last chapter is, to survive. We have seen how,

from a power perspective, a system that organizes debate beats those that fail to.

But there is more to it than this. We have seen that the success of the liberal

system is a consequence of the ingenuity it unleashes. This is a necessary

condition of survival, but it is not sufficient. Drawing on John Rawls’ argument

in Political Liberalism, this chapter explains that what ultimately distinguishes

liberal polities from others is people’s willingness to work within the system;

people believe themselves better off in the system than out of it because it

allows them the maximum freedom to pursue whatever their own goals are. It is

the two characteristics together that are necessary to explain the liberal nation

state’s longevity. Not only is it powerful enough to overcome external threats,

but also its morality keeps it free from the endemic discontinuous internal



57

change of other polities. Liberalism’s continuous change means that hard-won

lessons are not discarded when a new polity is established. Success emerges

from a virtuous circle: the capability for learning lessons makes for a superiority

over competing forms, and continued survival means that more lessons are

learned.

So, why do people accept the basic structure of the liberal state? Because

it has at its heart the principle of political equality, at least in theory. But what

does equality mean in this context? Our examination of the nation state started

with the idea of organization, and discovered the power of organized debate. In

his major 1971 work, A Theory of Justice, John Rawls put these two ideas in the

reverse order, to help understand political equality. He started from debate and

suggested why it is that, as individuals in a collective discussion, we would

choose to organize: because even the worst off will be better off than under a

disorganized system. Defining justice as the primary political virtue, and the

purpose of equality to be fairness, Rawls characterizes the goal of the liberal

state as justice as fairness.

Rawls’ first aim is to establish principles of social justice prior to any

particular individual's conception of good. To do this he constructs what he

terms an original position, formed of individuals who understand society, but



58

do not know their own positions in it; they are said to be under a veil of

ignorance. Rawls suggests that in this situation each individual will come to the

same conclusion, the need to apply two fundamental principles. The first states

that “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of

equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.” The

second, and secondary, principle is that “social and economic inequalities are to

be arranged so that they are both: (a) to the greatest benefit of the least

advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle, and (b) attached to offices

and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.”63

The system Rawls describes, perhaps not surprisingly, matches the

idealization of the liberal political system in which he lives, and which

Habermas too describes. The first principle effectively describes universal

suffrage and the rule of law, where everybody has to be treated equally by the

political and legal systems. The second justifies market economies, and allows

widespread inequality in the system as a whole, though with certain constraints

needed to guarantee its good, i.e., that the least well off are better off than they

would be with institutions ensuring greater equality.

63 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1971) 302.



59

The model Rawls sets out explains the extraordinary internal coherence of

the liberal state. First, he establishes the autonomy of the individuals involved,

because they have no ties or obligations, beyond a general one to their

immediate offspring. He then shows that from this assumption people would

choose a system that matches, in broad outline, a political system that is an

idealization of the modern liberal state. Because a central tenet of that type of

state is that it is the responsibility of the individual to determine their own life,

that is to be autonomous, coherence exists between the values of the individual

and the values of the liberal state.

Between individuals there is a second mode of coherence, for two

reasons. First, because everybody has equal political rights, everybody has the

opportunity to challenge the weaknesses in the system, and can seek their own

advantage, within the system. Secondly, because as the least well-off are better

off than they would be otherwise, even they can be confident that they too

benefit from the system. Rawls is at pains to emphasize that these benefits have

many dimensions, including people’s self-esteem.

It is these degrees of internal coherence that align the motivations of the

liberal state’s citizens, helping to ensure the integrity of the system, and its

longevity. It is in this way that the liberal nation state is not subject to the



60

destructive internal tensions that afflict other political systems, or at least not to

the same degree. In addition, because diverse individuals and groups are

recognized and involved, the liberal state is able to mobilize the distinctive

perceptual resources they can bring for solving problems, thereby increasing its

learning capacity.

These are very admirable principles, but how can they be applied, let

alone implemented? Rawls proposes moving beyond utilitarianism’s simplistic

notion of the function of liberal government to maximize utility, established if

necessary through majority voting, to a much more sophisticated goal of

maintaining a legitimate framework of processes: pure procedural justice. This is

obtained when:

there is no independent criterion for the right result: insteadthere is a correct or fair procedure such that the outcome islikewise correct or fair, whatever it is, provided that the procedurehas been properly followed. … A fair procedure translates itsfairness to the outcome only when it is actually carried out. Inorder, therefore, to apply the notion of pure procedural justice todistributive shares it is necessary to set up and to administerimpartially a just system of institutions. … The great practical

advantage of pure procedural justice is that it is no longernecessary in meeting the demands of justice to keep track of theendless variety of circumstances and the changing relativepositions of particular persons. One avoids the problem of



61

defining principles to cope with the enormous complexities whichwould arise if such details were relevant.64

Just as Habermas found that an institutional structure guaranteeing

political debate is central to the resourcefulness and longevity of the liberal

state, Rawls finds that an institutional system that provides a fair procedure is

the primary necessity for justice as fairness. It is Rawls’ fair procedure that

guarantees political debate.

Ideal as his system apparently is, Rawls is not immune from criticism.

Significantly, the most sustained criticism has come from within the liberal

democratic tradition itself, from a number of theorists collectively known as

communitarians. In Liberalism and the Limits of Justice,65 Michael Sandel presents

the argument that it makes no sense to talk about the priority of right over good,

as this in itself makes a moral judgment about the good of individual rights. It is

only the community that can determine what is right and good, and the only way

that the individual can ensure their autonomy is by participating in a communal

political process. It is only the communal nature of the process that makes it fair,

64 Rawls, Theory of Justice 87.

65 Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1982) 1.



62

as communities have their own conceptions of fairness and so any basis for a

procedure can potentially be disputed.

Sandel believes that the concept of individual autonomy leads to

conceptual contradictions: either people have ties or they are autonomous, in

which case there is no reason for them to accept the constraints of Rawls’ original

position if it is not in their interests.66

Sandel describes the point of the original

position not as a forum in which mutual boundaries are debated, but as “the

coming to self-awareness of an inter-subjective being.”67 For Sandel, an

individual can only conceive themselves in terms bequeathed to them by their

society. It is only because this identity includes an element of sharing in a

community that an individual would consider adhering to any policy that

benefited another member of their community over themselves.

However, Rawls does not see a contradiction, because he affirms the

priority of the individual, and of society existing for the benefit of its members:

“In justice as fairness society is interpreted as a cooperative venture for mutual

advantage. The basic structure is a public system of rules defining a scheme of

66 Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, 2nd ed. (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1996) 66.

67 Sandel 132.



63

activities that leads me to act together so as to produce a greater sum of benefits

and assigns to each certain recognized claims to a share in the proceeds.”68

However, underlying Sandel’s criticism is the idea that society and the

individual are inseparable. This is a more difficult argument to counter. The

previous chapter explained and endorsed Habermas’ argument that individual

and state autonomy are interdependent. A Theory of Justice is a magnificent

achievement, a bridge between economic and political theory. It provides a

mechanism that deals with many of the concepts from which economic theory

builds, particularly rational man. The fatal weakness of utilitarian liberalism is

that it is impossible to actually decide any moral questions, because it is

impossible to operationalize the concept of greatest total happiness. By

describing a realizable process, Rawls provides a method of tackling the moral

issues that economics and capitalism are unable to deal with. Yet it begs the

question with which Sandel wrestles.

In what could be considered an answer to these criticisms, Rawls’ most

recent book, Political Liberalism, proposes that his principles of justice are not

absolute moral standards, but a political framework that institutes tolerance in




64

the diverse societies that constitute modern liberal democracies. It is political,

not comprehensive or metaphysical, in the sense that it

is framed to apply solely to the basic structure of society, itsmain political, social and economic institutions as a unified schemeof social cooperation; that it is presented independently of anywider comprehensive religious or philosophical doctrine; and thatit is elaborated in terms of fundamental ideas viewed as implicit inthe public political culture of a democratic society.69

It would be disingenuous to suggest that because Rawls says “the

original position is to be seen as a device of representation and hence any

agreement reached by the parties must be regarded as both hypothetical and

nonhistorical”70 he has discarded the most valuable aspect of his Kantian

inheritance, a categorical imperative of autonomy and the philosophy of history.

What Rawls is in fact rejecting is the idea that “there is but one reasonable and

rational conception of the good”71 at the political level, not even that determined

by one’s community. He proposes instead “that political liberalism supposes

that there are many conflicting reasonable comprehensive doctrines with their

conceptions of the good, each compatible with the full rationality of human

69 John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) 223.

70 Rawls, Political Liberalism 24.




65

persons, so far as that can be ascertained with the resources of a political

conception of justice.”72 The only particular morality that must remain at the

political level is what he terms overlapping consensus. “Such a consensus consists

of all the reasonable opposing religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines

likely to persist over generations and to gain a sizable body of adherents in a

more or less just constitutional regime, a regime in which the criterion of justice

is that political conception itself.”73

Because this does not lead directly to specific moral principles, Rawls

recognizes the need for a more abstract approach to morality, in the form of a

process for determining the overlapping consensus in any community. He terms

this process public reason, “the reason of equal citizens who, as a collective body,

exercise final political and coercive power over one another in enacting laws.”74

One result of deciding to allow so many disparate political and religious

convictions is that the autonomy that we have established as an important

ingredient of the liberal state cannot be assumed in the broadest sense. And in

practice there are many people who do not believe that they are autonomous, as






66

well as many who reject the notion that individual autonomy is a crucial

component of the good life. It is therefore not possible to argue on a

metaphysical level; it is important to restrict discussion to the interpersonal, the

political level.

This does make the scope of the theory less comprehensive, which could

make it a little less satisfying, and seems to solve fewer problems. However, it

does provide a better solution to one problematic issue, how one makes value

judgments in a world of multiple and sometimes conflicting value systems. This

could be the central question of political philosophy, even of modern political

life.

For Rawls in Political Liberalism, the moral principle he seeks to apply now

is not so much fairness, as toleration: “the success of liberal constitutionalism

came as a discovery of a new social possibility: the possibility of a reasonably

harmonious and stable pluralist society.”75 Different worldviews frequently

make debates to establish fairness futile. Rather than seek to balance conflicting

values, to the greatest extent possible, individuals should be free to make their

own choices. Rawls locates the origin of this idea in the irreconcilability of

75 Rawls, Political Liberalism xxv.



67

religious movements following the Reformation.76 Because this was not a

problem in the ancient world, the issue was not addressed by its philosophers.

This could be said to bring us back to the original definition of liberty, as

the freedom to act as one chooses to the extent it does not adversely affect others.

This takes us back to Locke again, and the English revolution. Almost as well

known as his Second Treatise of Civil Government is his A Letter Concerning

Toleration. One example of the extraordinary nature of the revolution was the

coherence of theory and practice. The profound relevance of Locke’s work in his

time is seen in the fact that Romanall suggests that this letter “may be regarded

as the theoretical counterpart of the Toleration Act of 1689.”77 The Toleration Act

would not appear very tolerant in the twentieth century, but it was an important

milestone, which came about through organized debate, and strengthened the

English nation state’s capacity for subsequent organized debate.

A cycle of positive reinforcement was created again, this time because

toleration leads to the benefits of diversity for problem-solving, as discussed in

the previous chapter. Success, particularly in an economic sense, attracts people

76 Rawls, Political Liberalism xxii.

77 Patrick Romanall, ed., in John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, trans. William

Popple (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall, 1950) 5.



68

from diverse backgrounds. More diversity and the blurring of boundaries

sensitizes people to be more tolerant, opening their minds to new possibilities.

These lead to new solutions, which mean more success and so on.

Of course this begs the question, how is toleration institutionalized?

Given the importance of history to a nation state’s identity suggested earlier, this

is not a trivial exercise. Many factors will be important, such as political

leadership. However, fundamental to any tolerant society has to be Rawls’

concept of public reason. It is through public reason that one secures the

cooperation of each individual, without being specific about individuals or their

ties.

Rawls seeks more than a “modus vivendi” where people compromise on

a balance of power, but actually enter into constructive dialog to build a system

where the whole is greater than its parts. In this way, participants obtain benefits

over and above those they could secure simply by themselves. It is this process

that constitutes public reason. As one component of this, Rawls identifies a need

for a “duty of civility”78

that can only be developed over time, if the law gives

people confidence. Public reason requires education in its practice.




69

In summary, because one person’s virtue is another’s prejudice, Rawls

has issued a call to “apply toleration to philosophy itself,”79 to give people a

choice of philosophy; this is the heart of the liberal vision. To make this a reality,

and not just in cases where people have the necessary family resources, is the

function of the second principle that allows non-political inequalities, so long as

they benefit the least advantaged most and guarantee fair equality of

opportunity.

One curiosity is that Rawls limits political liberalism to “democratic

societies.”80 But is it not the case that a democratic society needs a liberal

political conception that admits the equality of incompatible worldviews?

Taking into account the problems with the term democracy discussed

previously, is it not liberalism that is the foundation of effective democracy? As

Rawls himself says:

our exercise of political power is proper and hence justifiable only when it is exercised in accordance with aconstitution the essentials of which all citizens may reasonably beexpected to endorse in the light of principle and ideals acceptable

to them as reasonable and rational. This is the liberal principle oflegitimacy.81


80 Rawls, Political Liberalism 13-14.

81Rawls, Political Liberalism 217.



70

Democracy is a consequence of that legitimacy that in turn is a

consequence of the principle of political equality, the first of Rawls’ principles of

justice.

Although firmly situated in our world of diverse cultures and global

horizons, Rawls’ principal merit appears to be encouraging a return to Locke’s

focus on process before morality, or reason over virtue. For the autonomous

individuals in the original position, with no ties or obligations beyond their

immediate family, liberal society is very stable, and assures everyone of the

least-worst life experience.

The institutions that facilitate public reason first came into existence

because of the size of the nation state. As well as giving it military strength at the

beginning of the modern age, size also created a need for the mechanisms that

make public reason possible. Unlike the city state, the nation state was too big

for every citizen to participate in public meetings. The rule of law had made

possible ancient empires, but they lacked popular involvement, except through

the famously unreasonable mob. Necessity being the mother of invention, the

growth in demand for popular involvement in government, in return for taxation

to fight foreign wars, brought about the innovation of representation. This began

to give the general population a voice. It also reinforced the need to consider the



71

abstract person and to debate issues in general terms, because invoking one

among a multitude of individuals is not a strong argument. This has the effect of

moderating debate, by taking it away from specific cases. Representative

government also, to a degree, restricts the people who take part in debate to

those who are able to engage with abstract constructs, making it more difficult to

deal in purely personal terms. This does not prevent special interests from

engaging in the political process, but encourages them to develop their

arguments, and their positions, in terms of the general interest.

One useful practical innovation that improved the effectiveness of the

system was another result of the English revolution, that of parliamentary

committees to consider the details of legislation. With committee members

representing parliamentary colleagues some diversity of view is maintained, but

with smaller numbers the capacity for reasoned debate is increased.

The impartial administration of law is also crucial to the success of the

system. Because all citizens are treated as equal before the law, in principle, it

follows that background, motivation, and value systems have no relevance. Even

in criminal law motivation is important evidence, but not a wrong in itself.

Background is no excuse, although most would agree it has profound affect on

later activity. This is because autonomy carries responsibilities, as well as rights.



72

Liberal democracy gained the support of the vast majority of its citizens

because it secured the property of the individual and required their obedience

to nothing but the law. Those laws were enacted by a government in which many

had a say, and to which all were equally subject, including the lawmakers. This

instituted across the nation the golden rule: do to others as you would wish

them to do to you. This law was upheld through a government supported by

taxation that could only be levied as agreed by the people's representatives, a

remarkably good bargain in light of the innovation it unleashed, and the way

this organization produced undreamed of wealth for most. Without the state

there would be no monetary medium of exchange for anyone. Such was the

success of this form of government that the state was able to secure the health of

all its citizens, providing social security for their basic needs and healthcare

when illnesses or injury occurred.

All this is the consequence of the rule of reason that is the fundamental

feature of liberalism. A rational framework of laws gives the individual the

confidence to experiment, and profit when they are successful. Democracy and

due process of law enable legislation to change as conditions change and correct

mistakes as they come to notice. The economic system that this structure secures



73

provides an incentive to retain and develop the knowledge required to

accumulate wealth, the result of producing value for consumers.

The invention of the Liberal state has profoundly altered the raison d’être

for the nation state, from securing its borders against armed aggression, to

securing the ability of its citizens to understand and tame their world. Tolerance

justifies autonomy, just as political organization does: power and morality

converge at liberalism.

It may not be accidental that there is a correlation between Habermas’

deliberative politics and Rawls’ idea of public reason. During the Cold War,

democracy became a label used to distinguish the Western nations from the

Eastern block. This may have created a public impression that it was simply

elections that divided the two political systems, yet this was clearly not true. The

deeper and more profound difference was the rule of law, which in practice

restricted the activities of the rich and powerful to a far greater extent in the

West, and in the long run created better living conditions for the vast majority.

After the largely peaceful revolutions in Eastern Europe, almost exactly

three centuries after England’s bloodless revolution, we now live in a

predominantly liberal world, one that acknowledges the widespread benefits of

the rule of law. The ideas of deliberative politics and public reason are possibly



74

the result of a need for a deeper understanding of the liberal nation state,

moving beyond confrontations where each side carries irreconcilable ideological

baggage.

The impact of new media can be examined from two perspectives that

draw on this analysis of political morality, the national and the international. At

the national level, new media have the potential to make individual people

aware of the benefits of liberalism, and the political strength of organized

opposition. Perhaps more interesting is taking the perspective of autonomous

states in the international system. Although there has always been

communication at this level, new media vastly increase its possible intensity.

This makes complex debate and close coordination at the international level

much more feasible.

Throughout the modern era the boundaries that surround the nation state

have effectively impeded communication between each one’s citizens. New

media remove this barrier for many social activities, one of which is political

discourse. New media make deliberative politics and public reason possible on

a global scale, though as previously shown, the ability to communicate is not

enough in itself. What principles can be learned from the experience of nation



75

states and applied to enabling organized debate to be institutionalized on a

global scale?



Chapter V

New Media and the Future of the Nation State

The previous three chapters have demonstrated how the nation state in its

liberal form mediates power and morality. While being possibly arbitrary, even

so the liberal nation state is enormously robust. More than simply happening to

be stronger than alternative forms of social and political organization, it

incorporates and even generates a logic that reinforces its distinctive

characteristics. From the position of the individual, toleration as a principle of

political morality justifies those political systems that balance the logic of

cooperation and competition. It is this principle that in organizational

embodiment is the liberal nation state. Because mutual toleration leads to fewer

conflicts and gives individuals more choices in their lives, and so a greater sense

of their own existence and worth, the liberal nation state should not go away.

If the liberal nation state is as robust and as desirable as this analysis

suggests, why should a new media threaten its hegemony? That is the first

question this chapter has to answer. However, once the changes already brought

about by new media have been described, and the essential difference between

the global level and any system previously developed becomes clear, the issue



77

of incorporating the lessons of the liberal nation state at the global level can be

addressed.

Before examining the case for the latest new media revolution, we will

first of all look at the historical evidence of two previous media revolutions,

writing and printing. Marshal McLuhan famously proposed that the medium is

the message, and that the cultures that result from spoken, written, and

electronic media derive much of their difference from the qualities of the

medium through which the culture is transmitted.82 I suggest that this is the case,

but not in the way McLuhan proposed.

Writing was not a sudden invention, but it is a striking fact that it was the

Greeks who first invented a fully functioning alphabet, who also first developed

many of the characteristic practices of Western culture, including scientific

inquiry and democratic government. Murray in his extensive history of early

Greek civilization describes the development of the Greek writing system from

its close Phoenician relation:

The Greek letter shapes are adapted from Phoenician; theorder of the two alphabets is essentially the same; and even thenames of most of the Greek letters, which have no significancebeyond their initial sound (alpha, beta, gamma …), are taken from

82 Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge MA: MIT

Press, 1994) 7.



78

Phoenician words which have meanings in themselves: aleph means‘ox’, beth ‘house’, gimel ‘throwing sick’, and so on. The adaptation ofPhoenician to Greek is almost mechanical, except in one essentialrespect: the invention of vowels transformed what can in a certainsense be seen as a simplified syllabic script, into a genuinelyalphabetic script, in which all the main speech sounds (vowels andconsonants) were for the first time isolated and representedindividually. The resulting system has proved so flexible that it isstill in use for most modern languages, and can in fact representadequately all languages which are “spoken” in the normal sense.

The particular modification introduced by the Greeks wasthus revolutionary in its consequences, but it shows the samemeticulous study of the Phoenician script. For the forms of most ofthe Greek vowels are derived from Phoenician consonantal orsemi-consonantal letters for which Greek had no use, and eventheir position within the Greek alphabet is the same as isPhoenician. Indeed many of the early names are those of theoriginal Phoenician consonants, and show how the vowels werearrived at by “creative misunderstanding” of their prototypes.83

Murray established the late eighth century BCE as the decades in which

this invention took place. The Greek world of this time, and for the next four

hundred years, was remarkably similar to the period in which the liberal nation

state was invented; a collection of politically independent but culturally

connected states, though lacking any distinction between church and state, or

power and morality.

Havelock suggests that the transition from a high culture mediated

through aural communication, the function of the epic poets, to one relying on



79

written documents, brought about a deep and profound change in the capability

of society:

to use Plato’s language, how did the Greeks ever wake up?The fundamental answer must lie in the changing

technology of communication. Refreshment of memory throughwritten signs enabled a reader to dispense with most of thatemotional identification by which alone the acoustic record wassure of recall. This could release psychic energy, for a review and

rearrangement of what had now been written down, and of whatcould be seen as an object and not just heard and felt. You could asit were take a second look at it. And this separation of yourselffrom the remembered word may in turn lie behind the growing usein the fifth century of a device often accepted as peculiar toSocrates but which may well have been a general device forchallenging the habit of poetic identification and getting people tobreak with it. This was the method of dialectic, not necessarily thatdeveloped form of logical chain-reasoning found in Plato’sdialogues, but the original device in its simplest form, which

consisted in asking a speaker to repeat himself and explain what hehad meant. In Greek, the words for explain, say, and mean couldcoincide. That is, the original function of the dialectical questionwas simply to force the speaker to repeat a statement alreadymade, with the underlying assumption that there was somethingunsatisfactory about the statement, and it had better be rephrased.Now, the statement in question, if it concerned important mattersof cultural tradition and morals, would be a poetised one, usingthe imagery and often the rhythms of poetry. It was one whichinvited you to identify with some emotively effective example, and

to repeat it over again. But to say, “What do you mean? Say thatagain”, abruptly disturbed the pleasurable complacency felt in thepoetic formula of the image. It meant using different words andthose equivalent words would fail to be poetic; they would beprosaic. As the question was asked, and the alternative prosaic

83 Oswyn Murray, Early Greece, 2nd ed. (London: Fontana Press, 1993) 94.



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formula was attempted, the imaginations of speaker and teacherwere offended, and the dream so to speak was disrupted, andsome unpleasant effort of calculative reflection was substituted. Inshort, the dialectic, a weapon we suspect to have been employed inthis form by a whole group of intellectuals in the last half of thefifth century, was a weapon for arousing the consciousness from itsdream language and stimulating it to think abstractly. And it didthis, the conception of “me thinking about Achilles” rather than“me identifying with Achilles” was born.84

Athens laid the foundation for its historically enduring achievement in the

early sixth century BCE, when its appointed lawgiver Solon produced a

constitution incorporating elements of democracy, and had it written on wooden

tablets that, judging from the fact that they are recorded as being on an

adjustable mounting, were designed to be available for reading.85 In the middle

of the same century, dialog was born, when Thespis, the first tragic actor,

stepped out in front of the dithyrambic chorus in the festival to Dionysus.86

Democracy was first fully established in Athens by Cleisthenes at the end of that

century in 508 BCE, after two years of fractional conflict.87 Throughout the

84 Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge MA: Harvard Belknap, 1963) 208-209.

85 Murray 183.

86 R.P. Winnington-Ingram, “The Origins of Tragedy,” in The Cambridge History of

Classical Literature: Volume I Part 2: Greek Drama, ed. P.E. Easterling and B.M.W. Knox

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 2.

87 M. I. Finley, Early Greece: The Bronze and Archaic Ages (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981)

124.



81

following fifth century BCE, Athens experienced an extraordinary cultural

flowering.

As Karl Popper noted, Socrates was the first person who saw the potential

power of a democracy that allowed self-criticism, though he died for holding to

the principle.88 In the early fourth century BCE, his pupil Plato chose to express

himself through written dialog, and his academy formed the prototype

distribution mechanism for handwritten, and hand-copied, literature. Soon

afterwards Aristotle was writing his books, and philosophical literature was

firmly established, giving people of the classical world a new, rational,

perspective on their place in their world, and their relationships to each other.

Because this literature used a full alphabet capable of distinguishing every

word, unlike previous literature it needed no human intervention in its

transmission; this literature was not an aid to memory for a self perpetuating

priesthood, but a body of knowledge in its own right. It no longer relied on

people to communicate it accurately, so the ever inventive human spirit found a

new role for itself, not as transmitters but as critics and, potentially, as

improvers.

88 Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1966) 189.



82

By the time of Aristotle though, Persian pressure from outside the Greek

world and the exhaustion of centuries of instability allowed Philip of Macedon

to unite the whole Hellenic world. After his son Alexander had led his army on a

rampage, much as Cromwell and Napoleon were to do in later centuries, his

successors’ states were soon incorporated into the Roman empire, which owed

much to the Greeks, but was internally too stable to be able to build to any great

extent on their innovations.

Once the Roman empire disintegrated, a large-scale political

configuration developed that supported a level of effective dialog, as described

in Chapter II. But another new media was needed to make widespread political

dialog a reality. In the process it also transformed large-scale social structures.

Two thousand years after the revolution of the written word, the fifteenth

century saw the invention of the book printed using movable type, the first

product to be mass manufactured.

Eisenstein describes how the impact of printing was truly revolutionary.

She explores its effect on three remarkable areas of the early modern world,

which indicates that in many ways printing brought about the transformation



83

from the medieval to the modern world.89 She substantiated this hypothesis by

considering the role of the printed book in the Renaissance, the Reformation, and

the Scientific Revolution. Eisenstein shows that printing had a profound role in

each, though one often not recognized. First of all, she suggests that the

Renaissance achieved an enduring recognition compared to previous classical

revivals, because the book was invented in time to be used for recording and

immortalizing re-discovered classical writings.90

Eisenstein proposes that the role of printing in the Reformation was more

critical as the process itself was more unusual. Traditional explanations for the

Reformation initiated by Martin Luther’s theses fail to identify their unique

characteristic. The theses, in both their substance and in their appearing in public

on a church door, followed accepted, indeed essential, practices for a professor

of theology. What was novel was the fact that Luther’s theses also appeared in

print.91 Although no direct evidence exists either way, subsequent events do

suggest that Luther was not wholly innocent in this happening, though he

89 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1983) 13.

90 Eisenstein 117.

91 Eisenstein 151.



84

clearly could not have anticipated, and indeed regretted, the division of the

Church that resulted.

Eisenstein also suggests a direct relationship between the introduction of

printing and the astronomical revolution that signaled the start of the Scientific

Revolution. In fact, the word “revolution” comes from the title of Copernicus’

book, although he meant it in the sense of a planetary orbit. Copernicus was one

of the first generation of astronomers with the potential to benefit from

printing.92 Another key player in the revolution, Tycho Brahe, was a student

when the first printed astronomical books were produced. Whereas previous

generations of students would have been fortunate to have direct access to one

written work, he had simultaneous access to the two astronomical models of the

solar system available at the time, and it was this that inspired him to make

measurements accurate enough to compare the theories.93 He also took

advantage of printing to record and disseminate his findings to a far wider

audience than could have been conceived of by earlier generations.

Although we do not know who invented the Greek alphabet (Murray

believes it was one individual), we do know who invented movable type

92 Eisenstein 209.

93 Eisenstein 211.



85

printing. However, in both cases the value of the innovation was so clear that it

spread very quickly through the common cultural sphere. In the same way that

the Athenians almost certainly did not invent the Greek alphabet, but probably

benefited most through applying it to the political process, the second chapter

showed how, although printing was not invented in England, the English people

were the first to leverage the potential of the new print media, and how the

concept of nationhood was an effect of the printed Bible and a debate conducted

in printed pamphlets. Even before the civil war, in late sixteenth-century

England, Shakespeare’s historical plays were profoundly nationalistic, in a way

that people of the times portrayed would not have been. In Richard II, John of

Gaunt eulogizes:

This royal throne of kings, this scept’red isle,This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,This other Eden, demi-paradise,This fortress built by Nature for herself,Against infection and the hand of war,This happy breed of men, this little world,This precious stone set in the silver sea,Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,Against the envy of less happier lands;This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,94

94 William Shakespeare, Richard II, act II, scene i.



86

In much the same way that the Athenian tradgedians used writing to help

them record their performances, sixteenth-century plays would have been made

widely available through a combination of print for those who could read and

performance for those who could not. Within a generation of Shakespeare’s

death, the nation reconstituted itself by taking sovereignty into the hands of its

people, through civil war. The political publications of Locke and Newton’s

publication of his Principia changed the next generation’s perception of their

world.

In the cases of both classical Athens and early modern England

revolutionary and enduring political innovations were developed through

combining a new media with political debate. So in the twentieth century the

conjunction of politically independent nation states with a largely common

economic, if not broader cultural, outlook and a new communication medium

presents a possibility that new media might bring about a revolution that leads

to the end of the nation state as a functioning political reality.

What was first presented as a thought experiment may already be well

underway. Given all the evidence presented so far in this chapter, it is an

extraordinary fact that the first inter-governmental organization was the

International Telecommunications Union, though at its foundation in 1865 called



87

the International Telegraph Union. Just over twenty years after the invention of

the telegraph by Samuel Morse, and ten years before the invention of the

telephone by Alexander Graham Bell, it was apparent that the existing practice

of multi-lateral treaties would not be sufficient to cope with the pace of

technological change. An enduring mechanism was necessary.

In the cultural sphere, in much the same way as the Athenian tragedians

and Shakespere were early users of new media who caught and shaped the

issues of their times, the questions addressed by filmmakers such as Steven

Spielburg in films like ET, Jurassic Park, and Schindler’s List, concern deep

questions about the communities we live in, and our place in the Universe. They

shape the consciousness of people around the globe. Their worldwide

distribution suggests that people are taking an increasingly global perspective,

not just in the West, but throughout our world, thus creating a global set of

cultural icons and values. However, there has been a subtle shift. In The Persians,

Aeschylus’ heroes were the Athenian citizens who fought and defeated the army

of the mighty Persian empire at Salamis. In Shakespere’s Henry V the heroes

were the valiant English yeomen who defeated the cream of the French nobility

at Agincourt. For Spielburg in Schindler’s List, as for the modern world, the

closest we come to heroes are the victims of the Holocaust; individual people



88

who just wanted to be left to get on with their lives, but became innocent victims

of a government that thought it could create a perfect world.

Before the present century, there has always been an outside to every

community: someone with whom there was no reciprocal understanding, and

hence no communication, so there was always war. However, this need no

longer be the case. In an apparently trivial but actually deep and profound

change, nations no longer go to war with each other, soccer and other sports have

taken its place. Now we see ourselves as citizens of one world. In retrospect, the

world wars can be seen as the global version of the civil wars that have always

accompanied paradigm shifts in large scale social organization.

Through the new medium of electronic information, goods have been

broadcast for most of our century at relatively minute marginal cost, but the pace

of change shows little evidence of slowing down. More than this, as a fully

functioning alphabet was needed to capture every syllable, and the usefulness of

printing required movable type, so the full utilization of electronic media

requires digitization. The invention of the Internet, itself already a couple of

decades old, means that a digital information exchange network on a global

scale is rapidly developing. Increasingly, more people will have access to the

tools necessary to create and distribute multimedia based works; for example



89

personal computers incorporating video cameras, with the computational power

to edit full motion video. Although these will only be accessible to the rich at

first, they will increasingly be available to individuals and small groups outside

major media organizations. Technology knows few borders, and information

technology shows no sign of escaping its history of precipitously declining costs.

High bandwidth switched networks will bring video on demand, and the end of

the broadcasting channel as we know it. People will have a genuine choice as to

what they watch. As more programs reach global audiences, others will appeal

to minorities within and across national borders. The end of national channels, or

at least the end of their monopoly, will breach one more major barrier to

reducing the mindshare the nation state enjoys with its citizens.

The multiple media that digital electronics make possible allow people to

absorb information much more easily and quickly. Allied to this is its capacity to

convey more convincing evidence. A handwritten text was prone to mistakes in

copying, and clearly subject to an individual’s own view. Printed material

offered a detachment that increased confidence in its evidence. To an even

greater extent, as the Rodney King case illustrated, video photography, though

always open to manipulation, offers a level of confidence to its viewers which is

very difficult to refute. It is also able to capture nuances of word and action often



90

lost when recorded in written form. Adding this to the increased rapidity of

transmission suggests that decisions will be able to be made more rapidly than

previously. Taken together, this evidence suggests that the scale and scope of

our interactions have increased, but not that the fundamental logic that drives

them has changed.

The nations that contracted to peace at Westphalia and effectively brought

about the modern international political regime were overwhelmingly

hierarchical, and looked at the world in that way. For them there were only two

choices, hierarchy or anarchy. Understandably, they chose anarchy. However, the

lesson of liberty is that it is not simply a choice between hierarchy and anarchy,

but that there is a third way: autonomy. In other words, freedom can be limited

neither by others’ whims, nor by the logic of the system, but by mutually self-

imposed constraints. The central two chapters of this thesis have shown that

liberty requires the existence of a robust institutional structure, to ensure the

organized debate that lies at its heart. What are the possibilities for this in the

sphere of international relations?

Rather than attempting to design sound theoretical structures devoid of

the relevant context, we will first briefly survey contemporary international

institutional arrangements. Antonio Cassese, in International Law in a Divided



91

World, gives a clear and comprehensive overview of international law. Although

written in the mid-1980s, when there were three groups in the international

arena, namely the West, the socialist world, and the less developed countries,

the work retains its value, especially as it sets developments in their historical

context. The Westphalian model of sovereign states being the only players in the

international arena, and military power being the only factor to account for, still

has some influence; but whether or not this ever really was the whole story, it is

not any longer:

In 1945, within a few months or even days of one another,three momentous events occurred: on 26 June the Charter of theUnited Nations was signed in San Francisco (it came into force on24 October 1945); on 6 August the Atomic bomb was dropped on

Hiroshima (on 9 August a second bomb was dropped onNagasaki); on 8 August the Agreement on the InternationalMilitary Tribunal (IMT) for the Punishment of War Criminals wassigned in London (the first session of the Tribunal was held inBerlin on 18 October). Although these three events were notformally linked to one another, and did not result from a unitarydesign, all of them were destined to have a radical effect on thefuture of the international community.95

The IMT at Nuremberg established the principle that individual members

of a state’s government can be held responsible for heinous crimes committed in

the name of that government. This principle has only recently been re-invoked,

95 Antonio Cassese, International Law in a Divided World (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1986) 64.



92

in the war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, where

Cassese is presiding judge. The invention of nuclear weapons dealt a final blow

to the idea of balance of power: soon after they were first deployed, both of the

two major powers by themselves had the capacity to destroy the other many

times over. In retrospect, the most important of these has been the UN.

The achievement of the United Nations in encouraging issues to be

addressed on a global level has been considerable. Perhaps most important has

been in the area of human rights:

As a result of the growing network of internationallegislation and the establishment of the above-mentioned controlprocedures during this period, the conviction gradually took holdamong UN members that “intervention” in the affairs of single

states is fully justified, so long as serious and large-scale violationshave been committed. With this reservation - important though itmay be - the UN is authorized to concern itself with the state ofhuman rights in individual countries, regardless of whether thealleged violations are a threat to peace or to friendly relationsbetween States. This development was an important turning-pointfor the UN. Respect for human rights became an end to be pursuedin its own right, and not merely as a means of keeping the peace.96

Other areas where its influence has been felt includes the establishment of

the International Monetary Fund in 1945, where “the previously unrestricted

sovereignty of States in monetary matters was seriously limited in the Articles of

96 Cassese 306.



93

Agreement by a set of obligations.”97 Cassese cites the development of the laws

of war as “a significant illustration of how culturally and ideologically different

States can come to accept the same international standards - thanks to the efforts

of international organizations and the existence of multinational forums where

they are able to get together and reach agreement.”98

Although a turning point, 1945 like 1648/9 was only the continuation of a

process, perhaps the consummation of the two processes that became

distinguishable at that time. The UN itself is the most visible, and arguably the

most successful, of a type of organization that first came into being in the

nineteenth century, and acquired a new importance following the First World

War:

Along with newly independent States, a new category ofinternational subjects became active in the international arena:intergovernmental organizations. They mushroomed in a shortperiod of time, covering several fields (political, economic, social,technical, etc.) with a broad variety of activities which hadconsiderable impact on international affairs. Their existence hadmany consequences. It may suffice to emphasize one which relatesto the political field. Previously, some States, particularly middle-

sized and small powers, were to some extent able to refrain fromgetting involved in international affairs which were not directlyrelevant to them. Once they started participating in the activity of

97 Cassese 327.

98 Cassese 125.



94

international organizations where all major world events werediscussed, often to form the subject of resolutions or some sort of

joint action, it became almost impossible for them to hold aloof.They were constrained to express their views on the matter, to takesides, to join in praising, condemning or exhorting. In short, thecreation of a wide network of intergovernmental organizationsaroused or strengthened, if not a sense of solidarity, at least thesense of belonging to the same community and therefore of beingconcerned by any crucial event occurring in it. If the First WorldWar made each State feel that it could no longer live in relative

isolation, the emergence of organizations buttressed this trend anddefinitively established the notion that certain occurrences (an actof aggression in one area of the world, a policy of destabilization ofother States pursued by one particular country, widespreadinjustice in economic relations between two or more groups ofStates, etc.) are of concern to the whole international community.99

This is an answer to those who believe that Hobbes’ view of international

relations, as a perennial state of war, still applies, and who say there is no reason

to expect that this is about to change.100 The world has already moved on.

There is a blemish on the horizon though. The technical, political, and

cultural innovations needed to improve the human condition have only thrived

while there are many institutional and cultural arrangements cooperating and

competing at the same time, most obviously in the eras considered earlier in this

99 Cassese 68.

100 John Mearsheimer, “The False Promise of International Institutions,” International

Security 19.3 (Winter 1994-95): 5-49.



95

chapter: ancient Greece, early modern Europe, and now in the international

system of states.

There can be only one global system.

This means that to ensure continuing development there is no longer the

possibility for simply letting the best of several competing arrangements

emerge. The challenge, to which we cannot afford not to rise, is to ensure that the

lessons learned in the development of the nation state are applied to the global

political sphere. This is one of the principal challenges that faces our world.

What resources do we have to draw on in considering how to deal with it?

Of the two principal writers considered in the previous two chapters,

Rawls has addressed some of the issues, and these will be considered next.

Habermas on the other hand, perhaps because he says little about actual

structures, has not explicitly addressed the extent to which global politics differ

from national politics. Nevertheless, the extent to which his principles apply will

be considered subsequently.

Rawls has extended his principles from within the nation state, to

relations between nations. A Theory of Justice suggested that there were principles

to employ at the international level in a section (§58) entitled “Law of nations.”

Here Rawls suggests that, in a natural way, “one may extend the interpretation



96

of the original position and think of the parties as representatives of different

nations who must choose together the fundamental principles to adjudicate

conflicting claims among states.”101 Specific principles that Rawls suggests will

be chosen include a principle of equality, including self-determination and self-

defense, as well as that treaties be kept.

In a more recent lecture, part of a series organized and published by

Amnesty International, Rawls elaborates on these principles: “We must

reformulate the powers of sovereignty in light of a reasonable law of peoples

and get rid of the right to war and the right to internal autonomy, which have

been part of the (positive) international law for the two and a half centuries

following the Thirty Years War, as part of the classical states system.”102

Rawls does recognize a difference between liberal and hierarchical states,

though he believes both would accept the principles he elucidates. These are,

remembering that in practice peoples would be nations:

Peoples (as organized by their governments) are free andindependent and their freedom and independence is to be

respected by other peoples.Peoples are equal and parties to their own agreements.


102 Rawls, “The Law of Peoples,” in On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993,

ed. Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (New York: Harper Collins, 1993) 49.



97

Peoples have the right of self-defense but no right to war.Peoples are to observe a duty of nonintervention.Peoples are to observe treaties and undertakings.Peoples are to observe certain specified restrictions on the

conduct of war (assumed to be in self-defense).Peoples are to honor human rights.103

Human rights have three aspects:

They are a necessary condition of a regime’s legitimacy and

of the decency of its legal order.By being in place, they are also sufficient to exclude justifiedand forceful intervention by other peoples, say by economicsanctions, or in grave cases, by military force.

They set a limit on pluralism among peoples.104

Rawls identifies two barriers to the realization of these principles: non-

compliance and unfavorable conditions.105 He also recognizes that unfavorable

conditions, in the sense of material well-being, are a consequence of

organization:

Well-ordered societies can get on with very little; theirwealth lies elsewhere: in their political and cultural traditions, intheir human capital and knowledge, and in their capacity forpolitical and economic organization. … These remarks indicatewhat is so often the source of the problem: the public politicalculture and its roots in the background social structure.106

103 Rawls, “The Law of Peoples” 55.






98

Unfortunately, Rawls does not believe he has the resources to tackle these

issues, particularly non-compliance, in practice:

Another long-run aim, as specified by the law of peoples, isto bring all societies eventually to honor that law and to be full andself-standing members of that society of well-ordered peoples, andso secure human rights everywhere. How to do this is a question offoreign policy; these things call for political wisdom, and success

depends in part on luck. They are not matters to which politicalphilosophy has much to add.107

Rawls does a fine job expounding on how the principle of political

toleration can operate at the international level. Unfortunately, possibly because

in his national situation moral arguments have some force, he does not discuss

how these might become possible at this level. In leaving to “everyday” politics

the details of implementation he does not recognize that, while he lives in a state

that possesses the power structures that enable “everyday” politics, in the sense

of reasoned policy debates, these structures only exist to a very limited extent at

the international level.

Fortunately, the moral perspective as elucidated by Rawls is only one

aspect of political philosophy. The power perspective, explained by Habermas,

offers us another collection of resources on which to draw, to explore global




99

institutional configurations that create collaboration and competition, and so

institute the organized debate that makes political toleration viable.

The evidence Cassese provides shows that the rule of law that makes

organized debate and political toleration possible is already starting to happen.

However, as Locke first recognized, and for the reasons Habermas explains, the

rule of law requires a separation of powers, the structure of interacting

institutions that lies at the heart of any liberal system. Power is separated by

creating clear functional distinctions between different elements of the system, as

happens in any complex system; biological, commercial, or political. This

already exists in the international arena to some extent .

However, there is a barrier to the differentiation of functions becoming

truly effective: the tendency for many different functions to be collected together

under the umbrella of the United Nations. There are three negative

consequences of this. The first is that separate issues get tied together. If a

country does not agree with one policy of the UN, there is a tendency for them to

boycott, or be boycotted by, the whole organization. This makes taking any

action far more problematic than it would be if involvement in one initiative was

completely separate from others. The second downside is the creation of an

inside and an outside, and for the UN to be perceived from the outside as one



100

coherent body. This leads to negotiations between functional bodies being seen

as internal, and so not open to public scrutiny and comment. Finally, a single

body is probably too daunting a prospect for the most powerful nation states to

subject themselves to willingly. It will be difficult enough for them to submit to

the process of global public reason proposed here. Nevertheless, Rawls’ analysis

shows why they must. History suggests that catastrophic conflict will be the

result if they do not do so before irreconcilable positions are established. The

UN has played a major role in establishing the legitimacy and effectiveness of

international organizations. But it has reached its limits. It is time to move on.

Three policies present themselves as essential to this proposal. One is

using the existing differentiation of functions, another is ensuring democratic

accountability, and the third is ensuring compliance. The first two are not as

problematic as the third.

It would probably be too disruptive not to build on the workable

functional division that already exists in the different bodies of the UN,

including for example, the IMF/World Bank, UNESCO, UNICEF, and the

International Court of Justice. One would expect an environmental body to be

needed, building on the Earth Summit work within the UN. This also suggests

that the Security Council should limit itself to immediate threats to peace.



101

Ironically, in this way Habermas’ concern of independent subsystems colonizing

the lifeworld governed by reasoned debate is turned on its head. The global

lifeworld can ensure its vitality through consenting to government by reasonable

interacting subsystems.

Instituting democratic accountability for each body would retain the

essential function of the General Assembly. The obvious suggestion is a ratio of

one nation, one governing body member. This is easiest to justify when one is

dealing with reconciling different national systems. In some areas it may be

more appropriate to relate governing body membership to population. The

function of the governing body must be primarily to ensure reasoned debate,

and maximize the perspectives that are taken into account. One member per

nation state would seem to ensure this, with the additional benefit of explicitly

involving the nation states into the system. Each one would determine how it

would appoint its member, or possibly several if representation were to be

population based, and whether they be elected or appointed by the legitimate

government.

The third issue, compliance, is the one that requires most debate. This has

two sides, which are inexorably linked. The first is funding and participation, the

second is implementation. In classic republican tradition, the key would seem to



102

be participation. If the vast majority of states participate, and accept the

authority of a governing body, then they would all act together to let the non-

compliant know of, and possibly feel, their disapproval. The bodies would need

to be constituted to achieve this effectively.

One indispensable lever towards achieving compliance, again drawing on

the example of individual liberal nation states, is through only the broadest

issues of approach and policy being decided by the governing bodies. Their role

must be limited to producing legislation defining specific measurable

limitations or activities, with universal application. As a body it must fully

support the activities of the professional staff in impartial implementation and

administration. The governing body must not decide on specific cases, but seek

to modify the principles contained in legislation if judged necessary because of

unintended consequences. To deal with problematic individual cases, each body

would need to develop its own judicial processes and principles. For example,

the World Trade Organization could establish an international commercial court.

There would also be a need for the bodies to debate with each other, and

one would hope this is where another major benefit of the system would arise.

No longer would international relations be dominated by the posturing of one

nation state against others, but by reasoned public debate over trade-offs



103

between the different domains, such as financial and environmental. Extensive

consultations rather than interminable plebiscites are the key to success.

The resulting complex interdependent system of legislative principles,

statistical reports and judicial-administrative actions, will serve to institute on a

global scale the model of the self that is at the heart of the liberal nation state and

the conscious human being. It is a logical result of the recent growth in global

environmental consciousness, beyond a simple awareness and desire for

improvement, towards a cycle of small-scale experimentation, rational reflection

and coordinated action.

The role of new media in this is not as a voting box in every home, as

some seem to perceive it,108

but as a global debating chamber; giving people the

opportunity to deal with the issues in which they have an interest, in both the

psychological and legal sense, and make their own contributions. In practice

reasoned debate needs resources and recognized legitimacy, and in the process

proposed it is the nation state as the representative of its citizens that will control

the debate. Though this scheme has its weaknesses, it is similar to national

108 Frances Cairncross, The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will

Change Our Lives (London: Orion Publishing, 1997) 262.



104

political debate being conducted by elected members, and in the long run will

benefit the vast majority in a similar way.

Global issues are complex and interdependent. The ability of the liberal

nation states to deal with the complexities of national issues is what has ensured

their longevity. This chapter has proposed that new media should not be

allowed to lead to the death of the nation state but, if liberal organizing

principles are applied at the international level, should enable them to become a

fundamental part of the complex adaptive process of global governance.



Chapter VI

Conclusion

By synthesizing three traditionally diverse approaches to understanding

social and political systems, a rich picture of a possible future for international

relations has been developed. None of the three by itself is capable of producing

a convincing understanding. The future is never quite like the past, and never

should be. Power and morality must always be considered together. A power

structure may be effective in competition, but may not be capable of maintaining

the cooperation necessary to sustain itself. A moral framework will not survive if

it is not able to respond to the threats changing circumstances produce.

Not only is the logic described rich, it is also robust. The principles

arrived at are not compromises between conflicting objectives. They arise from

taking a systems perspective, where what is important are self-reinforcing sub-

systems, systems in their own right, that maintain their integrity by adapting

themselves to changing conditions and other self-adapting sub-systems.

Historical analysis, critical political theory, and moral philosophy all appear

here as manifestations of this single approach. This suggests that developing the



106

logic roughly sketched out here could pay substantial dividends for both social

science and practical government.

From the practical perspective, it should be clear that if the principles

expounded here are applied to the work itself, as they should be, the particular

solution proposed is not meant to be definitive. Any robust institutional

configuration must be the result of debate, as well as subject to changes

suggested through ongoing debate. This has to be true in the realms of global

governance more than any other, as there is no opportunity for testing

competing solutions. We have reached the limits of natural selection and market

forces. Neither will function at this level, because there is no opportunity for

competition. Whatever term one prefers, the future welfare of the world’s

population will be secured when a critical mass of people and nation states

collectively choose to institute procedural democracy, public reason, or

organized debate on a global scale.

The Greeks’ new media revolution brought about an astonishing diversity

of achievements in the way human beings interacted with their world, in all its

physical and social aspects. This dialog between mankind and nature is in many

ways the defining property of Western civilization. One particularly significant

aspect of this wave of novelties involved the political innovations of Athens,



107

enabling it to play the outstandingly preeminent role in the Greek revolution.

However, the democratic innovations it introduced did not go far enough in

institutionalizing a creative dialog; the state and the citizen were too closely

identified.

In the longer term, the written word played an instrumental role in the

rise of the Christian dialogue with medieval European political regimes. This

created practices that went beyond simply balancing, to mutually reinforcing,

reason of state and respect for every individual.

The ultimate achievement of rule by law that institutionalized the

dialogue between state power and individual morality had to wait for the next

new media revolution, printing. The invention itself was not enough. That it

required a fertile political climate in which to work its magic is testified to by the

fact that the second language of choice throughout the world is not Chinese, nor

German, but English.

The evidence that we are now well into the latest new media revolution is

not hard to find. Some team sports, another English invention, though derived to

some extent from the Greeks again, achieve audiences of billions of people, a

significant fraction of the world’s human population. More evidence, the surreal

experience in 1990 of seeing the start of the UN air offensive against Baghdad



108

live on television: US camera crews broadcasting pictures of US weapons

arriving in the capital city of the US’s enemy. Technology has freed rich media

organizations of state control, individuals will not be far behind. A few years ago

someone painted a picture of famine victims dying in a desert, all wearing wrist

watches with television receivers built in. The subsequent rise of the Internet

suggests that this picture displays a fading prejudice towards one way

communication, a contradiction in terms. Ultimately, new electronic media like

every other media is an interactive technology. It is hard to see anyone dying in

this way when they could connect directly to citizens of wealthier states. The

issue is how to ensure fairness in dealing with these global questions, which

means how to work out long-term solutions with mutual benefits for all.

New realities must include new political structures. It will be increasingly

morally unsustainable, as well as physically impossible to use coercive power,

to limit people’s opportunities, human rights if you like, based on the place on

the planet on which they were born. The inherent instability of the international

system of nation states, as the instability of the Greek city states, was necessary

to enable the astonishing creativity they unleashed. More than ever, this sort of

creativity will be needed to ensure that the parity of opportunity that seems

inevitable is at the maximum end of the existing scale, which anyone would be



109

hard put to deny the benefit of, rather than the lower end of the scale, which

everyone would want to avoid.

The resources exist on a global scale to support the political configuration

mapped out here. One single government will not allow the instability

necessary, but the lack of any governance mechanism will ensure that conflict

can only be destructive. The logic of liberalism suggests that when nation states

subject themselves to global governance, through the rule of international law

created and enforced by a number of independent representative institutions,

each will benefit in the same way that citizens of the liberal nation state have. A

few distinct interacting international institutions will be able to mediate

electronically the constructive dialogue between nation states that everyone will

choose who understands power and morality in our diverse world.



Chapter VII

Afterward

Just over three years to the day after conceiving this project, on Labor day

1995, the previous few weeks have witnessed two events that bring the issues of

global governance that are at the heart of this thesis into sharp focus. On 20

August 1998 President Clinton ordered a unilateral air strike against targets in

Sudan and Afghanistan. Only five weeks before, on 18 July 1998, an international

treaty had been adopted in Rome to establish an International Criminal Court.

The crimes this court had been established to prosecute included attacks against

civilian targets and the production of chemical weapons, the very reasons

Clinton used to justify his nation’s action.

As these words are written, days after the US government’s attack, the

next few years promise to witness the working out of these two incompatible

approaches to international relations, a morality of might is right verses a rule of

law that rationally mediates between individual actors, either individuals or

nation states. I hope that this work clearly demonstrates why the rule of law is

the only rational choice, and that it can be reasonably brought about.



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new media and the end of the nation state

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