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There can be no doubt that from a cultural vantage point, all these English-speaking countries are islands off the coast of Kent; the cliffs of Dover can be seen as clearly from Cincinnati as from Edmonton, Wellington, and Ballarat. . . . They all share, for example, a profound and irreverent distrust of bureaucrats, bureaucracy, and regulations that would be out of place in France, Turkey, or Mexico, while they exhibit a propensity to volunteer (prompted possibly by the wish to keep offers of time and energy constantly under review) that the Greeks, Paraguayans, and Hungarians would find decidedly disconcerting. —Claudio Véliz, The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America

The modernist economic-determinist paradigm that dominated twentieth-century intellectual thought tended toward brutal simplification. The world was to be reduced to as few basic elements as possible, and these were to be measured, quantified, planned, and administered. The fewer elements, the easier the planning. That which could not be homogenized was eradicated or ignored.

So it was with the taxonomy of societies and their political expressions. The paradigm of the Industrial Era led to the reduction of all political entities to two levels: nation-states and a notional universal world regime. The nation-state in this view was a curious construct—part economic state, part civic state, and part “blood-and-soil” state as envisaged by theorists such as Herder, which sought to unite all members of a linguistic group into a single ethnically defined state. Anything smaller than a nation-state was an essentially irrelevant administrative subdivision of a national government; above the nation-state, the only reality would be the universal state, whether in the grandiose form of the United Nations or the more effective form of the quiet but powerful “technical” international organizations. International forms that fell short of universality were seen as signs of failure. Regional organizations were seen as inevitably coalescing into new states, as the European Common Market would eventually become a United States of Europe, and would become in turn administrative subdivisions of a world government.

The result of this paradigm was to impoverish the language of political thought. It was as if biologists were to discard their existing rich taxonomy of kingdoms, phyla, orders, and species, and recognize only two levels of organization: individual species and the totality of the biosphere, from single-cell bacteria to whales and redwoods. Furthermore, such an impoverished taxonomy would eventually lead students to think there were not or more important, ought not to be, any similarities or affinities between any two or three species more than any other, that lions had no more in common with tigers than with lichen.

Such a biological taxonomy would be absurd. It is precisely the study of the groupings of organisms and species, and the measurement of the relative distance between various ones—the discipline of cladistics—that has been one of the most fruitful analytical tools of modern biology. Yet the extreme example noted previously is exactly the frame of reference that twentieth-century thought tended to use in discussing cultures and political organizations.

It is important to emphasize that this is an exercise in cultural classification, not biological categories. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some anthropologists attempted to construct a Linnean taxonomy of subraces of humanity. They sought a biological, rather than a cultural, division in which a person of western African origin was a “negroid” regardless of whether he lived as an integral part of a western African culture or as a native and resident of New York City. This book, however, is concerned with human societies and their political expression, which is a learned, cultural phenomenon. For the purposes of this work, a person of, say, Cantonese genetic ancestry growing up in the United States is a member of American society, of the English-speaking network civilization, and of Western civilization.

In thinking about the phenomenon of cultural rather than biological evolution, it is also important to remember that political-social evolution follows Lamarckian rules, rather than Darwinian ones. Entities may acquire characteristics during their lifetimes that are passed down to their descendants. Furthermore, self-aware entities can consciously choose to change characteristics. A Linnean taxonomy should not be taken as an invitation to draw spurious parallels with biological evolution; if a parallel example is to be sought, the closely related field of linguistic evolution is a better, less controversial example. Even those who doubt Darwinian evolution in biology seldom dispute the fact that the modern Romance languages, for example, evolved from Latin, nor do they argue that Satan planted Latin grammars in library stacks to cause doubt among believers.

THE SINEWS OF THE NETWORK COMMONWEALTH: EVOLVING NEW FORMS FROM EXISTING ELEMENTS

Network commonwealths will emerge in an evolutionary fashion, as do most viable political mechanisms, growing from, altering, and redefining institutions and developing in the era of economic states until these institutions become a new thing. When the history of network commonwealths is written, the current time will be seen not as the start of the process, but as perhaps a halfway mark in the building of the network commonwealth. The network commonwealth will evolve from several current institutions:

1. Common Economic Spaces: Trade and Transmigration

As noted earlier, common market areas for trade in goods have blossomed over the past half century, the successes sparking numerous imitations. A network commonwealth will have a set of free trade agreements as one of its fundamental ligatures. It would differ from existing common markets in focusing on facilitation of informational trade, services, and the free flow of people and interpersonal cooperation.

The mental model of the EU as a “harmonized” trade area (to use the EU’s jargon for area-wide uniform standards) could be demonstrated by envisioning a group of corporations throughout Europe being able to manufacture an airplane jointly, coordinating tens of thousands of workers producing fuselages in France, wings in Germany, and tail assemblies in Spain. The mental model of a network commonwealth is demonstrated by envisioning a set of arrangements permitting a software company incorporated in Bermuda to use programmers, marketers, and financiers in California, Australia, India, and Ireland to put together a Web-based product in cyberspace and sell it worldwide. At the same time, they would enjoy adequate intellectual property protection and have the ability to resolve disputes fairly and expeditiously.

It is relevant that the harmonization needed to enable the European example took decades to create and has imposed substantial transition costs on the citizens of the member states. Most of the harmonization needed for the latter example, by contrast, already exists: common language, common software standards, and a common law and understanding of business practices. The network commonwealth places greater emphasis on creation of a common business space for information businesses than on the elimination of traditional barriers like tariffs or quotas. International processes such as the World Trade Organization are already effecting many of the needed changes in such areas. A NAFTA-EU free trade agreement, such as has been proposed, which would reduce trade barriers between those areas, could carry the process further and deeper.

In the network commonwealth, future trade will be dominated more by informational goods and services rather than by physical goods. In these areas, it is more important to avoid the creation of new barriers than to eliminate existing ones. Instead, such a trade regime would focus on resolving issues such as the different treatment of state-generated intellectual property by the United States and the Commonwealth countries. In an era in which the U.S. software industry is economically more important and generates more jobs than the U.S. auto industry, resolution of these types of issues ought to take priority. Similarly, a network commonwealth emphasis would ally Anglosphere nations, with their more open, competitive industries, in international decision-making forums such as those on radio spectrum allocation, where (for example) Britain today undercuts its own interests in the name of European solidarity.

In creating common trade and economic spaces, the highest-priority targets are agreements providing for free entry throughout the community’s economic space in the communications and transportation sectors. Universal flat- or low-rate communications and fully competitive air transportation should be the goals of these agreements. Trade in physical goods may decline in absolute tonnage of goods shipped as local production in flexible, computer-integrated facilities from software developed worldwide begins to supplant bulk manufacture and export in coming decades. Thus protectionist struggles against such trade may be pointless, while nations pursuing export strategies based on low-wage manufacture may suffer disruption in turn.

2. Sojourner Provisions: The Human Element of Trade and Cooperation

I place substantial emphasis on immigration ties and “sojourner” status: a right to travel to, reside in, and do business within all the member states of the network commonwealth on an equal and reciprocal basis. The EU has effectively implemented such a status as of 1993; U.S.-Canadian agreements have moved in a similar direction. Sojourner status is important because the critical ties within a network commonwealth are not, as with the EU, hierarchy-to-hierarchy relationships between large corporations, but rather person-to-person relationships between the enterprising individuals who will create the businesses, civic organizations, and personal networks of the future.

Sojourner status is also important because the network commonwealth model incorporates a new vision of transnational personal movement appropriate to the era of Internet, cheap jet travel, and worldwide media. The Machine Age model was fundamentally one of immigration. Individuals were citizens of one nation-state and resided, worked, and paid taxes within that state. The only way to change that status was to give up citizenship in one nation, move to a new nation, and adopt residence, employment, and citizenship there. The immigrant who adopted the identity and customs of the new nation and fit himself into that structure, rarely if ever returned, lost contact with home-country media, and communicated with his previous home and family slowly through mails, or not at all.

The Network Era model of transnational personal movement is sojournership. A sojourner is one who moves from one country to another to reside and engage in economic activity, but retains his previous identity, returns to previous countries of residence frequently, and remains in constant communication with his home network. This sojourner is an essential element of transnational cooperation, making possible entrepreneurial activity on a wide scale with an extremely low cost of entry. The sojourner often serves to cross-pollinate activity from place to place, accelerating ties begun or continued via Net and Web. As humans cease to be inhabitants solely of physical space, we begin to have an “amphibious” existence split between physical space and information space. Each space has its own rules and realities, and the sojourner helps tie the two together by combining cyberspace and physical-space contact.

Existing immigration law is poorly adapted to such activity. The economic-state benefits attached to citizenship have risen to such levels during the Machine Age that an immigrant’s slot becomes a valuable prize, particularly for persons from poorer countries. The sojourner does not seek to fill a citizen’s slot. The immigration machinery and provisions of most of the industrialized world’s economic states are designed to ration these entitlements by rationing citizenship. Sojourners face the choice of trying to fit the immigrant’s slots or to abuse tourist, student, or temporary worker provisions, none of which are appropriate to their needs.

National borders create other obstacles to effective sojourning. Consider the situation among English-speaking nations. Despite the similarity in the legal, financial, and business systems of the English-speaking nations, and the transparency of credit records due to common language, it is difficult for an ordinary sojourner to obtain credit or secure loans across the borders of the English-speaking nations. At a minimum, credit checks in the United States require a Social Security number. But to gain a Social Security number is to stake a claim on numerous benefits, none of which are the sojourner’s primary objective. Yet the would-be sojourner cannot renounce those benefits to get a Social Security number merely for the purposes of gaining credit status. Network commonwealth agreements could reduce such burdens with a substantial net gain to financial institutions as a result of an expansion of the common economic space.

Two types of concerns have fueled anger over immigration in almost every advanced industrial country. The first is concern over the rationing of employment and citizen-benefit slots, in which current citizens are concerned about immigrants absorbing jobs and benefits that they feel might otherwise go to them. The second concern is over the presence of large blocks of non-assimilating immigrants from substantially different cultures. It is precisely the fading of the classic immigration model that has fueled this concern, for the reverse of the coin of immigration is assimilation.

Today’s immigrants have many of the same characteristics as sojourners, in that they can remain virtually in their home culture, maintaining instant communication and access to home media while residing in the host nation. Assimilation can be delayed or avoided, and host-country citizens fear the creation of permanent alien communities with incompatible values and social characteristics.

Put in economic terms, interaction with a person with substantially different values imposes “transaction costs”; the more alien, the higher the costs. These costs are particularly high when a person from a high-trust culture attempts to interact with one from a low-trust culture, or individuals from different high-trust cultures with different trust-validating mechanisms attempt to interact. Costs are felt directly—for example, when an immigrant has difficulty communicating with a native—while the benefits of immigration are typically diffuse and often hidden.

The immigrant bears most of the costs, but the host citizens bear some, and those are typically resented. Such resentment is usually directly proportional to the degree to which the native feels his “citizen’s slot” is threatened. Political demagogues find it easy to exploit the gap between visible costs and hidden benefits.

Multiculturalist theories, rather than emphasizing the margin of benefits over costs, seek to declare these transaction costs equal for persons of all cultures, or even nonexistent, whereas empirical experience teaches daily that there are wide differences in such costs.

A sojourner regime among English-speaking nations, to examine a specific case, would create a reciprocal right of sojourning for citizens of the adhering nations, permitting those citizens to travel to, reside in, and perform economic transactions in all member nations. Sojourners would not be eligible for state benefits and would pay core taxes, but not taxes earmarked for state benefits. Thus, a Briton sojourning in America would pay taxes supporting basic governmental functions, but would not make a Social Security contribution nor be eligible for Social Security benefits, unless the United States chose to include sojourners in the system on a voluntary basis. Similarly, an American sojourner in the United Kingdom would pay basic taxes but not support the National Health Service or be eligible for those benefits.

Although it would be generally beneficial to permit sojourners to hold employment, concerns about competition for formal employment slots may create a barrier to agreement. Equally useful, and less controversial, would be a provision permitting sojourners to conduct business, including acting as contractors and consultants. As such, they would be in line with the emerging economic trends. They would not have political rights in the host nations, though there is a reasonable argument for giving longresident sojourners who pay local sales and property taxes a vote in local elections, as the EU does.

Most important, sojourner status would not be rationed; it would be freely available to any applicant, subject only to a basic check for criminal record. Misbehavior of a sojourner in a host nation would be dealt with primarily by restitution and expulsion; similarly, need for welfare services would be dealt with by repatriation.

Countries could remove sojourners from the competition for state benefits and insulate host citizens from potential problems caused by their presence. They could make sojourner status depend on strict reciprocity and ensure that sojourners come primarily from countries within the network civilization of the host nation (thereby minimizing interpersonal transaction costs). This would deliver many of the benefits of immigration while minimizing the commonly ascribed costs to the host nation and its people. In fact, a sojourner program would enhance the ability of nations to receive immigrants of the traditional variety as well, as it would increase the critical mass of individuals sharing many of the same or similar trust mechanisms relative to immigrants requiring extensive assimilation.

In many developed nations, politicians face the moral hazard of making immigrants the scapegoat of frustration with the structural problems of transition from Machine Age to Network Age economies. Such politicians direct attention to every abuse of the “citizen’s slot” access to state benefits by immigrants and give the illusory impression that state benefit programs would be viable if not for immigration. As fiscal pressure on such programs increases in coming years, due to both the demographics of aging populations and the pressures on the ability to tax, there will be a greater temptation to blame immigrants for the problems of such systems.

Sojourner status is crafted to minimize vulnerability to such pressures.

In fact, the problem is not with immigration per se but with economic state social welfare structures and immigration policies that make immigrants liabilities rather than assets, by permitting working immigrants to bring in nonworking relatives, often extended-family rather than nuclear family relations, who create net claims on the system. These combine with anti-assimilation policies that create large masses of young people ill-equipped to obtain employment in the modern network economy, and ill-educated for the task of participation in the civic state. Civic states held together by shared memories, symbols, and narratives must extend these things to immigrants if they are to have other than second-class status, once offered, they must be grasped by the immigrants.

Interestingly, the theoretical availability of a sojourner-like status throughout the EU, young Britons and Irish have made relatively little use of it to work on the Continent. (In contrast, Britons with income streams from the Anglosphere use the status to retire in the French countryside.) Large numbers of both nations’ young (and those of the other principal Anglosphere nations) come to the United States to live and work, often by abusing immigration statuses designed for other purposes. Sojourner status would turn current violators into constructive economic participants.

The creation of sojourner status may have other benefits as well. Some industrial states already exempt certain portions of their population from full participation in the economic state; the example of the Old Order Amish in the United States is perhaps the best known. Such populations are, in effect, domestic sojourners. States may find it expedient to extend sojourner status to elements of their domestic population who have principled objections to participation in the welfare state and its administrative apparatus.

A sojourner agreement would create a powerful incentive for active, entrepreneurial persons in all parts of a network civilization, particularly the young, to support the creation of the network commonwealth. It creates a direct and visible benefit to individuals from the creation of the network commonwealth.

3. Collaborative Organizations in Science and Technology

The EU was seen as the outgrowth of the European Coal and Steel Community, which evolved gradually into the European Economic Community (EEC), then the European Community. However, the EEC was only one of several strands from which the EU was woven. Also important was a group of organizations for joint scientific and technological cooperation, including the European Atomic Energy Agency and the European Space Agency.

These programs had two important functions. The first was a pragmatic one, of permitting European nations to participate in scientific and technological projects beyond their individual means. Second was the symbolic function of demonstrating that a united Europe could remain competitive in science and technology at a time when the United States and USSR seemed destined to dominate those fields.

The cooperation model for European scientific-technical organizations was, as in nearly all pan-European programs, one of top-down, negotiated relationships between national hierarchical structures. Programs are composed under the rule of juste retour—money is spent in each member nation in proportion to the percentage of funding it contributes. Nations benefit from these programs to the degree that their national economic and technical structures are organized in a top-down, state-directed hierarchical structure and their political systems can generate the bureaucratic and funding stability needed to properly support such programs. France and Germany are good examples of such nations; the United Kingdom has historically been a poor example, not surprisingly. The United Kingdom has tended to get the worst of the deal in most of the European cooperative science and technology programs in which it has participated.

A network commonwealth would find cooperative science and technology programs similarly useful in creating added leverage for national expenditures in those fields. Highly visible programs like space exploration would yield similar benefits in producing a visible source of pride in cooperation for accomplishment.

However, such cooperative programs would be conceived and structured quite differently from the Machine Age structures of the EU. As with all network commonwealth efforts, its science and technology programs would seek to exploit the deeper cooperation possible among persons with similar cultural backgrounds. The universality of English as the world language of science would seem to reduce the value of network commonwealth commonalties.

However, difficulties of interpersonal communications among scientists are not the barrier to international cooperation; scientists are often capable of forming effective transnational teams. The problem lies in the way conflicts of their sponsoring states often intrude into the possibilities of further cooperation once initial work has produced promising results. Consider the invention of the World Wide Web. Although developed by two researchers (one of them English) at CERN in Switzerland, a pan- European scientific research institution, its benefits were first and most widely reaped by Americans, who neither participated in the CERN consortium nor were present at the creation of the Web. The incompatibilities of the CERN member states and the slowness of state-to-state cooperation made it unlikely that any of the member states would be able to exploit this breakthrough, as indeed they did not. By aligning nations with similar and more compatible political systems, and by encouraging person-to-person and institution-to-institution rather than state-to-state cooperation, a network commonwealth is likelier to promote effective science and technology cooperation than international structures created on other bases.

As this example demonstrates, many of the economic benefits of public sponsorship of scientific and technical research come not from formal transfers of technology to industrial organizations, but by informal, entrepreneurial transfer.

Benefits arise from small groups of researchers leaving the formal research world to create entrepreneurial ventures based on the knowledge, skills, and insights they have gained. Pan-network commonwealth cooperative programs for scientific and technical research should blend seamlessly with the pan-network commonwealth economic environment created by trade and sojourner agreements.

To formalize the pan-network commonwealth institutions for science and technology, research agencies in the principal areas of investigation should be formed. Emphasis should be placed on the leading fields of the likely Singularity revolutions: space, medicine, biotechnology, molecular manufacturing, computer science, and other high-visibility fields such as nuclear physics, environmental studies, and oceanography. These agencies should cooperate with national and regional research agencies and universities, but should have their own budgets, staffs, and identities, funded by the participants. No attempt should be made at a juste retour policy, although the practicalities of the politics of funding will dictate that distribution of benefits will not be entirely ignored.

Such structures would enable creation of a set of visible programs, giving short-term results as well as long-term promise, to accelerate the process of public recognition of the network commonwealth. In the example of a network commonwealth with American participation, visible programs could include quick implementation of manned space flights with crews from a pan-network commonwealth astronaut corps and joint funding and participation in programs modeled on “faster, quicker, cheaper” space exploration pioneered by the U.S. Defense Department and NASA.

Environmental programs aimed particularly at biosphere preservation in the poorer parts of the network commonwealth (giving maximum benefit for dollar spent) would reach a different segment. Research and development areas of particular interest to a pan-network commonwealth aeronautics effort might include “shockless supersonic” technology, which exploits recent theoretical breakthroughs in supersonic travel without shock waves and sonic booms. Previously, enormous energy demands, short range capability, and need to fly at extreme altitude effectively prevented the exploitation of supersonic air transport for economic and environmental reasons.

Public outreach would include a very heavy Web presence, organized through pan-network commonwealth educational networks. Schoolchildren in all parts of the network commonwealth would be able to access Web sites and interact with high-visibility activities which are “theirs” in a way that U.S. space launches, for example, are not for non-U.S. spectators.

In general, education creates a powerful avenue for pan-network commonwealth cooperation, as the Web permits students at all levels to link directly with their counterparts in other nations and regions. Shared language, cultural values, and experiences permit the creation of a shared virtual space. A program of cross-commonwealth scholarships and student exchanges, with follow-up on Web-created interpersonal relationships, will make them more effective than traditional programs of such nature. Students in the class from which the exchange student originates can keep in touch with their classmate daily via the Web and incorporate his experiences into their lessons and daily realities, forming further relationships that sojourner provisions and other pan-commonwealth programs can help facilitate.

4. Security Organizations: Sailing with the Fast Convoy

Permanent security alliances rank high among the institutions that can evolve into building blocks for the network commonwealth. Since its founding, NATO has become more than a military alliance: it is now an elaborate set of permanent structures and institutions which have had a profound effect on the military, political, and economic life of the nations that have joined them. One need only look at the importance of NATO membership to Spain, Greece, Turkey, and now the states of Eastern Europe in stabilizing and democratizing them to see that permanent alliance structures have become one of the central building blocks of transnational institutions.

It is also instructive to note the failures in building or maintaining security alliance structures. America’s unsuccessful attempts to replicate NATO’s success in the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and the immediate collapse of the Warsaw Pact with the fall of Communism, demonstrate that permanent structures require substantial alignment of interests and values. Perception of immediate threats can create an incentive to join an alliance, but when the perception of threat changes (or the members no longer believe that resistance, rather than accommodation, is the effective way to meet it), that incentive disappears, and the alliance collapses.

Also instructive is the failure of all attempts to create a cooperative military structure for Western Europe outside of NATO. Despite the strong commitment to European unity among the core states, there has never been (despite past and current attempts to create such), any successful mechanism or tested commitment to a common security policy among European states. The past decade’s tests of European will, from Bosnia through Kosovo to Macedonia, justify skepticism toward the idea of a common European security policy. In naming Javier Solana as the putative “European to answer the phone,” the lack of which Henry Kissinger had noted earlier, the EU has tried to address this gap.

Solana can answer the phone. But when he speaks, will the European states stand by what he says?

This lack of a European security consensus stems from the substantial differences among European states regarding military and foreign policy—another reminder that deep cooperation comes from sharing deep values. Europeans (particularly if one includes the British) have no deeper consensus of values among themselves than do Europeans and Americans with each other. Europeans by themselves have been able to create no deeper cooperation than already exists within NATO. As of this writing, the latest incarnation of this effort, the “European Rapid Reaction Force,” is still struggling to come together.

The Iraq war brought the problematic nature of a common European foreign and security policy to the fore. Germany and France opposed the U.S. efforts to assemble a coalition to shut down the Saddam Hussein regime. In opposing the U.S., they assumed they spoke for the EU, and for Europe as a whole. Yet the second-strongest member of the coalition was Britain, which supplied a third of the striking forces at the opening of hostilities. Furthermore, other key Western European states, most noticeably Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands, supported the American position. Worse yet, from the Franco-German point of view, the bulk of the Eastern European states about to enter the EU took the American side as well. French president Jacques Chirac observed that they had “missed a good opportunity to stay silent,” a remark that did not help the cause of a common European outlook. A democratic state requires a demos—a population that thinks of itself as a people, and conducts a common dialogue. Europe has many democracies, but there is no European demos; thus the European project cannot create a genuine democratic consensus on the critical issues of war, peace, and security.

Just as the transition to the Machine Age made mastery of manufacturing the key to success in warfare, so will mastery of information be the key to success in Information Revolution warfare. Already, the predominance of the U.S. military is due increasingly to its superior information technology.

Information war is war directed not against persons or things but against the information that controls and affects both. That information war has become a major new form of warfare.

The great powers of the new age, to the extent that there are great powers, will be those nations that possess a high degree of Information Age literacy, a vigorous software industry, and the ability to develop the political-military doctrines to exploit its advantages.

The United States prevailed in the Machine Age because of its general mastery of machinery, its enormous industrial base, and its ability to find and give command to generals such as Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower and his peers understood how to use these assets to win in the face of clear German superiority in weapons, morale, and training throughout most of the war. Germans had, for most of the war’s length, better tanks, planes, and guns; the United States had better trucks. America also had the only army in which almost every draftee knew how to drive, and most how to maintain and fix motor vehicles, from civilian life.

The dominant powers of the future will be those with a strong domestic software capability, potential soldiers who are comfortable with using computers, and the ability to generate political-military strategies to exploit the new technologies properly. The network commonwealth provides a means for today’s economic states to minimize the loss of defensive potential as they undergo devolutionary pressures and fiscal constraints when their previous ability to divert large percentages of their GDPs diminishes. Those who can effectively implement it will retain substantially more power than those who don’t.

The balance of power has already begun to change as a result of the increase in the rate of transition from the Machine to the Information Age. Powers like Russia, which dominated the Machine Age because of their ability to cover square miles with medium-tech tank battalions, have lost capability. Ironically, a power such as Britain, which had fallen to the middle rank of military capability, is once again among the top-rank powers today precisely because of its greater ability to master the cutting edge of current information-based technologies.

The centrality of information technology, combined with organizational and weapons-technology innovations, constitutes what has become known as the “Revolution in Military Affairs.” The United States has already begun to consider how to cooperate with its NATO and other principal allies in using the “Grid”—the dense network of information, using Internet-like techniques, that links information-gathering sensors, command and control centers, and weapons and men in the field. The defense sinew of network commonwealth ties will center around cooperation in the use of the Grid by the core alliance. NATO has built a series of standards, such as a common rifle caliber, making it easy for units of NATO member nations to cooperate in the field. A network commonwealth defense alliance would be built primarily around common standards in information.

p. 172-180

NETWORK COMMONWEALTHS AROUND THE WORLD

The primary focus of this book is on the possibility of a network commonwealth among English-speaking nations. Subsequent chapters will examine that case in detail. Because Britain, and subsequently the United States, share a background of a particularly individualist culture long predating the Industrial Revolution, and for that reason experienced the Industrial Revolution and political modernity early, the English-speaking nations have tended to be in the forefront of social, political, and economic evolution. The position of the United States in the Information Revolution and the emergence of the Internet have continued this tendency. Therefore, network commonwealth structures will probably arise in the English-speaking world quite early as well.

A network commonwealth for the English-speaking community would not be the only such entity, although it would probably be the first. The Spanish-speaking world is another prime candidate for the creation of such a community, as there is a similar flow of information among Spanish-speaking nations and an increasing effort to renew common links and institutions. The French-speaking world has a similar potential, for the same reasons. In fact, France supports a substantial apparatus— La Francophonie—for pan-Francophone relations, which could serve as the nucleus for a Francosphere Network Commonwealth.

It is interesting to note that at the most recent meeting of the association of French-speaking states, Louisiana sent a delegate. This may be a precursor of a much wider phenomenon. The Portuguese-speaking world, whose center is now Brazil, may well construct a Lusosphere; the increasingly close connections between Brazil and the former Portuguese states of Africa foreshadows such a development.

The future of the EU in the Information Revolution is another interesting discussion. The impact of devolution, the erosion of state taxation power, and other likely developments is the weakening, and perhaps ceasing, of movement toward a European federal superstate. Certainly, the pension liability issue, placed in the context of a general decline in taxation levels, suggests that the EU will have to substantially reform its structures before or shortly after the liabilities become unsustainable.

Euro-optimism also fails to address the divisive tendencies in the EU. If in fact trust characteristics have a substantial impact on the abilities of political systems to interact, the lines of cleavage among the cultures of the EU nations—high-trust versus low-trust countries, north versus south, center versus periphery—may drive a dissolution of the Union. Alternatively, it may convert to one or more network commonwealths. In some ways, a EU consisting of a loose cooperative framework among several network commonwealths may be the optimal structure for the era of the Singularity revolutions. We can imagine a Scandinavian-Baltic Network Commonwealth; a Rhenish Commonwealth of Germany, France, and the Benelux countries; a Mediterranean Commonwealth; a Turkic Commonwealth; and a Danubian Commonwealth. These could all cooperate with the Anglosphere Network Commonwealth, with a Commonwealth of Independent States evolving toward a network commonwealth model to the east, and with language-based network commonwealths worldwide—to the Francosphere, Hispanosphere, and Lusosphere as well as the Anglosphere.

The heart of this option is the ability of member states to carry levels of affiliation to more than one network commonwealth simultaneously. Britain and Ireland may well be the test cases of this flexibility, as, whatever links they create with the Anglosphere, it makes sense for them to retain trade and cooperative links with Europe as well. British politicians have adopted the formula of defining Britain as a European country having a special relationship with America; it is probably more accurate to describe it as an Anglosphere country having a special relationship with Europe.

China provides a particularly interesting case, as the Chinese diaspora forms a worldwide business community whose common ties are already of significance in world trade. A network commonwealth approach may provide the only acceptable basis for common institutions linking the Sinosphere of Taiwan, mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and other communities with substantial Chinese-language populations.

It can by no means be taken for granted that the large, ethnically diverse Asian nations, particularly China, India, Iran, and Indonesia, can maintain their political unity in anything like their current forms. Asia is not immune to the techno-political changes that drive the devolution of economic states elsewhere. For instance, widespread availability of the Web in the prosperous Chinese coast areas is necessary to ensure their competitiveness. Widespread use of the Web will make it easy to offer information in the local languages written in Western alphabetic characters. (These are usually called dialects of Chinese, but in fact Shanghaiese, Cantonese, and Mandarin—the so-called National Language—are at least as distinct as French, Spanish, and Italian.) As learning is much faster in alphabetic systems, the next generation may be more likely to think and work primarily in these local languages, and find Mandarin, written in characters, to be increasingly more alien and difficult. It might be the case that a Shanghaiese and a Cantonese of the next generation will communicate with each other in English rather than in Mandarin.

China, furthermore, is still a culture in search of a binding idea that works.

Despite the superficial claims for the resurgence of Confucianism (actually a highly mutated Anglo-Confucianism evolved in Hong Kong and Singapore), that philosophy, in anything like its classical form, is unsuited to the demands of a modern technological society. Communism and nationalism, represented by Mao and Chiang, have both failed. Religion of one form or another may return to take their place. Both homegrown movements such as Falun Dafa, based on martial-arts philosophy, and imported religions such as evangelical Protestantism have grown substantially in East Asia over the past two decades. It is possible that evangelical Protestantism, in either a pure or mutated form, will make substantial inroads in China over the next twenty years, as it has in South Korea, Taiwan, and Latin America. If that is the case, the evangelical drive to publish Bibles in Roman character regional languages may provide a strong impetus to their use.

“China,” even without its non-Han minorities such as the Tibetans and Turkic peoples, is at least as diverse as Europe. The printing press drove the emergence of separate national languages and the decline of Latin as a common European language; the Web may drive an equivalent process in China. This, combined with the decline in available tax revenues, will greatly increase the impetus for a more devolved, network common- wealth structure for China, if not the complete disappearance of China as a centralized economic state. Kenichi Ohmae proposed a “Chinese Commonwealth” in his End of the Nation-State. This proposal, combined with the network commonwealth institutions described here, could form the basis of such a development.

Similarly, India, Indonesia, and Iran are all extremely diverse areas. Each current state is dominated by a large ethnic group (Hindi speakers, Javanese, and Persians, respectively) who are resented and suspected by the large ethnic minorities of those states, all of whom have strong national linguistic and cultural traditions of their own. The massive dislocations caused by the economic shifts of the next twenty years will make survival of these entities in their current forms unlikely. The recent achievement of independence of Timor from Indonesia and the persistent demands for the independence of Aceh, Ambon, and Eastern New Guinea foreshadow such a breakdown.

Just as Asia is unlikely to retain its current political, cultural, and economic forms over the next twenty years, Africa and Latin America will continue the current course of evolution. If they can ride these changes successfully, both Latin America and Africa (particularly English-speaking Africa) will come to substantial prosperity as a result. Two trends have emerged in Latin America which, between them, may mark a permanent break with the past practices that have kept these regions in poverty.

One is the relative opening of their economies to market forces, most fully in Chile, but also significantly in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and elsewhere. This has begun to break down the cozy symbiosis between the political class and the economic monopolies, who have together historically dominated Latin American societies.

Observers such as Hernando de Soto, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Claudio Véliz have all written extensively, from their various perspectives, on this phenomenon.

The other is the explosive, and mostly unnoticed growth of alternatives to the Catholic Church, particularly evangelical Protestantism and the Latter-Day Saints (Mormons). The hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Latin America has contributed heavily to the perpetuation of the crony system throughout its history. When it has attempted to challenge the status quo, it has been vulnerable to the totalitarian temptation inherent in its Baroque hedgehog mentality (as Véliz calls it). “Liberation theologians” have ended up supporting Marxist solutions, which would take Latin America out of the crony-capitalist frying pan into the totalitarian fire, as happened in Cuba.

These economic and religious trends among them offer the prospect of transition to a stronger civil society and better constitutional mechanisms. If successful, they could support a genuine transformative takeoff throughout most of Latin America. Observers have been expecting a “Chinese miracle” for several decades; it might in fact be eclipsed in the short term by a Latin American miracle. However, the failure to address trust issues adequately in Latin America has caused a backlash to the wave of market reform of the 1990s. Particularly in nations such as Argentina, macroeconomic reforms have destroyed the old employment system of the crony capitalists without sufficiently liberating the creative energies of the entrepreneurs.

The result has been the destruction of old jobs without the growth of sufficient new ones to replace them. This has caused a general economic crisis and, rather than creating impetus to carry out the difficult and non-obvious transparency reforms needed, has evoked a wave of nostalgia for the days of crony capitalism.

De Soto has recently criticized the “civilizational” school of analysis, particularly those taking after Samuel Huntington, because he sees that analysis as characterizing Latin American societies as inherently backwards, and thus incapable of self-reform. Yet this is true only of a particular reading of civilizational analysis. The very fact that some cultures have become high-trust and transparent is an existence proof of the ability of other cultures to acquire similar characteristics. After all, England in the Old Whig era of the eighteenth century was massively, staggeringly corrupt in some ways. Yet the takeoff into the Industrial Revolution, political modernity, and a particularly transparent and uncorrupt society was underway at the same time. Cultural traits are persistent, but they are not immutable. It is a question of time—can massive social changes be implemented in one political generation? Two? These are the questions that matter. What De Soto must concentrate upon is the question of exactly what pressures will be needed to overcome the cronyism and corruption of Latin American societies, and how to generate such pressures. In this, civilizational analysis has the potential to be a source of help, not of hindrance.

Africa is undergoing positive changes for the first time since independence.

Postcolonial regimes and their socialist-interventionist economics (which owed more to the bureaucratic socialism of the French and British colonial regimes than to Marx or Lenin) are declining, giving scope to entrepreneurism. The sanctity of colonial boundaries is also fading; Eritrea was permitted to secede from Ethiopia with the blessing of the Organization of African Unity—a political first, but not a last. Sooner or later some successful states will latch onto the opportunities presented by the Information Revolution—realizing that their pool of educated, underemployed, English-speaking people (so far more of a curse than a blessing) is actually a continental gold mine waiting to be turned into prosperity. South Africa—which desperately needs to expand its economy beyond its current natural-resource base to provide prosperity for its large numbers of educated nonwhites—could be the first.

The Arabic-speaking world has both a long-standing pan-Arab sentiment, and populations who have never been fully converted to the paradigm of the nation-state. There is a long-standing feeling that Arabs should be a unified people with shared institutions. At the same time, there is also a history of real differences among the various Arab nations, and a disinclination to submerge those differences into a common political entity. An Arabic Network Commonwealth could provide the essential benefits of unity without requiring the submission of the very different parts of the Arab world to a single political center. The rise of satellite television systems broadcasting in Arabic from the relatively free Gulf states (interestingly enough, former British protectorates with continued strong ties to London) has begun to create a common Arabic informational space, and has begun the undermining of local informational monopolies. Although at present stations such as al-Jezeera have played to demagogic sensibilities rather than democratic ones, nevertheless the creation of a common informational space beyond the control of local governments has the potential to bring forth other, eventually more constructive responses.

Similarly, the Turkic states—Turkey, Azerbaijan, Northern Cyprus, and the former Soviet republics of Turkic origin (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan)—offer a prospect for a Turkic Network Commonwealth. This would give institutional reality to a demographic and cultural fact, without creating a threat to neighboring states or closing the possibility of network commonwealth links in other directions. The Central Asian states with substantial Russian-speaking populations, particularly Kazakhstan, could belong to both a Turkic Network Commonwealth and a successor to the Russian-centric Commonwealth of Independent States without contradiction.

There will continue to be strong, unique, distinctive cultures which are not readily assignable to any wider civilization. In the world of economic states, such cultures often embodied themselves in nation-state form with substantial success.

How will they fare in a world in which many civic states are strongly enmeshed in network commonwealths? Although the Singularity revolution world will tend not to produce uniform, one-size-fits-all solutions, it is worth examining two special cases to think about the fate of states that are not obviously part of a wider network civilization. Japan and Israel are such cases.

The most important fact about Japan may not be what it is, but rather what it is not. It is not part of an East Asian, Confucian civilization as many superficial observers tend to assume. Here I must agree with Huntington and others who define it as a unique civilization. In the same way that the Anglosphere is recognizably rooted in Western Christian civilization, but has become something distinct, so had Japan become something rooted in East Asian Confucian civilization, but now similarly become something distinct. Just as a pan-European political institution is unsuitable as a primary affiliation for Britain, so would a pan-Asian political institution be unworkable for Japan. (History shows how Japan’s own version of a pan-Asian political institution, the Greater East Asia Co- Prosperity Sphere, was unacceptable to non-Japanese.)

The other historical fact of interest about Japan is its deep, problematic, mutually stimulating century-and-a-half relationship with the Anglosphere. From Commodore Matthew Perry and his Black Ships, through General Douglas MacArthur as Shogun, to Edwards Deming and his quality-control revolution, and the impact of the Internet, the Anglosphere and its people and institutions have often been the irritant that causes the Japanese oyster to produce its pearls.

The influence has not been one-way. Japan’s aesthetic, its architecture, its religions, its philosophies, its manufactures, and its emigrants have all profoundly influenced the Anglosphere, and to a greater degree than other European cultures.

This suggests that in a network commonwealth future, Japan may find its task to be balancing its historical ties with the Asian continent with its newer but also profound ties with the Anglosphere. Such a balance may be the key to maintaining Japanese independence, not so much from formal threats of conquest, but rather from absorption and submersion, particularly if Japan must begin admitting immigrants in significant numbers to counter its demographic decline.

Israel is another issue. Judaism was the original, definitive Diaspora. The creation of the State of Israel changed the dynamic of the Diaspora by giving it a center and an anchor. Zionist theory looked to the end of the Diaspora and hoped for aliyah—the “ascension” of all Jews to Israel. What has happened is different.

Jews have left en masse two of the three main historical areas of the diaspora—the Islamic world and Continental Europe. From the third, Russia, many left as soon as they were able and it is not unlikely that most of the remainder will leave within the next few decades. But at the same time Jews have increased throughout the Anglosphere, which has experienced a new gain in Jewish population. Thus, Judaism is becoming an Israeli- Anglosphere phenomenon. Like the Japanese-Anglosphere encounter, the Judeo-Anglosphere encounter has become extremely creative and productive. It is also starting to see a very high rate of intermarriage of Jews into the Anglosphere. Israel is not an Anglosphere state, except peripherally.

It suffers from a bureaucratic-socialist tradition and lack of a legal instrument as flexible as common law. But it is becoming increasingly more aligned and intertwined with the Anglosphere, particularly in high technology and defense relations. Ultimately, Israel’s defense and trade ties with the Anglosphere may be folded into an Anglosphere Network Commonwealth of which Israel becomes more and more of a full member. One of the most interesting speculations is whether the need for an external stabilizing framework for Israeli-Palestinian peace, combined with the continuing Palestinian emigration to the Anglosphere, leads to the use of Anglosphere Network Commonwealth institutions as such a stabilizing framework, bringing both Israel and Palestine into its fold. Such a possibility seems distant today, but like Sherlock Holmes, the Israelis and Palestinians may someday have come to reject all other solutions, and find that the remaining one, no matter how improbable, is in fact the only possible one.

UNITED NATIONS—OR ASSOCIATED COMMONWEALTHS?

Since network commonwealths are not states, and are not intended to grow into states, there is no intrinsic reason why countries, regions, and even cities might not have overlapping and duplicate affiliations with multiple commonwealths.

In cases where a common legal tradition is used, it may be necessary for one commonwealth’s standards to take precedence over others for particular purposes.

Two legal systems cannot exist in the same space without such precedence.

However, it is also in the nature of such organizations that there be multiple levels of affiliation—some closer, others more distant. Many cities today serve as links between one linguistic world and another. Miami, for example, is a bridge between Spanish and English speakers, Hong Kong is a bridge between English and Chinese, and Los Angeles links all three. The United States might have a primary level of affiliation with an English-speaking network commonwealth, but a secondary affiliation with the Spanish-language commonwealth (and others, such as the French, as well). Puerto Rico may have its own separate affiliation with the Spanish-language commonwealth.

What is the future of the United Nations and its technical organizations (World Telecommunications Union, etc.) in the era of the Singularity revolutions? (Distinctions must be made between the Security Council, the General Assembly, and the technical organizations, each existing in a different political reality.) The General Assembly’s primary function is now as an international endorsement of sovereign statehood. The Security Council must parallel actual lines of power to be effective. The problems of the future will be in deciding where actual power lies. Should the EU have membership? Should NATO? As network commonwealths emerge, should they have representation?

The United Nations may evolve into the “Associated Commonwealths,” as network commonwealths become most important actors at the global level. The interplay of too many nations becomes too complex (and too divorced from realities of power) for stable political system. The United Nations had approximately fifty-some members at founding, has about two hundred today, and could have substantially more in five to ten years. This expansion would paralyze the existing structure, to the extent that it is not paralyzed already. The General Assembly may remain as a largely symbolic function, a sort of global House of Lords. UN technical organizations may come under supervision of the Security Council, as their functions become too important to remain under supervision of the General Assembly. In a network commonwealth world, the United Nations, or its successor, would be a lower-profile organization, which would probably be a good thing.

Too much has been expected of the United Nations, given its internal contradictions.

There is only the thinnest level of consensus among UN member-states regarding what is good, desirable, or possible, and much of the consensus that does exist is not shared or supported by the citizens they purport to represent.

Many of the functions it now supposedly carries out would be better carried out by network commonwealths closer to the people and problems they address.

Reducing the responsibilities of the United Nations may eventually enable it to discover a balance between the available means and the desirable ends, rendering it more useful and restoring to it more respect.