The Age of Disintegration

The Politics and Economics of Division

Bill Jordan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030414443
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030414450
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book addresses the disintegration of collective units of all kinds, under the twin pressures of economic globalisation and technological automation. At the level of super-states, the constituent nations of the European Union and the former Soviet Union, and of the United Kingdom, have demonstrated this dynamic; and their constituent groups, associations and communities have done so too. The author analyses the causes and consequences of these processes, at the global, national and local levels, the significance of increased mobility and migration, and the politics of resistance to some damaging effects. He recommends ways in which public policy can offset some of the latter, including radical changes in tax-benefits systems, already being trialled in several countries worldwide.

© The Author(s) 2020

B. JordanThe Age of Disintegrationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41445-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Bill Jordan¹

(1)

Exeter, UK

Bill Jordan

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

The collective life of human beings has alternated between periods of enlargement in units (from tribes to empires and federations) to fragmentation. At a local level, the recent history has been the substitution of private collective services for state-run ones. Now the new era of globalisation and automation has brought problems in the maintenance of collective institutions of all kinds.

Keywords

AutomationGlobalisationHuman collectives

End Abstract

Human collectives are enormously diverse in size and composition; they also rely on a number of different mechanisms, processes and factors for their creation and maintenance. For centuries, they were units for the survival of our ancestors, who lived in small family groups, within larger tribes, sustained by beliefs about natural and supernatural forces. A series of systems of rule by those who seized ownership of the land and created laws on property rights, states and empires, and eventually superstates like the USA, the USSR and China, constituted stable or shifting units, often in conflict, either internally or against each other.

Is it possible to generalise about the likely future viability of any of these collective units (from families to superstates) in the face of present-day technological, economic and social change? In this book, I shall explore these questions, starting from the proposition that long-standing collective structures, and the institutions which sustain them, are simultaneously under pressure from these forces and are already in the process of re-formation, even as they disintegrate.

The twentieth century was a particularly traumatic one for large-scale collectivities. The Austrian, Spanish and British Empires were beginning to break up during the first two decades, contributing to the onset of the disastrous First World War. Hitler’s imperialist ambitions brought about the Second World War and accelerated the access to national self-rule among British colonies in Asia and Africa, as well (after wars of independence) as those of Portugal and France, while still consolidating the power of the Soviet Union, which had suffered the largest human toll during the war.

So in the West the tendency was towards national autonomy, and this was greatly enhanced by the break-up of the USSR. But there was also, of course, the emergence of new, quasi-federal unions of states, in Europe and (in a weaker form) in Africa and Asia, as national governments sought to shelter from the disruptive impact of global economic forces on the protective institutions through which they had contrived to shield them.

But at the same time, within these national and transnational collective units, the collectivities which had structured their economies and societies were crumbling. Long-standing organisations, from trades unions to civil societies’ voluntary organisations, were losing members, as a culture of individualism, home ownership and consumerism seemed to dispense with the need for these protections. All this was slightly later paralleled by the decline in support for traditional Conservative (Christian Democratic) and Labour (Social Democratic) political parties and the rise of Green and radical Right-Wing ones.

This book will argue that the disintegration of historical collective bodies threatens the fabric of our social order and could lead to dangerous conflicts. The rise of authoritarian leaders (such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Viktor Orbán) could trigger the emergence of ‘mass societies’, which are intolerant, exclusionary and coercive towards minorities, including poor people. But this is not inevitable; I shall propose ways in which these trends could be reversed, and a more tolerant, equal and inclusive order established.

Smaller or Larger Collectives?

In his book In Care of the State, Abram de Swaan (1988) argued that it was issues of poverty and its management that led to the collectivisation of administrations, on a larger and larger scale, and ultimately to welfare states. Whereas political authority was primarily concerned with law, justice and social control on the one hand, and military defence and aggression on the other (Mann 1980), these collective arrangements expanded to include provision for education, health, social care services and environmental controls.

So the overall tendency of these processes was towards both larger collective units and the professionalisation of tasks previously (for the vast majority of citizens) supplied by family members or local village elders. But first, as there were inevitably limits in the extent to which large political units could effectively provide and regulate such services, and professional bodies guarantee their quality, at some point, there was bound to be resistance to the internationalisation of what had been tasks central to nation states and to the penetration of international commercial bodies into services which defined the sense of membership and political belonging (such as the British NHS). So it was not so much a question of one set of collectivities being replaced by another, as of the maintenance of all forms of solidarity becoming problematic over the same period (or so it seemed).

Yet it is clearly the case that all forms of human collectivities have boundaries (physical borders, economic charges and fees, or social signifiers) which include members and exclude non-members. As globalisation has eroded the boundaries of nation states and their constituent organisations, it has also widened the scope of other kinds of collectivities, as commercial bodies, many of them international in reach, have come to supply the services formerly organised by states. This process has accelerated transnational movement of staff, such as doctors and nurses, and eroded political controls over the nature and quality of the services, eligibility for them and the rules governing national borders.

One obvious manifestation of these phenomena has been the Brexit farago. Since the referendum of 2016 (itself an ill-judged response by Prime Minister David Cameron to the rise of populist nationalism in England and to the growth of support for Scottish independence), there has been a furious dispute about the UK’s future, crystalised in the inability to find an agreed formula for leaving the EU. In all this, the almost equal division of seats in the House of Commons after the 2017 election gave exaggerated power to the ten Democratic Unionist MPs, themselves representatives of barely half the Northern Ireland electorate. It also gave disproportional significance to the Irish border issue, as a determinant of whether Britain could leave with a deal to avoid catastrophic effects on trade with the EU. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) argued that the proposed deal potentially violated the terms of the Good Friday agreement, which had sustained peace in Ireland for 21 years. The election of December 2019 resulted in a large Conservative majority, but the fact that nationalist parties made gains in both Scotland and Northern Ireland sufficient to give them a majority in favour of remaining in the EU exacerbated the problems of the Union.

So borders—and especially the shifting implications of borders for political and economic issues—took on a significance at this time that was unprecedented for any period of UK history since the seventeenth century, as the governments of Theresa May and Boris Johnson, despite their very different political affiliations and loyalties, both struggled unsuccessfully to achieve majorities for any compromise. They were as much rendered impotent by divisions within their own parties as by any unified opposition, another example of the process of fragmentation that is characteristic of the present age.

A further instance is that of Spain and the saga over the secession of Catalonia. The five leaders of the ‘coup’ that followed the referendum on independence for the province who had remained in the country were each sentenced to between 9 and 13 years of imprisonment on 13 October 2019, provoking days of demonstrations by Catalans. But even these demonstrators were almost equally divided between those prepared to use violence and those who wanted peaceful mass protests; from his exile in Belgium, their former leader, Carlos Puigemont, pleaded for non-violent action.

These examples suggest that the root causes of the new wave of disintegration in political units are new priorities in the sense of collective belonging—cultures of national or regional loyalty that move members of such communities to join with like-minded others to assert their identities in protests, or to vote for parties representing such views. But at the individual level, it also indicates that citizens experience themselves as members of these smaller collectives, even when they purchase and consume commodities and experiences from all over the world, their work and leisure may involve travel abroad, and when they receive electronic communications and watch films and TV from every continent.

So, individual consciousness seems to have moved in the direction of less binding affiliations and fewer or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. National and Regional Autonomy
• 3. Collapse of Collective Institutions
• 4. Minorities, Movement and Exclusion
• 5. Communities and Associations
• 6. Protest, Disorder and Social Control
• 7. Conclusions
• Back Matter