Picture a world in the next century organized not around nation-states but around a new form of
tribes sharing the same culture and values. It's a world where you pledge allegiance not to a
republic, but to a clan.
That possibility isn't too far-fetched when you take the current state of our fracturing world and overlay new information technologies and the new telecommunications infrastructure. Here's how it conceivably could play out:
This melting-pot business is not working out. America no longer seems able to meld all the various peoples within its borders into one harmonious whole. As the years go by, Americans seem to identify less with their nation and more with their various subgroups based on ethnicity, religion or race.
The rest of the world, now that the Cold War is over, is resuming its long-simmering ethnic rivalries. Nations from the former Soviet Union to Yugoslavia have broken apart into smaller nations based primarily on ethnicity or religion. Separatist factions are mounting serious challenges to nations from Canada to Spain to India.
The idea of the large nation-state, grouping people together within geographic boundaries, does not seem to work anymore. We have organized that way for several centuries, but it's usefulness may be running out. People seem to identify more with those sharing a common culture or holding similar values.
Digital technologies can enhance -- or, depending on your perspective, exacerbate -- such tendencies. They could allow people to connect with people more like themselves regardless of where they live in the world. And, ultimately, they could allow people to formally organize themselves that way.
Consider a world of the next century along the lines sketched out by Neal Stephenson in his new science-fiction book, "The Diamond Age": It's a world dominated by three large tribes, the Chinese, the Japanese and the neo-Victorians, or people rooted in the cultural tradition of the British, which includes many Americans.
That future world has many other less-powerful tribes that vaguely relate to cultural traditions around today, such as the Ashanti, a tribe rooted in African traditions but based in Los Angeles. And then there's the majority of people who don't belong to any tribe and are virtually powerless on their own.
People are not necessarily born into the tribes, but they join them by adopting the values of the particular group. A person can even belong to more than one tribe for different reasons.
These tribes could carry out most of the functions that we now associate with nations or governments. A person at the farthest outpost of the world could use the technologies for day-to-day contact and support from the larger group based far away.
They could get all the same news, entertainment and casual gossip that would reinforce their identities from afar. They could even rely on the group for all levels of education, much of their health care through advanced telemedicine and even their personal security.
People's tribal identities would be so apparent, and tribal affiliations so strong, that no one would physically harm you unless they wanted to incur the wrath of the entire clan. The tribal police of the future would travel the planet pursuing justice for their members, much as gangs do today.
These new technologies simultaneously reinforce trends toward more localism and more globalism.
They can empower smaller and smaller groups of people and allow them to function more autonomously in the world. At the same time, they tend to collapse the world into a more integrated global market which pays much less attention to arbitrary political boundaries.
That leaves the large nation-state trapped in between. It's too big to deal with the particularities of a small group's needs. It's too small to grapple with economic forces that are global in nature. And it does an increasingly bad job of trying to do both.
Over time, we may see the nation fade in its importance until it's just a shadow of its former self.
Some fear that such a scenario would inevitably tend toward a riot of parochial sects warring among themselves. They fear the emergence of tribalism in the old sense -- a new form of barbarism.
But that scenario leaves out the equally powerful forces that are integrating the world. For every step toward more parochial localism, there's a step toward more universal globalism.
This end of the nation-state might not be such a disaster in the long run. In the digital future, we might even see international peace.
