L'Etat-nation serait-il un modèle dépassé ? Les frontières gommées, la démocratie diluée, l'intérêt général menacé... les Etats-nations n'en mènent pas large face à la globalisation. Au point de bientôt disparaître ? « L'Etat-nation est devenu un cadre obsolète », déclarait sans ambages le sociologue Albert Ogien, dans un récent entretien à Télérama. « Les élites au pouvoir le savent bien, elles se sont mondialisées depuis longtemps. Les frontières des Etats n'ont plus de sens quand le capital n'a plus de limites, quand la finance s'est autonomisée, quand la libre circulation est devenue la norme, quand les entreprises sont multinationales », poursuivait-il, établissant d'emblée un lien entre mutations de l'Etat et du capitalisme.
Les élites ne sont pas les seules à sentir ce déclin de l'Etat. Aujourd'hui, la crise du système représentatif, la montée de l'abstention aux élections traduisent un constat général d'impuissance des politiques et donc de l'Etat. Aujourd'hui, tout a changé. De nouveaux types de citoyenneté émergent. Enlargement and the Finality of European Integration. <P>Your browser does not support script</P> Title|Previous|Next Fischer assumes that exclusion of Eastern European nations from more advanced forms of integration is only a temporary phenomenon.
In due course, they are also likely to join the European federation. My argument is that a level of diversity in a broader pan-European setting prevents the creation of such a federation, thus exclusion would need to have a more permanent character. However, I will go a step further and argue that Fischer's vision of a European federation is not even possible in a narrower setting confined to only the Western part of the continent.
This is partly due to the persisting divergence among the EU's existing Member States, and partly due to the forces of interdependence and globalisation currently at work in Europe and elsewhere. Fischer's term `European federation' has alarmed most Euro-sceptics. Table 1: Two Contrasting Models of a Future EU 15 See, for example, Vaughan-Whitehead (2000). Working Papers. Iraq may not have the will to survive – and that’s not even the biggest problem. Airy talk of sending in troops distracts us from the hard work and tough thinking necessary to secure the international order War is a contest of wills. Although determination alone does not guarantee final victory, its absence makes defeat all but inevitable. Way back in the 1770s, Britain lost most of its north American colonies because rebellious Americans cared more about gaining their independence than George III and his ministers cared about preserving their empire.
Today, if Isis fighters care more about creating their caliphate than Iraqis do about preserving their country, then Iraq may be doomed. At Saratoga in 1777, a scratch force of American Continentals and militiamen defeated 7,000 regulars under the command of Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne. It marked a major turning point in the American Revolutionary War. We may eventually see Isis’s recent seizure of Ramadi as an event of comparable significance.
Who is this ‘we’? The actual threat posed by Isis is threefold. Who then? Paramilitary volunteer groups surge in popularity in Eastern Europe. Thousands of ordinary civilians, including doctors, carpenters and teachers, are flocking to join volunteer paramilitary groups in several European countries, with some doubling in size since the start of the Ukraine crisis, Newsweek has discovered. In Estonia, Lithuania, Sweden and Poland, volunteer defence leagues, many of whom train with real weapons and would be called upon to support the army in the event of a conflict, are seeing record numbers of ordinary civilians joining up. Finland's military sent out letters to all 900,000 of its former conscripts at the beginning of this month, informing them of what their roles would be in a "crisis situation".
Earlier this year, the Polish parliamentary speaker announced that parliamentarians will be offered the opportunity to train at an army firing range and that though the cut off age for the Polish military is 50, there would be exceptions for "healthy and youthful-looking" MPs. Try Newsweek: subscription offers. A Post-Westphalian Caliphate? Deconstructing ISIS Ambitions.
CAIRO — Since the group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) declared a caliphate, much has been written about the movement — but still more remains unclear. How seriously should we take their rise? How does ISIS define Islamic law, and how would it be implemented? There are also more basic questions about the group's origins and its finances. Some compare its meteoric rise to the ascent of the Taliban, which ideologically and militarily might be true — but there is an essential difference: While the Taliban and most other Islamist movements function in the Westphalian state model defined by national sovereignty, ISIS rejects it, effectively making it the first post-Westphalian entity to arise since the end of colonialism. And the consequences could be dire. The nation-state as we know it today is a result of the Westphalian peace agreements, signed in what is now Germany in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years' War. A double obsession What's in a name.
Expanding e-residency: Estonia moves closer to being borderless - Factor. Designing and creating robots is not a simple job, and creating one that can be used on another planet comes with even more challenges. However, NASA has revealed detailed designs behind one of the crucial components to creating its human-like space robots.
In a patent, which was recently published on NASA’s website, the space organisation details the complex construction of a robot’s finger. The sixteen-page patent, which has been fully released, details how the joints of the finger are put together and interact with the robotic elbow, shoulder and more. While the robot displayed in the patent isn’t described as Robonaut, it bears a large resemblance to the humanoid robot that is currently in space. One version of the robot (R2) is already in space, and the development of future versions will be important to the success of future space missions.
In total NASA applied for 46 patents for the technology in R2, 21 of which were related to the hand. Humanising the robot Building the hand. Why the internet of things could destroy the welfare state | Technology | The Observer. On 24 August 1965 Gloria Placente, a 34-year-old resident of Queens, New York, was driving to Orchard Beach in the Bronx. Clad in shorts and sunglasses, the housewife was looking forward to quiet time at the beach. But the moment she crossed the Willis Avenue bridge in her Chevrolet Corvair, Placente was surrounded by a dozen patrolmen. There were also 125 reporters, eager to witness the launch of New York police department's Operation Corral – an acronym for Computer Oriented Retrieval of Auto Larcenists.
Fifteen months earlier, Placente had driven through a red light and neglected to answer the summons, an offence that Corral was going to punish with a heavy dose of techno-Kafkaesque. It worked as follows: a police car stationed at one end of the bridge radioed the licence plates of oncoming cars to a teletypist miles away, who fed them to a Univac 490 computer, an expensive $500,000 toy ($3.5m in today's dollars) on loan from the Sperry Rand Corporation.
What, then, is to be done? The three constituent elements of the Decentralized Computing Revolution | P2P Foundation. Excerpted from Gary Sharma: “There are three technologies that will form the foundation of the decentralized computing stack — mesh networks (decentralized networking), block chain (decentralized transactions) and autonomous agents (decentralized decision making). * Mesh networks The traditional network architecture of the Internet is vulnerable. There is risk of accidental damage or deliberate disruption (e.g. 70 million J.P. Morgan Chase accounts got hacked last week). We’re at the mercy and whims of telecom providers (e.g. the net neutrality debate). Over the last few days, hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy protesters have been thronging the streets of Hong Kong. Mesh networks are peer-to-peer networks created by daisy-chaining your phone (which becomes a router) to nearby phones using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
. * Block chain You’ve probably heard of Bitcoin, the global, decentralized crypto-currency, which incidentally has also become the largest supercomputing network in the world. The Great Transformation of our Time: Hans Abrahamsson. The Future of War: Adios, Clausewitz. By Justin Lynch Best Defense guest columnist “War therefore is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.” – Carl Von Clausewitz In a white, perfectly circular rotunda at the Reagan International Trade Center, military officials and foreign policy experts gathered at the New America/ASU Future of War Conference.
They sat at perfectly circular white tables, ate from perfectly circular white plates, and tried to create a perfectly precise definition of war. Yet the age of Clausewitz is over, a panel found. No longer is war only an act of physical violence, as Clausewitz theorized. In the future, what defines an act of war will become increasingly non-violent. The norm of what constitutes war is changing said Charles Dunlap, a retired Air Force JAG general, “especially when you move over into the cyber realm”. So where can we draw the line of what constitutes a war, asked Rosa Brooks, a Schwartz fellow at New America.
Cross-Border Data Restrictions Threatens Global Economic Growth. Leading U.S. technology firms have become loud critics of cross-border data restrictions in foreign markets, arguing that such moves run counter to the distributed nature of cloud computing and threaten to curb global economic growth. [ Related: Open Internet Central to U.S. Trade Policy ] Featured Resource Presented by Scribe Software Data integration is often underestimated and poorly implemented, taking time and resources. Learn More Now, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) is advancing that argument, warning that the impact of cross-border data restrictions is felt much more broadly than in just the tech sector, as companies in traditional spheres of the economy from mining to retail are hit by those policies.
Perversely, then, policies aimed at supporting local businesses end up harming the same domestic economy they are trying to help, the ITIF's new report (PDF available here) concludes. Competition and Privacy Top Reasons Cross-Border Data Flows Get Restricted. Silicon Valley likes to promise ‘digital socialism’ – but it is selling a fairy tale | Evgeny Morozov. The outside world might regard Silicon Valley as a bastion of ruthless capitalism but tech entrepreneurs fashion themselves as believers in solidarity, autonomy and collaboration. These venture humanitarians believe that they – and not the wily politicians or the vain NGOs – are the true champions of the weak and the poor, making the maligned markets deliver material benefits to those on the fringes of society. Some of the valley’s in-house intellectuals even cheer the onset of “digital socialism,” which – to quote digital thinker and environmentalist Kevin Kelly’s 2009 cover story in Wired – “can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant the old debates.”
Leaving aside the battles over the true meaning of “sharing” in buzzwords like “the sharing economy”, one can discern an intriguing argument in all this self-congratulatory rhetoric. Silicon Valley’s oft-repeated tales of “user empowerment” are made of these kinds of promises. "Beyond the Sovereign State: Isopolitan Citizenship, Race, and Anglo-American Union," Political Studies, 62 (2014) | Duncan Bell. BITNATION @ The Keiser Report. Welcome to Bitnation | Bitnation. A different cluetrain. Right now, I'm chewing over the final edits on a rather political book.
And I think, as it's a near future setting, I should jot down some axioms about politics ... We're living in an era of increasing automation. And it's trivially clear that the adoption of automation privileges capital over labour (because capital can be substituted for labour, and the profit from its deployment thereby accrues to capital rather than being shared evenly across society). A side-effect of the rise of capital is the financialization of everything—capital flows towards profit centres and if there aren't enough of them profits accrue to whoever can invent some more (even if the products or the items they're guaranteed against are essentially imaginary: futures, derivatives, CDOs, student loans).Since the collapse of the USSR and the rise of post-Tiananmen China it has become glaringly obvious that capitalism does not require democracy.
Or even benefit from it. Have a nice century! Afternotes: A new Google-powered website lets you compare every constitution in the world and write your own. In an ornate hall in the Philadelphia State House in 1787, a few dozen men drafted the US constitution. For four months, they debated and revised the document until they had something they could generally agree on. Today, they wouldn’t even have to leave their homes.
A new site could let any diplomats-to-be work on drafting a new constitution in real time over the web. Constitute is a repository of all the world’s constitutions, run by the Comparative Constitutions Project, and funded by Google Ideas and the Indigo Trust—a British charity that funds tech projects mainly in Africa. Beyond search and comparisons, Constitute can be used to collaboratively create new constitutions, with the help of Google Docs. Zachary Elkins, the director of Constitute, told Quartz that constitutional drafters in Lybia, Myanmar, and Nepal have all used the site. SuddenlySnowden comments on We are Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald from the Oscar-winning documentary CITIZENFOUR. AUAA.
iKnow WI-WE Bank : WI-WE Bank. Peace-building in a post-Westphalian age - Defence Viewpoints from UK Defence Forum. Peace-building in a post-Westphalian age: geopolitics on the species scale - by David Hoghton-Carter, UKDF Research Associate Back in 2009, I considered here on Defence Viewpoints how we might look to different ways of building international consensus as traditional views of sovereignty are challenged by the rise of non-state actors and new kinds of power. Indeed, the rules of the international game have changed over the last few decades, deeply but quietly, and no-one is 100% certain what they are anymore. The writing is on the wall: international humanitarianism, increasing economic globalisation, climate change, the rise of cyber-warfare, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, proxy conflicts of various shades, these are other evolving issues in international security highlight ever more the need to revise the rules of the great game.
So, I'd like to lay out a different approach to sovereignty (continued on next page) This can go one of two ways. Dismantling Empires Through Devolution. Democracy is not the most potent political force of the 21st century. Last week, the world’s most globe-spanning empire until the mid-20th century let its fate be decided by 3.6 million voters in Scotland. While Great Britain narrowly salvaged its nominal unity, the episode offered an important reminder: The 21st century’s strongest political force is not democracy but devolution. Before the vote was cast, British Prime Minister David Cameron and his team were so worried by voter sentiment swinging toward Scottish independence that they promised a raft of additional powers to Edinburgh (and Wales and Northern Ireland) such as the right to set its own tax rates—granting even more concessions than Scotland’s own parliament had demanded.
Scotland won before it lost. Furthermore, what it won it will never give back, and what it lost it can try to win again later. England, meanwhile, feels ever more like the center of a Devolved Kingdom rather than a united one. Estonia's digital residency clicks with Indian entrepreneurs. Offshore babies: The murky world of transnational surrogacy. Foreign-owned mines operate royalty-free under outdated US law | Reveal. Cybertopia - Dreams of Silicon Valley (VPRO, Marije Meerman) Disposable Life - Slavoj Zizek. Don't blame Westphalia. Robert Cooper: the new liberal imperialism. The New Materialsm | dark ecologies. General: Border crisis threatens U.S. existence. Debating nine pre-P2P perspectives: 3) Cosmopolitanism.
The Transformation of the International Legal System: The Post-Westphalian Legal Order by Eric Engle. What is post-Westphalian war? The Post-Westphalian Order and the Age of the Network | Eli Dourado. State Failure Characterised by the Westphalian Model of Sovereignty. The 25 most failed states on Earth. Which post-Westphalia? International organizations between constitutionalism and authoritarianism.
The World Health Organization’s response to Ebola: The devil in dealing with post-Westphalian pathogens is not (only) in the detail | IHP. Lobby group unveils plans for 'Catalan army'
Seasteading. Borders. History.