End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies - Softcover

Ohmae, Kenichi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684825287 ISBN 13: 9780684825281

Verlag: Touchstone, 1996

Inhaltsangabe

From Simon & Schuster, The End of the Nation State explores how capital, corporations, consumers, and communication are reshaping global markets.

Arguing that nation states are forfeiting their role in the global economy, the author contends that other forces have usurped economic power--capital, corporations, customers, communications, and currencies--and that natural economic zones or region states are emerging.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kenichi Ohmae is an organizational theorist, management consultant, Former Professor and Dean of UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, and author, known for developing the 3C's Model

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The End of the Nation State

By Kenichi Ohmae

Touchstone Books

Copyright © 1996 Kenichi Ohmae
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0684825287

Chapter 1

THE CARTOGRAPHIC ILLUSION

A funny -- and, to many observers, a very troubling -- thing has happened on the way to former U.S. President Bush's so-called "new world order": the old world has fallen apart. Most visibly, with the ending of the Cold War, the long-familiar pattern of alliances and oppositions among industrialized nations has fractured beyond repair. Less visibly, but arguably far more important, the modern nation state itself -- that artifact of the 18th and 19th centuries -- has begun to crumble.

For many observers, this erosion of the long-familiar building blocks of the political world has been a source of discomfort at least and, far more likely, of genuine distress. They used to be confident that they could tell with certainty where the boundary lines ran. These are our people; those are not. These are our interests; those are not. These are our industries; those are not. It did not matter that little economic activity remained truly domestic in any sense that an Adam Smith or a David Ricardo would understand. Nor did it matter that the people served or the interests protected represented a small and diminishing fraction of the complex social universe within each set of established political borders.

The point, after all, was that everyone knew -- or could talk and act as if he or she knew -- where the boundary lines ran. Everyone's dealings could rest, with comfortable assurance, on the certain knowledge, as Robert Reich has put it, of who was "us" and who was "them." The inconvenient fact that most of the guns pointed in anger during the past two decades were pointed by national governments at some segment of the people those governments would define as "us" -- well, that really did not matter, either. Boundaries are boundaries.

Politics, runs the time-worn adage, is the art of the possible. Translated, that means it is also the art of ignoring or overlooking discordant facts: guns pointed the wrong way, democratic institutions clogged to the point of paralysis by minority interests defended in the name of the majority -- and, perhaps most important, domestic economies in an increasingly borderless world of economic activity. So what if average GNP per capita in China is $317 but, in Shenzhen, whose economy is closely linked with that of Hong Kong, it is $5,695? Boundaries are boundaries, and political dividing lines mean far more than demonstrable communities of economic interest.

No, they don't. Public debate may still be hostage to the outdated vocabulary of political borders, but the daily realities facing most people in the developed and developing worlds -- both as citizens and as consumers -- speak a vastly different idiom. Theirs is the language of an increasingly borderless economy, a true global marketplace. But the references we have -- the maps and guides -- to this new terrain are still largely drawn in political terms. Moreover, as the primary features on this landscape -- the traditional nation states -- begin to come apart at the seams, the overwhelming temptation is to redraw obsolete, U.N.-style maps to reflect the shifting borders of those states. The temptation is understandable, but the result is pure illusion. No more than the work of early cartographers do these new efforts show the boundaries and linkages that matter in the world now emerging. They are the product of illusion, and they are faithful to their roots.

This, too, is understandable. Much of the current awareness of the decay of the modern nation state has been driven by the wrenching experiences of the former Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, which have formally ceased to exist as single national entities. Perhaps even more frightening, of course, is the noxious brew of ancient hatred, more recent antagonism, and unbridled ambition in what used to be Yugoslavia. These are extremes, to be sure, but they are deeply representative of the kind of erosion that has at last begun to capture an important share of public attention.

In a newly unified Germany, for example, unprecedented amounts of power have been ceded to the individual Länder. In Canada, before the recent elections in Quebec and even before the failure of the Meech Lake accords, the French-speaking province had been moving to cut its constitutional ties with the other, English-speaking provinces. In Spain, an explicit program of devolution is transferring much of the apparatus of independent statehood to the country's 17 "autonomous communities," especially those like Catalonia with a deeply entrenched historical identity of their own. In Italy, long-preoccupied with the problems of the Mezzagiorno in the south, recent elections have shown the Lombard League in the north to be a real and growing factor on the political scene. Even in dirigiste France, the prefects of Mitterrand's government can no longer unilaterally veto local decisions in the country's 22 provinces.

Developments as striking as these clearly merit the attention they have received in the media and in the regular comments of opinion makers and public officials. Nearly a half century of Cold War cannot end without dramatic -- and eminently noteworthy -- changes on both sides. Relaxation of the long-entrenched bipolar discipline imposed by the United States and the former USSR cannot help but allow even older fault lines to spread. Equally striking, however, is the way in which such attention has been framed and articulated. To the extent these developments have been treated as evidence of a systemic challenge to traditional nation states (and not just as a challenge to this or that current policy or set of leaders), they have been interpreted for the most part in political terms. Whatever their root, the centrifugal forces now at work have been seen to be meaningful, first and foremost, as statements about the inadequacies of established modes and processes of political order -- that is, as evidence of troubling realignments within previously established borders.

Thus, as today's public debate would have it, the fission represented by local autonomy and by ethnic or racial or even tribal irredentism, no less than the proposed fusion represented by Maastricht, shows clearly that the postwar writ of central governments no longer holds with anything like the power it enjoyed even a generation ago. And as that debate would also have it, this failure of the political center is a legitimate cause for concern. When no one seems to know where we are -- or should be -- going, initiative stagnates, special interests reduce each other to paralysis, and the consensus necessary for effective policy moves still further out of reach. In tones of despair, the more literary pundits like to cite Yeats: "Things fall apart; The center cannot hold." But the truer message comes from Matthew Arnold: we are "wandering between two worlds,/One dead, the other unable to be born."

These lamentations at least have the virtue of taking the erosion of nation states seriously. But they view it almost entirely as the result of long-repressed political aspirations bursting into the open once the various imposed restraints of the Cold War era have been relaxed. No matter how deeply rooted, however, these aspirations are not the only -- or arguably, even the primary -- forces now at work. Something else is going on. The battle and the battlefield have shifted.

A QUESTION OF CULTURE?

In a recent, highly influential article, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Samuel...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Touchstone
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1996
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0684825287
• ISBN 13: 9780684825281
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande