Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION, REFLEXIVITY AND SURVEILLANCE
particular nation, there is necessarily a definition of who does not belong. While
this may not be too much of a problem when it comes to legal conceptions of
nationality (i.e. who is to carry a passport and have access to other citizenship
rights), in the realm of the cultural – that area of feelings, meanings and identities
– it can be paramount.
It is not surprising that the nation state remains quite central to people’s identities
when one notes that the emergence of modernity, archetypically evidenced
in the processes of industrialisation, has been experienced within a context of
developing and consolidating nation states. The orthodoxy among social theorists
was that the nation state and associated nationalisms would irrevocably
decline when faced with the logics of ‘industrial’ or ‘capitalist’ expansion. This
has not been so. In fact, much of the dynamism of industrial capitalism has come
from the imperatives of the nation state itself, something that in turn stimulates
feelings of national consciousness.
Furthermore, the nation state remains crucial to a great deal of economic
and social life. One has but to reflect on fiscal policies, educational strategies, or
the complex issues surrounding law and order to appreciate this and hence to
understand better the continued salience of the nation state in people’s lives. At
the same time, it is sobering to be reminded of the novelty of the nation state.
So many of us have become so accustomed to the state’s presence that it can
appear to have an extraordinary permanence. However, even ‘traditional’ nation
states are little more than a couple of centuries old and, it should be stressed,
none of them are fixed. Thus the United Kingdom has a history of less than three
hundred years, and still today there are recurrent challenges from Scottish, Welsh
and especially Northern Irish constituencies (to which devolved government is a
response). One has but to consider the 1989 events in Eastern Europe to understand
the mutability of nation states: the break-up of the Soviet Union, the
reunification of Germany, the division of Czechoslovakia. Little more than a
glance across Europe reminds us that there is scarcely a nation state that is not
challenged by internal nationalisms; and a closer look at the Middle East reveals
nation states (Yemen, Kuwait, Jordan, Israel, Oman, Saudi Arabia) established in
recent decades on societies that hitherto were tribal, and Israelis and Palestinians
are at the centre of disputes about nationhood.
I lay emphasis on the importance of nation states to socio-economic organisation
and identities alongside their novelty and tendency to recompose because
this allows us to pay due attention to a second key feature of the nation state.
This is that the overwhelming majority of nation states have been created in conditions
of war and all are sustained by possession of credible defence. In short, war and
preparedness for war have been fundamental contributors to the nation state.
Any analysis of British history makes the point forcefully enough: the Act of
Union in 1707 emerged from military defeat of the Celtic fringe, and important
preconditions were that strong monarchs were able to defeat and place under
their control previously autonomous barons while offering some security from
outside invasion. Further, the more recent history of Britain, notably that of the
days of Empire, illustrates dramatically the readiness of nation states to fight
over territories and, by no means least, the contribution this made to national
212