Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA: A SECOND LOOK
One polyglot country after another around the world today is tearing
itself apart or trembles on the brink of doing so. Yugoslavia is a nightmare
for us all. West European nations like Spain and Belguim are under ingressing
stress. Even Canada, long considered the most tranquil and sedate of
nations, is on the brink of bust-up. As the Economist has well said, “The
virus of tribalism ... risks becoming the AIDS of international politics—lying
dormant for years, then flaring up to destroy countries.” After the Cold War
the warfare of ideologies gives way to the warfare of ethnicities.
All this has given new urgency to an old question: what is it that holds
a nation together Though the nation-state is a relatively new 19th century
invention, its dominance was so great that the Nation State has come to
seem a permanent feature of the international landscape. Nationalism was,
and probably still remains, the most potent of political emotions. But the
nation-state as a political unit is today under devastating technological attack.
The world market, the microchip revolution, cybernetic technologies,
instantaneous communications, multinational corporations, information
superhighways, the Internet, E-mail, fax machines, CNN—all undermine
the nation-state, rush across frontiers and foster a world without borders.
The computer turns the untrammeled market into a global juggernaut
crashing across frontiers, enfeebling national powers of taxation and regulation,
undercutting national management of interest rates and exchange
rates, widening disparities of wealth both within and between nations,
dragging down labor standards, degrading the environment, denying nations
the shaping of their own economic destiny, accountable to no one,
creating a world economy without a world polity. Cyberspace is beyond
national control. The nation state is small for the big problems and too
big for its small problems.
These pressures towards globalization have a boomerang effect. They
make the world simultaneosly one and many. They drive people to seek
refuge from and protection against powerful global currents beyond their
control and understanding. The more people feel themselves cast adrift
in a vast impersonal anonymous overwhelming sea, the more desperately
they seek some warm, intelligible, comprehensible, intimate, human life the
more they crave a politics of identity. Integration and disintegration thus
are opposites that feed on each other. The more high technology makes
the world one, the more people cling to their own. The increasingly heterogenous
nation-state may no longer satisfy, and people huddle in smaller
groups defined in these post-ideological days by ethnic, racial and religious
allegiances. This is one challenge that led me to write.
The proximate cause of this upheaval is the challenge of ‘multiculturalism’—that
relatively new term that has recently invaded public discussion.
It is odd that the word should be so novel, since the United States has
been from birth a multicultural nation. But through most of our history
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Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 • HOMINES •