Hello DJ, “economy, politics, as seen in and from Germany” is quoted from your site. I have thought about doing a site for years and years, and something else always crop up to divert my attention, stealing another hour from my day:0(
Message 17831586
<<Washington … whether … considers a resolution of the UN Security Council to be necessary. The American public today supports increasingly the preventive war doctrine. There's even talk of nuclear first strike … global clash of civilizations … more money on arms in the future ... daily growing foreign debt of the US economy or the increasing national indebtedness of America or frightening excesses of American carnivore capitalism>>
My view from Hong Kong is:
A nation-state is just like a desk, but organic, as in it tends to get bigger, and stronger (or it disappears), until it doesn’t, and then shrivel up and fizzle out, and then recycled back to vitality once again. The world has had a lot of organic desks since humans got smart. Many are still around, but many more are no more.
A desk, when small and new, is simple to organize. The vital fluids required to sustain the extremities of desk can be pumped powerfully, in short distances.
Singapore and Hong Kong are easy to keep in tip of the top working shape and focused, not because the locals are smarter or more diligent, but because the entities are tiny, in terms of dimensions, population, and sphere of influence, and its demand on survival ration is manageable.
USSR, at the other extreme, is no more, not so much because of the US victory in the Cold War, but because it was USSR, with all its complications, contradictions, and encumbrances, and would have become no more even without US intervention, just in a different way, at a different time, just as it would have been.
All desks eventually have aspirations to become super and imperial desks, bigger than ever, with more drawers and plenty of cubby-space divisions.
After the initial success at such aspirations, lots of unqualified folks are eventually drafted to the service of the running of the imperial desk domain, simply because there are more unqualified folks than there are qualified ones. Lots of rules and regulations are put in place. More interest groups are taken care off. More resources are needed. Well, you know the drill.
Reflect for a moment on your desk, how it started out neat, organized, focused, allowing you to do much with little.
Then something happened. One day, you got a whateveritis, a thing bothersome to store but inconvenient to dispose of, and you thought “I do not know where to put this whateveritis, so I will put it in a designated whateveritis drawer”.
The whateveritis drawer is initially the small left (if you are right-handed) drawer. Over time, it is either swapped for or joined by the large bottom left hand drawer. In the meantime, other drawers are taking in content not originally meant to be. Pretty soon, you have a messy desk.
In the context of nation-state, whateveritis is an interest group, cannot be snuffed out, and inconvenient to accommodate.
We periodically reorganize our desks to their original simple condition, at the beginning of a new semester of school, just after moving into a new house, or if the old one burned down. These episodes, in the context of nation-states, are called revolutions, but with a capital R, accompanied by much mayhem and flowing fluids.
Revolutions are always energized from within the desk, although external events tends to be part of the triggering process, much like one of those sub-molecular bombs.
Where am I going with all this?
Since you did not asked, I will tell.
(a) Iraq may soon get its desk cleaned out. I suppose a new desk will take the old one’s place. All around Iraq’s desk, there are lots of other desks, hiding all manner of whateveritis, waiting to creep out, presumably.
(b) In the case of ‘democracies’ such as the US, the one-man-one-vote system of government is an experiment in civilization, but it is an experiment. As all experiments in progress, the outcome is not certain. Question, how does a one-man-one-vote nation-state drastically renew itself periodically, or is such drastic renewal not necessary for some societies and they still will manage to maintain their focused energy state?
(c) Some societies are good at revolutions, some not. Rome was not, and neither was Greece. Russia was good at it, and is undergoing another. Euroland? What next? What about others;0?
China is very good at Revolution, doing so once every 100-300 years.
Trinidad does not need to, because Trinidad will never get big and complicated.
Chugs, Jay |
