Com. Redmond asks:
"What century do you think this is? The age of nation-states and nationalism is gone for good, though national cultures and identities will linger on for awhile, sort of like city-states. We're in the multinational era now, there are 6 billion of us on a mighty small planet, and we have to start figuring out what multinational democracy might look like. Roy's meditations on the Narmada struggles, on globalization and solidarity, are meant to ask these sorts of questions."
But he's being silly. First of all, the planet is not small. Second, nobody can contend that the age of the nation state is over when one nation state that sits astride the world - the U.S.. It's all very well to talk about nation-states being a thing of the past but the fact is that national laws govern global commerce and international institutions are relatively weak. Obviously the Euro-zone is an exception, but not much of one. Ask the Swedes.
Frankly, "multinational" democracy looks like India. It looks like Russia, Indonesia and Malaysia. It looks like the U.S.. India holds many nations in one state, likewise Russia, etc. and everybody everywhere spends and saves in dollars. This may be an age where nations are expansive and the institutions of some few nations become generalized, but that is very different from a post-nation-state condition.
In the dopey speech that was quoted earlier Roy herself said that "The only institution more powerful than the U.S. government is American civil society." In other words, American national democracy.
For some reason leftists seem to sprout this idea that there is some easy, free, wild world of "people's" rule that is somehow better and more automatic than democracy. No. Expanding democracy just means more hard work. It means more laws, more legislatures, more contracts, more lawyers. There is no quick and easy substitute.
I have a banker friend who loves to tout the "unregulated" market of international derivatives desks that swap and trade huge notional amounts of credit across the globe. I remind him that, in fact, a relatively small number of highly regulated banks do this. The derivatives market itself may not be regulated but the reason these banks can trust each other is that they all have bank examiners breathing down their necks.
International democracy and international law are nice ideas but they are (with small exceptions in Europe) bogus. There is no such thing as an international contract (except, to some arguable extent, in Europe). There are treaties. There are sets of simultaneous mirror contracts in separate nations, but that is very different from an international contract. Until we have international contracts the nation-state is the ruling paradigm.
The euro is the exciting exception, but is a euro note really an international contract? Maybe.
peace,
boddi
p.s. - I like Roy, though. Her speeches are wild Leninist rants but she writes them so beautifully. I like that. I still think she should stick to writing and forget the speaking though. Maybe do poetry instead. Who cares? How many high-powered Marxist pinup girls are there anyway?