* Book: From Nations to Networks. by David de Ugarte, Pere Quintana, Enrique Gomez, and Arnau Fuentes.

A very important book, that I strongly urge the P2P community to read!!

Summary and structure

Key thesis is summarized in this citation:

“Esperanto, the bearer of a universal humanist ideal, showed in practice, probably definitively, that the alternative to surpassing nationalities does not lie in universalist cosmopolitanism, for the only way of being human is to have a tribe, but in making the community real and tangible, and thus truly human.”

David de Ugarte et al.:

“In the first part of this book, we will try to understand nations, as well as the tools and symbols from which they were imagined and experienced.

In the second part, we will follow the experiences of 19th- and 20th-century segregationists, those who did not accept the passage to a world that resembled a jigsaw with hundreds of coloured pieces, and tried to split away from the inevitable internal homogenisation which it generated.”

From the prologue by Josu Jon Imaz :

“The speed of the transformation process of social links, from territory-based forms to network-based forms, has increased geometrically in the last decade. This is the phenomenon that is analysed with an extraordinary precision in the pages of From Nations to Networks. Territorial links become more flexible, and networks and communities are created in which geographical connections are sometimes replaced by affinities, common interests and shared aims. The concept of belonging does not disappear, but is extended to spaces with higher degrees of freedom. It is as if until now we had been flat figures living in a two-dimensional space divided by black lines, with domains painted in different colours, and suddenly we had become three-dimensional: now we are larger geometrical bodies, with more complex shapes. We still interact with the plane that intersects with us, as we are still ascribed classical national identities, but we acquire further nuances and dimensions. And we even discover links that bind us beyond belonging or not to the same colour of the plane in which we had previously lived, and which now is one more among the infinity of planes which we can regard as part of ourselves.

The network is the mechanism that strengthens the power of a research group, the market ranking of a company’s products, someone’s schedule or his or her degrees of relationship. I have recently spent half a year in a university in the United States, during which time a large part of my personal and even professional relationships became virtual. The network was part of my life, the created network had become part of my own identity and I myself was undergoing a certain deterritorialising experience. Due to academic and professional reasons, in the eighties and nineties I lived six years abroad. But I was only able to experience the phenomenon of network participation referred to in this book this past year. Why? Because of the development of a technology that enables full articulation of a network, a technology that fifteen years ago was still in its early stages.

…

New spaces tend towards the disappearance of centres and the creation of networks. They are no longer configured following the model of old clusters, but rather start to look like an extensive mesh.

There is more network enmeshment and less “slopes” and “gradients” for countries and environments that wish to enter the system. And for those of us who work towards a fairer society, this means new opportunities for the 80% of mankind which has been displaced from development spaces in the last century.

The authors are right in that this is probably only the beginning, and it will be the confluence and interaction of the new trans-national conversational spaces and economic spaces with a similar domain that will make new identities fully emerge. Also, the linguistic communication space will play a crucial role in these identities, as this book also stresses. We cannot yet fully apprehend what political structures will emerge from these network realities, but it seems likely that they may contribute to a lesser dependence on the territory and revalorise spaces of personal and political freedom.”

2. Identity and Sovereignty

David de Ugarte et al.:

“The central thesis of this book is that the passage from a society with a decentralised economy and communications – the world of nations – to the world of distributed networks which arose from the internet and globalisation, makes it increasingly difficult for people to define their identities in national terms. That’s why new identities and new values are appearing, which in the long run will surpass and subsume the national and statalist view of the world.

Identity springs from the need to materialise or at least imagine the community in which our life is developed and produced. Nations appeared and spread precisely because the old local collective identities linked to religion and agrarian and artisan production no longer adequately represented the social network that produced the bulk of the economic, social and political activity which determined people’s environment.

In the same way, for a growing number of people, national markets are becoming an increasingly inadequate expression of all the social relationships that shape their daily lives. The products they consume are not national, nor are the news contexts which determined the great collective movements, or, necessarily, most of those with whom they discuss the news and whose opinions interest them. National identities are becoming both too small and too large. They are becoming alien.

It’s not a rapid collapse. We must not forget that nations arose from real need, and, despite that, their universalisation took almost two centuries and was quite difficult to say the least, as it met with all kinds of resistances. The abandonment of real communities where everyone knew everyone else’s faces and names in order to embrace a homeland, an abstract community where the others were not personally known, was a costly and difficult process.

And in fact it’s quite likely that the national State and nationalities will stay with us for a long time, in the same way as Christianity still exists and some royal houses still reign, even though nowadays national identities are politically dominant and determining, and the world is politically organised into national States, not on the basis of dynastic relationships or faith communities.

Many historians, politologists and sociologists nowadays foresee and even advocate a privatisation of national identity, a process which would be similar to the passage of religion into the personal and private domain that characterised the rise of the national State. But the issue is that such a privatisation, such a surpassing, can only take place from a set of alternative collective identities.

And what’s really interesting is that identitarian communities and virtual networks that seem capable of bringing about such a process are not only defined by their being trans-national, but they also display a nature that is very different from the respective natures of the great imagined identities of Modernity, such as nation, race, or the Marxist historical class. Their members know each other even if they have never physically met. They are in a certain sense real communities, or, more precisely, imagined communities that fall into reality.”

…

The nation is still presented as a “natural” fact that we unconsciously seek in every “complete” political unit: a unified language, a unitary map/territory, a media-defined public sphere, and ideologically defined political subjects.

The nation, as a form of political organisation and identity, was much more powerful, encompassing and massive than any of its predecessors because its symbols linked institutions and power to everyone’s identity, to the extent of sustaining the configurative and determining power of the nation.

In the end, what is essential about the nation is its exclusive claim over its identity as configurative, as generating co-nationals. It is the nation that makes the nationals, not the nationals that make the nation. People belong to the nation; they are a construct, a product of the “national reality”, not the other way round. The nation reinterprets the past looking back on its own historiography, which goes far beyond the time when it was first imagined. In fact, it is the nation that gives rise to History as a supposedly scientific and detached narrative, with the explicit aim of conferring unity through time to the units that emerged from contemporary maps.

From Thiers to Stalin, the first form of nationalist imperialism was exerted over the past, as a way of grounding the conversion of people’s identities – people who had ceased to be the subjects of History in order to be considered the products of the recently discovered national History. Culture was redefined by the nation and from the coffee house: ceasing to be a personal symbolic sediment in order to become a supposedly constituent political phenomenon. “

In conclusion:

“In this brief biography of the national imaginary, we have seen how it emerged from a real need to imagine the new production and socialisation community generated by the market, as well as from the increase in labour division that became more evident and spread practically all over the planet between the 17th and 20th centuries. We have seen how that imagination took shape and reached its materialisation in the form of the national State born in the French Revolution and the American wars of independence. And finally, how its conversion into a culture state, constituting personal identities and the framework for all conflicts, established it practically into our day.”