I was happy to oblige by participating on a conference panel last Friday, February 22, called “The Multilateral System in the Public Eye: The Impact of Mass Communications.” (The conference itself was entitled “Emerging Challenges to Multilateralism: A Parliamentary Response.”)

This panel focused on the ways in which new communications media, especially the Internet, are affecting the effectiveness, credibility, and reputation of multilateral institutions such as the UN. The clear takeaway that I took from the conference is that certain players within UN are openly worried about the ability of multilateral institutions to solve the urgent problems of our time.

That’s a legitimate concern. As countless problems pummel the world order – climate change, inequality, cyber-warfare, data surveillance, the list goes on – the UN is an obvious forum in which to discuss issues. But with limited authority to solve problems and unwieldy internal governance structures and processes, no one expects bold, timely action. Yet the rise of participatory online media is showcasing the limits of the UN. Hence the open hand-wringing.  

I was pleased to learn that there is at least a glimmer of interest in commoning as an appealing option. Regrettably, my sense is that UN discussants are not prepared to explore the commons very deeply or seriously. This is not entirely surprising. Most participants in UN deliberations, after all, are representatives of their national government and are immersed in the bubble of state power and conventional politics. There is a general conceit that policy, legislation, and other top-down actions are the most meaningful and effective ways for dealing with problems.

They’re not, of course. There are other important approaches. Many centralized state and multilateral structures are themselves part of the problem. They tend to consolidate power too much, inviting political gamesmanship, media optics, and corruption at the expense of substantive on-the-ground results. They privilege capital-friendly “market solutions” at the expense of socially minded, creative innovation from the bottom-up. For their part, state bureaucracies often feel threatened by stable, locally grounded commons that assert their own interests and self-sufficiency. And so on.  

Below are my prepared comments for the panel, which a presented were abbreviated to accommodate the five-minute limit for each speaker. A video of the panel can be found here. My presentation is at the timemark 11:50 through 16:40.

Multilateralism and the Commons

It wasn’t so long ago that nation-states strictly controlled the types of news, information, and culture that citizens could see and hear. While certain authoritarian regimes still tightly control domestic communications – notwithstanding the Internet – the interconnected global village that Marshall McLuhan predicted in the 1960s is well upon us. Cheap and easy transnational communications is the norm for a great many of the world’s people. Communications from other cultures and countries routinely influence our everyday lives.

It’s not just that people can hear or see unauthorized, novel, and foreign information, however. It’s that they can now generate their own news, videos, and podcasts. They can write their own software code, develop their own wikis, and start new movements with modest resources.

This is enabling people to assert moral and political claims to global audiences that was previously impossible – and that traditional state and media authorities cannot control. Distributed media technologies have essentially changed the political and cultural ecosystems of individual nations and global culture, often in profound ways.

Naturally, nation-states and multilateral institutions tend to find these developments disorienting and troubling. They may still be able to assert their authority, sometimes with sufficient coercive power to enforce their will. But the legality they invoke is not necessarily the same thing as perceived legitimacy. The latter is more of an open question – a question that national governments may try to influence, but which ultimately only the citizenry can address.

This tension is not going to go away. It is now baked into the very structures of modern telecommunications, the economy, and politics. Indeed, the Trump Administration is largely based on exploiting the tension between new media and legacy state institutions.

I characterize the problem as a deep structural conflict between the centralized, hierarchical, expert-driven institutions of a prior era – and the bottom-up, self-organized, participatory communities made possible by open networks and various apps. The very ideas of centralized state power and shared national identity are under siege when everyone can easily create a diversity of new publics and subcultures on their own terms.

While social media have plenty of proven dangers – fake news, Facebook algorithms, venues for authoritarian populism and hate – let’s remember that open networks – especially when organize as commons – hold some fairly significant creative, productive, and democratic powers. For me, the question is whether state power and multilateral institutions are capable of recognizing and supporting these constructive powers of the commons.

As an activist and policy strategist, I have been studying and working with commons around the world for the past twenty years. I’m not talking about the “tragedy of the commons” that Garrett Hardin made famous in his 1968 essay immortalizing that phrase. Contrary to Hardins claims, a commons does not consist of unowned resources. It is not a free-for-all in which you can take as much as you want.

A commons is a self-organized social system for the stewardship of shared wealth over the long term. It’s a distinctly different form of governance and provisioning than either the market or state. Commoners devise their own rules, social practices, traditions, and rituals that are suited for their particular context and culture. They self-monitor for free-riders and they impose punishments on those who violate the rules.

The commons is not just small bodies of natural resources such as farmland, fisheries, forests, and irrigation water, as studied by the late Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize for her work in 2009. The commons also consists of shared management of systems in higher education, in cities, in diverse social settings, and in digital spaces. 

Commons are especially robust in the world of free and open source software and Wikipedia; open access journals that are making science and scholarly accessible to everyone; open educational resources that are making textbooks and curricula more affordable to students; and Creative Commons-licensed sharing of everything, bypassing the monopoly rents imposed by the intellectual property industries. 

There are many other commons to which I will turn to in a moment. But my basic point is that commons are generative and value-creating, not a “tragedy.” And they are huge potential partners for state and multilateral institutions, if the latter can understand commoning properly.

If we want a world of greater inclusion and participation, and greater freedom in both a political and consumer sense, then we need to be talking about the commons. It is worth remembering Hannah Arendt’s concept of power. She wrote in her book The Human Condition that power is something that “springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.”

In other words, power does not inhere in our institutions themselves. It must be constantly created and re-created constantly, socially. In this respect, many state and multilateral institutions are losing their struggles to retain power and perceived legitimacy. They are not offering credible, effective responses to urgent societal needs. I’d like to suggest that state institutions would do well to enter into partnerships with various commons to:

1) leverage the generative, creative power that commons can offer;

2) empower peer governance and responsibility among people in ways that can nourish wholesome participation and, indirectly, state legitimacy; and

3) support locally appropriate, stable, self-supporting solutions that affected people can create themselves; and

4) enable transboundary cooperation on ecological problems.

In other words, state and multilateral institutions need to see the challenge of social media in a much bigger context. It’s not just about clever messaging and better tweets. It’s about developing a deeper modus vivendi with the largely unrecognized power of the commons. This, in fact, is what the French Development Agency has been doing recently as it explores how commons could enhance its development strategies in Africa and other Francophone countries.

So imagine an expansion the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, DNDi, which is a partnership among commons, state institutions, and private companies to reduce the costs of drug R&D and distribution. DNDi releases medically important drugs under royalty-free, non-exclusive licenses so that benefits so that the drugs can be made available everywhere inexpensively.

Or imagine how the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team has helped various states in the wake of natural disasters, such as the earthquake in Haiti. HOT brings together volunteer hackers to produce invaluable Web maps showing first-responders and victims where to find hospitals, water, and other necessities. This is a notable commons-driven solution, not a bureaucratic one.

The System of Rice Intensification is a global open-source community that trades advice and knowledge about the agronomy of growing rice. Working totally outside of conventional multilateral channels, SRI has brought together farmers in Sri Lanka and Cuba, India and Indonesia, to improve their rice yields by two or three-fold.

We should think about how Community Land Trusts are decommodifying land and making them more available to ordinary people. Let’s consider the Open Prosthetics Project that is producing affordable, license-free prosthetics….and cosmo-local production that shares knowledge and design globally, open-source style, while producing physical things (farm equipment, furniture, housing) locally. 

The King of the Meadows project in the Netherlands is a commons that has mobilized citizens to steward biodiversity connected with cultural heritage. The Bangla-Pesa is a neighborhood currency in Kenya that is helping people exchange value and meet needs without the use of the national fiat currency. 

I think you get the idea. If multilateral institutions are going to adjust to the new world unleashed by distributed apps and digital technologies, they should begin by exploring the great promise of commons in meeting urgent needs, giving people some genuine control over their lives, and compensating for the inherent limits of bureaucratic state systems and markets.

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The best that nation-states could do was adapt to planet-scale forces of capital, technology and migration. And part of that adaptation meant national identities would become more worldly and cosmopolitan. It would be a functional necessity to tolerate, even embrace, difference.

Jump-cut to now. Where some in a 60,000-strong crowd for a national anniversary in Budapest freely hold up posters titled “White Europe” and “Clean Blood”. Where ex-Trump advisor Steve Bannon, a self-proclaimed “economic nationalist”, addresses a French National Front rally with the words, “Let them call you racist… wear it as a badge of honour”. Where elements of the UK commercial press (and other pint-wielding provocateurs) describe domestic judges and MPs as “traitors” and “saboteurs”.

All of this underpinned by proclamations of national glory and tradition — more often than not deemed as under threat from a host of named and nameless “others”.

Understanding nationalism

Bewilderment is understandable. As are laments that this is a veritable retreat from the future. Yet at FutureFest, we try to set current developments in deep and wide contexts. As it extends outwards from now, the “cone of uncertainty” that futurologists talk about contains many thorny issues — and that means power, passions and asymmetries, as well as tidy and gleaming solutions.

If the call to nationhood is irresistibly on the rise, the future-minded should be thinking about how to turn its dynamics to the good.

What that might imply, to begin with, is an understanding of nationalism that is less phobic and alarmist than is (understandably) generated by the headlines.

In much political science, the assumption behind the term “nationalism” is that the qualities of the nation are the driving force of its ideology — just as the dynamism of capital propels “capitalism” or the primacy of social relations fuels “socialism”.

The anthropologist Ernest Gellner understood nationalism as a functional phenomenon. It was a means whereby industrialising territories established a common language, clock-time and other useful standards. It justified investing in education and welfare systems, in order to strengthen the capacities and character of the “folk”.

Now, 19th and 20th century nationalism could fall into preposterous myths of racial superiority, and provide a logic for imperial exploitation and the subjugation of others. But it could also — in, say, the Nordic countries — become a transformative spur for societal development in economy, culture, education and land ownership (as outlined in Tomas Bjorkman and Lene Rachel Anderson’s recent book The Nordic Secret).

Altruistic and narcissistic nationalism

What form of nationalism — with its “Janus” face, as Tom Nairn once called it, facing both forwards and backwards — is prevailing in the present moment? As reported in the Economist a few months ago, the Polish social psychologist Michal Bilewicz has made a useful distinction between “altruistic” and “narcissistic” forms of contemporary nationalism:

Altruists acknowledge a chequered past, give thanks for today’s blessings and look forward to a better future — a straight line sloping up across time. Narcissists exalt in a glorious past, denigrate a miserable present and promise a magnificent future — a rollercoaster U-curve with today in its pit… If you need a rule of thumb for assessing a nationalist movement, ascending ramp versus switchback U is as good as you are likely to get.

One might recognise the altruistic version in the small-nationalisms of Scotland and Wales, or the Catalonian independence movement, or even Macron’s forward motion for the French nation. These nationalisms are liberal and progressive. They are pro-EU or other transnational regimes, shouting ‘stop the world, we want to get on’.

Yet it would be fair to say the narcissistic form is currently dominant in Europe. The administrations of Hungary, Poland, Russia and Turkey — and the anti-immigration contenders in many other countries — do indeed combine these elements. That is: a glorious reading of their own history; a vision of a present society overrun by malign, polluting and external forces; and a future which restores national “Greatness”.

A post-Brexit UK looks like it’s trying to be both kinds of nationalism at the same time. Meaning a “Global Britain” that’s about to be freed from the exactions of European bureaucracy, in order to extend its national genius for democracy and industry around the world… so we are told. And as for Trump’s America? Well, as presidential tweet tumbles after presidential tweet, it’s difficult to tell.

“New nationalism” at Futurefest

In this year’s FutureFest, we’ve been trying to grapple with the full spectrum of creative (and destructive) forces shuddering through our lives at the moment. Our aim is to open up alternatives than can occupy the future in a confident way. The enduring appetite for collective identity has to be one path we explore. Which means taking nationalism seriously.

We’ve invited Professor Manuel Castells to dwell again on his remarkably prescient comments about the power of identity, made in his mid-90s trilogy The Information Age. Castells saw the interdependence of what he called “the Net and the Self”. Our networked, mobile and global existence is so demanding that it produces a need for a collective anchor in the storm; a more slow-moving resource of culture and history.

The narcissistic nationalisms previously mentioned indicate how this relationship can go badly wrong. Castells, himself Catalonian, will give us clues as to how it can be set right for the future. He will also be exploring these ideas in a conversation with Sir Nick Clegg.

Our panel on the “new nationalism” has a range of leading experts who will take “these islands” of Britain as their starting point. British Future’s Sunder Katwala has been conducting research on attitudes to Britishness since 2011 and Cambridge’s Michael Kenny is as interested in the nations that comprise the “United” Kingdom. As a leading scholar on cosmopolitan identity, the LSE’s Ayça Çubukçu will hold open a wider space in which a post-Brexit British identity can be explored.

A few decades ago, Benedict Anderson once described nationalism as an “imagined community” — a sense of connection with those who we will never actually, physically meet. How much of our virtualised, networked life does that concept also describe? How much of our future depends on how well we imagine our communities? What can the nations we craft teach us about how to invoke and locate the collective in our lives?

As ever, in one single FutureFest, many possible worlds.

Originally published by NESTA

Photo by alda chou

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Presentation resources

This is a recording of the presentation ‘Commoning our Democracy’ by Michel Bauwens of the p2pfoundation.net/ at the Imagine Festival in Belfast 14/03/2018.

imaginebelfast.com/events/commoning-our-democracy/

Slides below description.

“Democratic nation-states are in crisis and hardly able to contain the forces of disruption that are trans-national in scale. We are living in an era of crises when the consequences of the currently dominant economic, social and political paradigms are pressing upon people, fomenting feelings of frustration, helplessness and despair and damaging democracy. Such feelings are all too familiar for those of us living in Northern Ireland.

In recent years, we have seen a re-emergence and fast growth of ‘the commons’ and ‘commoning’, with ‘citizen commoners’ cooperating in the interests of an ecologically sustainable, kinder society. This has been particularly evident in the fields of the field of shared knowledge, and in the mutualisation of provisioning systems through urban commons. There are many who believe that the innovative ways of thinking and doing associated with commoning are vital strands of the ecological and societal transformations that are needed for humanity to survive and thrive in the challenging times ahead.

Drawing from his experience of working in various parts of the world, Michel Bauwens, co-founder of the trans-national P2P Foundation, will offer answers to this question. It is envisaged that Michel’s presentation will inform and inspire some co-creative, civic conversation among participants about the prospects for ‘commoning our democracy’.”

Presentation Slides –

PDF – drive.google.com/file/d/1lrwpGsti…view?usp=sharing

ODP – drive.google.com/open?id=1z0jAwou…vnGEuGXrxFk8BitK

PPTX – drive.google.com/open?id=1iKa_DmT…osRENCp1RvhaJqed

Photo by danna § curious tangles

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