Global Politics Course Companion 2017 PDF

1.1 Power The nature of power Power is a matter of relationships. Power is also situational. It cannot be...

1.1 Power The nature of power Power is a matter of relationships. Power is also situational. It cannot be viewed as a unitary or independent force but as an aspect of relations among people. The ability to direct another’s actions or a country’s economy is always situated within a context that has increasingly become the subject matter of social inquiry. Power cannot be assumed, but needs to be explored and studied in order to discover the patterns and bases on which it operates. Eric Wolf, one of the most prominent scholars in the study of the concept of power and its application to social analysis, outlined four types of power. In his words, “power works differently in interpersonal relations, in institutional arenas and on the level of whole societies” (1999: 5). For global politics, it is Wolf’s structural power that is the most useful in studying the relationships between key concepts and units in this course. Structural power includes the people, power and politics that feature in global politics. There are other types of power that also t into our study. These include theories of power and types of power, such as military, social and cultural, unilateral and multilateral, hard and soft, which all present differing kinds of power relevant to the particular example under study, and will be discussed throughout this Companion. A collection of international ags in Munich, Germany Power in contex t The past century has been an era of revolutions, genocides and major wars in almost every part of the globe. Millions have died from violence in conicts over religion, ethnicity and colour, and what all of these conicts have in common are the adversarial claims over the resources that support the basic ability to reproduce life. There are many communities that are today in danger of extinction and many more that are in dire poverty. Over the past 50 years, the conguration of the world’s resources has changed dramatically. More than half of the world’s population now lives on less than US$2.00 per day, and one child (under ve) dies every three seconds from poverty – that is some 60 million between 2000 and 2006. How did this happen? When we observe the world today, we notice rst the many divisions based on physical geography, but quickly revealed are also divisions TOK based on race, ethnicity, religion and the many ways by which people Can we have beliefs and communities reproduce themselves and the contexts of their daily or knowledge that are living. These contexts are interwoven with divisions based on nations, independent of our culture? power, politics and claims to authority. Every day the news – available Does global politics seek to by radio in even the remotest of villages – tells stories of conicts and discover truths about human quests for peace, of battles and genocides and attempts at reconciliation, nature, or is it based on of crises and the hopes of peace by the citizens of a globe who are now assumptions about human all interconnected in ways that we have never been before. There nature? are no longer isolated peoples, regions or countries, and one region’s 18  1. 1 : P O W E R wars over oil are another’s crises over food and basic resources. The ways in which the world’s resources are used have become issues of power and authority. Scientists now predict that the current conicts over energy resources will be dwarfed by future claims over water, as desertication takes away livable spaces and famines are initiated by increasing droughts brought on by industrialization and global warming. Dams, for example, often affect the availability of water thousands of miles away, while pollution is making more of the Earth’s water unusable for food production. A number of questions may immediately be raised: How do decisions affecting the global and local distribution of resources get made? Desertication necessitates permanent crop protection in many parts of the world How is authority determined? Who decides who has the right to build dams or burn forests, or worse, allow the genocide of an area’s population? TOK What is a government, and who decides what it does? Can a person or group of people Anthropology tells us that there are many different types of government know what is best for other and ways of reproducing human social life, and that in the context people? of human history, government is a relatively recent development. Egalitarian societies have been a common thread throughout most of human history, characterized by equality between men and women, between groups, and among communities. The earliest forms of the differentiation of people is based on age and sex, but even these divisions do not necessarily mean that there is an inequality between older and younger or between men and women. These early differences are task oriented, with older and younger people performing different aspects of labour to maintain community life, or they are biologically necessitated, such as the case with women bearing children. So how did we get to this point of ever more complex forms of social hierarchy, power, and authority? What is the difference that people experience in a simple or a complex society? We have seen in the introduction chapter that earlier societies are not just societies and cultures minus some of the characteristics of more modern ones. They are qualitatively different from the societies and culture that most of us live in today, and our experience of daily life is, by denition, very different from those who A Somali National Government soldier walks past burning debris lived hundreds or thousands of years ago. We following a suspected suicide bombing are unique, indeed. 19 1 POWER, S O V E R E IGN T Y AND I N T E R N AT I O N A L R E L AT I O N S States and statehood in the contemporary world In contemporary society states are the best-known mechanisms of social control and social integration. Designed to promote and protect “the will of the people”, they have their own internal dynamics. There are many and varied kinds of states in the contemporary world, and not all have been successful. We have many examples of failed states in our world today – states that can no longer maintain social control over their populations. A few recent examples include Libya and Somalia, and there are others that are fast approaching that point. As the New Yorker reports (2016), Tunisia is the only country to emerge from the Arab revolutions of 2011 as a functioning democracy. Mexico has become dangerously close to becoming a failed state with the inux and violence of drugs and cartels, as has Colombia and other countries of that region for the same reason. Many claim that the term “states” has become outdated as boundaries are no longer legitimate, and the sovereignty of states has been questioned by trade agreements and large multi-national corporations. Also, the porous nature of many states with the immigration and migration of millions of people around the globe questions the stability of territory as it has been traditionally dened. 9 March 2011: Rebel soldiers ghting against Colonel Muammar Gadda re a Katyusha rocket near Ras Lanuf, Libya Other types of power Beyond those discussed above, other descriptions and reference to power have come into play as analysts try to understand the nature of power and its sources. Joseph Nye, for example, in his book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (1990), uses the terms “hard” and “soft” power as descriptors of kinds of interventions that are designed to bring about the desired change, whether coming from the outside or within a geographic level. As their names suggest, “hard” power refers to the use of force and threats of force to inuence the decision- making of those in charge; “soft” power lies more in the realm of 20  1. 1 : P O W E R negotiation, promises of aid, cooperation and other non-military means of inuencing change. Recently, the descriptor of “smart” power has L TA been added to this matrix, and although there is debate about its rst use Research skills and who used it, there seems to be some consensus that it came from Research the rst use of speeches made by Hillary Clinton as she ran for President in the 2016 the term “smart power” election in the USA. “Smart” refers to the combination of hard and soft and why it was introduced. power, the ability to use both when called for, or one or the other when necessary. Other kinds of power used in this Companion include military power, economic power, political power, social power, individual versus collective power, and universal versus multilateral power. It is important to remember that these are descriptors, not analyses, and that the type of power described must be part of a larger discussion and analysis of power and its uses. For example, Wolf’s structural power refers to social conditions and the use of labour to maintain social realms. Soft power is a descriptor for a kind of approach to the use of power, and needs to be connected to the analysis of particular situations and the strategies that are being employed. Violence and structural violence Class discussion What is violence? As citizens, we customarily assume a commonplace What is violence? Discuss your denition that encompasses physical acts among individuals, groups or individual interpretations of the nations. However, there are subtler and less obvious forms of violence term. that are inherent in the diverse forms of inequality and unequal access to social resources. In today’s world, violence is inherently integrated into the larger process of political economy and social life. Derived from liberation theologians, structural violence is the situated place characterized by social inequality that is exerted systematically – “that is, indirectly – by everyone who belongs to a certain social order… The concept of structural violence is intended to inform the study of the social machinery of oppression” (Farmer, 2004). Along with that violence and oppression, however, is the need to integrate the power that generates and maintains structural violence, and by which society is kept operationally functional. States often employ structural violence through laws and other mechanisms that would make it seem that the cause of this kind of violence occurs naturally. If poverty is a major problem, then, the reason for it becomes one of individual failure rather than problems with the system. The state thus protects itself from becoming the object of blame for the unequal access to resources that often causes the violence of poverty and the silence of those in poverty. Social scientists have been interested in structural violence as part of a study of power to analyse events associated with globalization, and that includes an analysis and reconstruction of events around the world, on scales that vary from the household to regional and continental organization. One of the more insidious characteristics of structural violence, as Farmer points out, is the erasure of history and the machinery of suffering, and how suffering and poverty generate violence (Farmer, 2004). 21  1.2 The nation state, power and modes of social control The nation state, the result of a complex division of labour and exchange relationships, is a political and territorial entity. “Nation” implies that there is a common ethnicity and cultural characteristics, such as language, while “state” most often refers to the sovereign nature of the area in which a state has been formed. While we know that state formations are the result of stratied socio-economic classes that have developed formal legal authority backed by force, it is less clear when a state becomes a nation state, or whether the nation can exist before state formation takes place. Nationalism has historically been a mechanism by which peoples are united under common characteristics with a sense of identity, generally backed by a government that denes a state. Whether nations existed before a state is formed is a research question, and many theories exist on both sides of the issue. States are classied as sovereign if they are independent entities not controlled by other territories or entities. They are political entities governed by a single form of government. People living within a sovereign state are subject to the rules, laws and duties as citizens of the state entity. Here we also have to consider internal sovereignty, for in order for sovereignty to exist, there has to be an agreement within the nation’s population that the state is legitimate and the holders of the will of the people. Here is where sovereignty can become very complicated, for while the nation’s leaders may assert to others around the globe that the sovereignty of the nation is stable and real, those inside that nation may not agree with their leaders, and conict within the state can be a problem for the wishes of its leaders, elected or not. The French Revolution During the French Revolution less than 50 per cent of the population spoke French, and even fewer spoke it well. Here is an example where the state clearly did come before the nation. The French Revolution solidied the role of the state as a generator of common identity, creating policies and mandates that united the “French People” under a dominant language, culture, and territory. 22  1. 2 : T H E N A T I O N S T A T E , P O W E R A N D M O D E S O F S O C I A L C O N T R O L Nations and states have goals to unite people under a single rubric of TOK political rule. The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci (2011), in his Prison Notebooks, coined the term hegemony: the goal of harmony through To what extent do the language the agreement of the peoples under state control. However, this is not and concepts we use shape always possible, and he states that when the creation of hegemony or determine, rather than just becomes impossible, then the state often uses force. The elites that are describe, the world? the beneciaries of state unity generate their own ideologies to justify their positions as managers and leaders, as well as rally the population for war when it is to the advantage of state organization or when the state is threatened by internal or external forces. They are also the generators of what is now often referred to as structural violence, or the institutional mechanisms by which people are discriminated against or oppressed because of their particular ethnicity, race or gender. The object of the managers of a state is to provide legitimacy for its existence that incorporates its peoples and resources. Other denitions of states represent the political realities of the area and its history. The present circumstances that are transforming areas, territories, legitimacy and social control are transforming past circumstances with the realities of the rapidly changing world system. At the start of the twentieth century, there were approximately 50 acknowledged states (Crawford, 2007: 3). Crawford tells us that before the Second World War there were approximately 75. He continues: The emergence of so many new States represents one of the major political developments of the twentieth century. It has changed the character of international law and the practice of international organizations. It has been one of the most important sources of international conict (2007: 3). The most common forms of states are unitary states, federal states, confederations, democratic states, militarized states, fragile/failed states and rising states. The differences between these types of states are predominately political: unitary states, for example, are organized by a centralized power that incorporates various territories and resources central to its functioning; confederations are unions of countries and territories with a centralized authority; militarized states are groups of territories organized for military action, and so on. In the contemporary world, types of states are changing often, with confederations coming together to defend territorial resources. There is an evolving nature of state sovereignty that is militated by stronger states and, importantly, multi-national corporations. These states must continually justify their legitimacy with the people under their governance. It is not unusual in the contemporary world to witness changes of governments, wars between states that were formerly close allies, and changing allegiances among governments and other non-governmental entities. Some of these changes are inuenced by L TA international law, challenges to the Westphalian conception of state Research skills sovereignty, or the ultimate power of the central administration. There Research the Westphalian has been much debate about the possibility of this sort of state, given the concept of state. With a interactions of trade and challenges to centralized law, such as supra- partner, discuss whether nationality, humanitarian intervention, indigenous rights, and social this a model that most movements. It is better conceptualized as an ideal that never quite comes countries follow today. into full completion as competing stakeholders keep the politics of states in motion. 23 1 POWER, S O V E R E IGN T Y AND I N T E R N AT I O N A L R E L AT I O N S Social order, ideology and power In order for power to be sustained, it must be justied, either by convincing people that existing forms of power are justied and good, or by force – whether that be the blocking and prevention of resistance against the existing forms of power or by all-out warfare. This justication of relationships of power is accomplished through the application of ideology, or “ideas in the service of power”. Wolf distinguishes between ideas and ideology, for, as he notes, the term “ideas” is intended to cover the entire range of mental constructs rendered manifest in public representations, populating all human domains…“ideology” needs to be used more restrictively, in that “ideologies” suggest unied schemes or congurations developed to underwrite or manifest power. (1999: 4) In simple terms, ideology means a way of thinking about a situation, a context, or the world. When we are told, for example, that the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness is best brought about by supporting the policies of a current administration (whether that be national, local or institutional), we are being presented with an ideology that hopes to direct our thinking and our action. The goal of ideology, according Antonio Gramsci, 1891–1937, wrote widely to Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), the Italian political theorist and on philosophy, politics and linguistics; he was also a founding member of the resistance leader who fought the Fascist government of Mussolini, Communist Par ty of Italy is to create a peaceful state of social stasis through hegemony, where the dominating world-view is integrated throughout society as a whole. The object of hegemony is to convince all within a society that the government is working towards their best interests, and this is accomplished in a number of ways, including education, the Church, military ideology, the penal system (Foucault, 1975) and the control over media and everyday cultural life. Where hegemony cannot be achieved through the incorporation or co-optation of competing ideologies, force is used, as we can see from the brutal actions of Mussolini in the 1930s. Gramsci, prolic in his writing, died in 1937 as a political prisoner, having been in prison since 1926. The point that Gramsci made clear was that ideologies represent powerful agendas, providing a “social cement” (Therborn, 1980: 4). The sophistication of an ideology, then, is found in its ability to construct a convincing logic that includes the reservations and resistance of its critics, thereby creating the lack of conict that leads to hegemony. When force becomes necessary the actual seizure may only be momentary; it is an act that is necessary to gain power and domination. In other words, to exercise power, there must be mechanisms in place to keep it going, to keep social tensions from tearing the domination apart. The successful implementation of hegemony creates a ”common sense” that all understand and share, it becomes an integral part of the culture. It is this “common sense” in a community that we look for to understand the mechanisms by which the interplay between power and its exercise takes place (Kirsch, 2001: 43). 24 1.3 Non-state actors L TA Along with the authority of nations and states, non-state actors, from Research skills the United Nations to smaller organizations, are playing a larger role on the world stage. We can refer to these types of actors as civil society, Pick one of the NGOs or the portion of society that acts as an alternative to coercive state (non-governmental power. In simple terms, non-state actors are those that operate outside organizations) mentioned the sphere of governmental control. Unit 3 has many good examples here. Research two ways in of non-state actors and their contributions to social movements and to which the organization has politics. Some good examples of these types of actors are Human Rights inuenced international Watch, Amnesty International, the United Way and academic discipline relations in recent years. associations such as the American Anthropological Association. These organizations often take positions on the debates around the local, regional, international and global actions and policies of the day, and are often more useful in the struggle to change long-held positions than states themselves. Another type of non-state actor that has gained much attention are the interrelated state organizations or IGOs (intergovernmental organizations), the most prominent being the United Nations. We will refer more to the United Nations below, and Unit 2 also uses the United Nations as a focal point for the discussion of human rights. Other IGOs that have gained prominence are the trade unions that exist on almost every continent, such as the African Union, and more government-related organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The Union of International Organizations (UIO) lists 68,000 international organizations, adding somewhere in the area of 1,200 per year. Not all of these organizations are active (the UIO estimates that about half are active and half are not), and these The logo of the African Union include both NGOs and IGOs. Other prominent organizations that play a large role in global politics are multi-national (sometimes referred to as transnational) corporations (MNCs), such as General Electric, Westinghouse, BP, Exxon Mobil and, more recently, Facebook and Twitter. As these companies operate in many different countries and interact with their governments, they can exert strong inuences on every level of global politics. The Economist reported that in 2012, for example, General Electric held more assets than any other nancial rm in the world (10 June 2012). As they report: Of the 100 companies with the most foreign assets, 17 hold over 90% of their assets abroad, includingArcelorMittal, Nestlé, Anheuser-Busch InBev and Vodafone. Their share of foreign sales is also substantially larger than GE’s. More than half of GE’s 300,000-strong workforce is based outside America; Toyota, which has slightly more employees, only has 38% of its 326,000 workers abroad. (2012; accessed 16 June 2016) These new realities, created in the midst of globalization, have their clearest effect on the local level. This is demonstrated by empty streets where stores and factories used to be, abandoned houses that people have forsaken in their quest to nd work in other areas where, they The logo of General Electric 25 1 POWER, S O V E R E IGN T Y AND I N T E R N AT I O N A L R E L AT I O N S hope, production has not yet moved outside the country, a drastic dip in the population that affects the ability of families to maintain ties as generations split apart in the movement of peoples, and the rise of poverty generated by a lack of jobs and the entitlements such as healthcare and retirement benets that jobs provide. For example, in Kirsch’s 1988 ethnography, In the Wake of the Giant, he shows how a healthy, family-dominated town in the north-east of the United States became torn apart as parts of its major employer, General Electric, went overseas or closed down. Pittseld, Massachusetts, USA, where this ethnography was carried out, was part of a deindustrialization that blanketed much of the north-east and Midwest of the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, splitting generations as younger members of the community moved away in search of work, and creating crises as sources of pollution from the General Electric plant resulted in health crises that the company would not take responsibility for. The irony in this particular case is that the head of General Electric at that time, Jack Welsh, was born and raised in Pittseld, and his direct orders to close down most of the plant not only destroyed the strong ties between corporation and community that has existed for the previous 100 years, but left a community that had, for the most part, been designed and run by the corporation so they lacked the knowledge of how to organize themselves or attract other industry when General Electric ed the scene. Also operating on global levels are large media corporations, 96 per TOK cent of which are owned by four multi-national companies. Social How has technology changed movements and resistance movements are now more visible on an the way in which knowledge is international scale, sometimes as a result of Internet access or because of produced? What role does the actions by organizations such as Amnesty International. The legitimacy media play in shaping people’s and sometimes even the survival of states are tied into these multi- views of issues in global politics? national organizations and forums, as the following units will show. The United Nations The United Nations and its members and activities are referenced throughout the course and throughout this Companion. It is an organization of interrelated states that was created shortly after the Second World War as a way to generate cooperation among the world’s states and, some would argue, as a direct reaction to the horrors of the Holocaust (more of this will be discussed in the next unit on human rights). Before the United Nations there was the League of Nations, established after the First World War by the Treaty of Versailles. It was, like the United Nations, created to maintain peace and security among nations, but was designated a failure when the Second World War started. The term “United Nations” was coined by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942. The United Nations emerged as a pledge by 26 nations to band together and prevent major conicts, especially with what were called the “Axis Powers”, which consisted of Germany, Italy and Japan. They were joined by 24 other countries directly after the Second World War ended, meeting in San Francisco to draft the UN Charter, which was initially signed by 51 countries. The remaining assets of the League of Nations The logo of the League of Nations 26  1. 3 : N O N - S T A T E A C T O R S were turned over to the United Nations, as the League formally dissolved. Today, most of the countries of the world are members of the United Nations, and its organization is a monolith that reaches out in all directions, touching almost every citizen on the planet. With agencies and research organizations as part of its outreach, the United Nations holds a potential power that no individual country could possibly assemble. Its major constituent parts are the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council, the International Court of Justice, and the Secretariat. Its 193 member countries agree The Security Council chamber at the UN headquar ters in New York in principle to abide by the UN Charter and to obey the rulings of the Security Council, which often deals with major conicts and disasters around the world. As an intergovernmental organization it provides universal ideals for nations to follow, sometimes intervening in conicts. The range of its power is a subject of ongoing debate, as are the constitution of the Security Council and the prosecution of individuals and nations through the International Criminal Court. The essence of the debates about the United Nations centre on its ability to challenge the sovereignty of the nation state, and if any of its treaties and covenants are enforceable at all. There have been many objections to the rule of the Security Council and its effect on smaller and less- developed nations. A developed, industrialized country has never been brought before the International Criminal Court, and in particular the United States, Russia, China, India and Israel, as members of the Security Council, are almost never challenged on their actions in their own countries or globally. Interestingly, these countries are often the major nations that do not sign agreements on issues such as the environment, the abuse of women and children, and human rights. Many, then, bring into question the place of the United Nations in world politics and as an example of good global governance. The next unit on human rights discusses these issues in more detail as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, initiated and founded the commission that drew up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The debates around this declaration and the inability to enforce human right precepts are ongoing problems that attract attention from every part of the globe. Importantly, the United Nations operates by assembling nations together, while the daily realities of local and global politics takes place on levels far below the chambers of the United Nations in New York. 27  1.4 Communities In the introduction the community was dened as a geographic level on which we work and analyse the global arena. Both NGOs and IGOs are most active on community – or, perhaps more precisely, local – levels. However, given the inuence of outside forces such as IGOs, MNCs and the United Nations, the viability of communities has come into question. The existence and denition of communities have become increasingly a subject of debate in the academic and the public sectors, and a further discussion of its present use and the surrounding debates can be helpful in dening our basic units of study. The basic question is whether we can dene communities outside the Class discussion constraints of territory, or taken a step further, without place. Those Has the Internet created promoting the primacy of cyberspace would seem to suggest that the equality among citizens? community in space and time has become a relic of the past. The often referenced “virtual community” assumes something post-community, or at least a reformulation of community. Andrew Sullivan, in a story for the New York Times Magazine (2000, Section 6: 30–34), makes a claim that the Internet has generated an equality among citizens that Marx could have only dreamed of. If we are to accept his premise, “virtual communities” promise eqalitarian interaction, requiring only a computer and a modem. What is forgotten, of course, is who has access to a computer and a modem and who does not. Cyberspace communities are based on technology, and in the words of Gillespie and Robins (1989), In considering the extent to which the new communications technologies challenge or reinforce existing monopolies of information, and the associated spatial hierarchies and interdependencies, we need to ascertain in whose interests they are developed and whose interests they serve. (1989: 11) They conclude that the “distance-shrinking” characteristics of the new communications technologies, far from overcoming and rendering insignicant the geographic expressions of centralized economic and political power, in fact constitute new and enhanced forms of inequality and uneven development. (1989: 7) The new denitions of community emphasize space over physical place and are more pronounced in the capital-intensive countries, in which the role of technology has been more decisive in everyday life. Even within these countries, however, in Bourdieu’s (1982) terms, the effect has been uneven, as those with the resources to access and to own technology have been more willing to redene themselves as novel and distinct from those who are forced to rely on more traditional means of communication and identication. The Internet has proved to be an enormous asset to those, with certain means, who are isolated and unable to communicate freely with their would-be peers. What has occurred with the rise of the Internet and other communications technologies is the ease at which, for some 28  1. 4 : C O M M U N I T I E S populations, communication over space is possible. However, while the ability to express one’s thoughts and feelings in novel modes of communication has helped some to reinforce self-identication, it can also contribute to an isolation that potentially works against the same process of self-discovery that the Internet engenders. The validation that the Internet provides exists in isolation from the physical, and the body, in postmodern terms, becomes an abstraction that is secondary to the working of the imaginary. Composed of text, cyberspace acts as a particularly relevant example of the primacy of space over place, where reality is inferior to perception (Mihalache, 2000). What can we say about the state of our communities, then, as we have traditionally known them, and what is the outlook for their continued survival? We have noted that the need for the community as a basis for socializing the next generation has diminished. Nevertheless, from independence movements in less capital-intensive countries to the resurgence of cultural identities, communities have continued to assert group identication and afliation. There are no shortages of examples of geographic communities that have acted as sites of resistance against oppression, and of community revolts that have broadened into larger revolutions. How do we reconcile the lessons of history with the realities of change that are represented in “the problem of place”? David Harvey argues: … we cannot go back… we cannot reject the world of sociality which has Class discussion been achieved by the interlinking of all peoples into a global economy… we Is increasing globalization should somehow build upon this achievement and seek to transform it into an inevitable? unalienated experience. The network of places constructed through the logic of capitalist development, for example, has to be transformed and used for progressive purposes rather than be rejected or destroyed. (1993: 13) Should this position be uncritically accepted? Is increasing globalization inevitable? Even if we accept the premise that we cannot resist TOK globalization, how this understanding and call for action is put into use remains an open question, tied to our understanding of place and space. How can we decide between the Citing Young, Harvey further posits: opinions of exper ts when they disagree with one another? The ‘desire for unity or wholeness in discourse’… ’generates borders, Are there dierent amounts of dichotomies and exclusions’. In political theory, furthermore, the concept disagreement in the dierent of community ‘often implies a denial of time and space distancing’ and an areas of knowledge? In what insistence on ‘face-to-face interaction among members within a plurality of ways might disagreement be contexts’. Yet there are ‘no conceptual grounds for considering face-to-face helpful to the production of relations more pure, authentic social relations than relations mediated across knowledge? time and distance.’ (1993: 15) However, the extreme cases where communities are presented as being exclusionary and, by implication, promoting discriminatory practices (and, in the worst cases, atrocities), run the risk of “blaming the victim”. We cannot ignore the enormous pressures to which communities have been subjected in a period of rapid globalization. The conict between and among communities has often led to a tragic outcome. Other consequences have been the loss of livelihood, the alienation of community members from each other, and the loss of a sense of being. Further, the “new communities” of virtual reality and other forms of communication over networked space often exclude 29 1 POWER, S O V E R E IGN T Y AND I N T E R N AT I O N A L R E L AT I O N S the very people who are most subject to the purposeful fragmentation created by a growing capitalist market: those without the resources to have access to electronic communication networks. Populations without resources, and particularly those exploited in less capital- intensive countries, are hardly able to participate in these new forms of community denition. Unsurprisingly, the argument concerning exclusion is the same that has been used against “identity politics”. This argument envisions “all human beings with universal human rights” as Duberman (2001) explains the complaint. The logic ignores the fact that communities and identities are being challenged rather than legitimated, dissolving the common bases for resistance with other attacked minorities and communities, the bases for building bridges (Kirsch, 2000). There is a difference between communities of exclusion, often generated by conict from the outside, and communities as centres of cultural transmission and inclusion. While not all relations may be alienating, the very changes in time and space to which Harvey refers have often come as a reaction to community resistance to domination that causes the ”alienation, bureaucratization and degradation” experienced by many around the world. When the basis for this identication is destroyed and the individual is left on his or her own, alienation results. As Maria Dalla Costa (1996: 113) tells us, It is signicant that, according to Italian Press reports in 1993–94, many cases of suicide in Italy are due to unemployment or to the fact that the only work available is to join a criminal gang. While, in India, the ’tribal people‘ in the Narmada valley have declared a readiness to die by drowning if work continues on a dam which will destroy their habitat and, hence, the basis of their survival and cultural identity. Suicide, of course, is not the only way out. Violence is often a part of the threat to communities, precipitated by a perceived need to maintain a past, even if idealized. Young’s complaints about the attributes of communities are most often during the processes of community destruction, as can be witnessed by the many recent examples in Europe and Africa. Stable communities have no reason to exclude individuals or to promote genocide. From community to aliation The fact that geographic communities feed into wider networks of social interaction is a staple of social analysis. Society comprises communities and the individuals within them. As we have noted, the real change in the denitions of community has come in the conceptualizations of time and space. Communities as physical entities have been metamorphosed into the “communities of taste” or “taste cultures” to which Jane Jacobs refers (in Harvey 1990: 67). These “taste cultures” are driven by the market, and as such, change often. So then, according to this reasoning, do communities. What we are left with is a denition of community that is truly driven by the forces of the market, and thus by the needs of capital accumulation. 30  1. 4 : C O M M U N I T I E S The space-time compression discussed earlier is reected in our networks. According to Manual Castells, a Spanish sociologist, new information technologies are “integrating the world in global networks of instrumentality,” in what he calls “a vast array of virtual communities“(2000: 21–22). At the same time, as Castells reminds us, there has been an increasingly anxious search for identity, meaning and spirituality. “… why,” Castells asks, “do we observe the opposite trend throughout the world, namely, the increasing distance between globalization and identity, between the Net and the self?” (2000: 22). The use of the Internet can increase feelings of loneliness, alienation and depression, as substantial studies have concluded (Wolton, 1998, in Castells, 1997: 387). As an example, Castells cites the psychoanalyst Raymond Barglow, who reports that his patients are having dreams about their heads being programmed by a computer, to illuminate the paradox that has developed in a society where the self seems lost to itself, isolated and alone (2000: 23). Our networked society is both a result and a cause of an alienation and aloneness that has pervaded our lives. It has also created a desire for connectedness and afliation. Although many argue that the Internet has created new communities, the loss of the physical self and physical interactions in these