Moving Toward An ‘Imperial Age’

“The End of the Nation-State” By Jean-Marie Guehenno (translated by Victoria Elliott), (145 pages, University of Minnesota Press, $19.95)

There is a consensus that the ending of the Cold War has thrust the world into a new era, but there is no consensus on what the era’s nature is.

For a while a good deal of attention was paid to Francis Fukuyama’s theory that the West’s victory over the Soviet system meant the end of history. Then the outbreak of savage ethnic conflicts, especially in the former Communist domain, suggested that the new era would be dominated by resurgent nationalism, which would make for an excess of history.

As Jean-Marie Guehenno writes in his own effort to figure out what the future holds in store, “We are haunted by the 19th century,” when the idea of nations as peoples dominated events.

But Guehenno does not believe that either the end of history or the new nationalism is the dominant characteristic of the world now forming, one in which superpower conflict has ended and various new ways of doing business, of communicating and of acting politically have made themselves felt.

Guehenno, a former French cultural consul in the United States who is now France’s ambassador to the European Union, argues that the renewed ethnic conflicts are the terminal spasms of the world that is ending, not the birth pangs of the one coming into being.

The new world, he writes, will mean the end of the nation-state as we have known it for the last 200 years. The age of ever more information, which Guehenno calls “the age of the networks” - communications networks, business networks, scientific and cultural networks - will continue to subvert the way nations have organized themselves and wielded power.

A new kind of “imperial age,” in his phrase, is dawning. It is imperial because “the society of men has become too vast to form a political entity”; the idea of empire “describes a world that is at once unified and without a center.”

Guehenno is a product of an elite French education, in particular the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, which trains the very cerebral few who will rise to the upper ranks of the French government. (President Jacques Chirac went to ENA; so did Alain Juppe, his prime minister.)

“The End of the Nation-State” shows Guehenno as one of those cerebral few. The book is extremely intelligent, a refined presentation of an idea. But it is also so abstract, so devoid of examples, so replete with statements that Guehenno simply tosses out like drops of holy water requiring no explanation or justification, that it is often difficult to grasp just what he means.

The first couple of chapters, in which Guehenno states his thesis, are the clearest and most compelling.

He begins by acknowledging that at a time when the United Nations has never had so many members, “it may seem paradoxical to evoke the demise of the nation.” But he quickly suggests that the nation-state, seemingly so durable as the world’s main institution, is ephemeral, perhaps even illusory.

The nation-state was in any event a largely European idea that satisfied European purposes and came about under very special circumstances.

The post-cold-war age will be neither the end of history nor a resurgence of history, but rather the dramatic weakening of nation-states and their governments as the primary institutions of life.