As we witness the rise of populist-nationalist reformers all around the world, there is much confusion about what this nationalism actually means. I get the impression that many think they are going back to the nationalism of an earlier time, but there is no resurrecting the past.
What we have called nationalism is the philosophy of the nation-state that arose in the 1860s. Whether in Italy, Japan, or America we saw a vast expansion of state power and centralization enabled by the industrial revolution era technologies like the railroad and the telegraph. The basic idea was that the country was divided up into departments handled by groups of bureaucrats in the capital city.
Mass public education inculcated all the nation’s children in the same values and eradicated local dialects and languages in favor of the speech of the capital province. Germany hadn’t been united in any meaningful way for about 1000 years, Italy not since the Roman Empire. Regions had distinct cultures and often spoke tongues that were not even mutually intelligible.
All those differences had to go so humanity itself could be reduced to standardized parts in the machine. The 20th century with radio, television and its mass mindless herd wars marked the high tide of centralization. What people like to call “globalism” is just a worldwide version of the 19th century style nation-state. The present nationalism is actually a reaction to what they see themselves as continuing in some way! No wonder they are confused about their identity!
The personal computer followed by internet has decentralized networks at a furious pace. The 21st century is about unraveling the monoculture that has grown ever more uniform and dreary over the last 150 years.
Until modern communications, large clumsy bureaucracies always won. Maybe 2 million men died because rubber stamps were put on the wrong forms, but the other 18 million would overwhelm the enemy. In a world of telegraph and then radio there was no real counter to this zerg swarming strategy.
Now though, it is possible for even small, poorly equipped forces to outmaneuver clumsy centralized states indefinitely while inflicting a thousand paper cuts and letting the nation-state waste its energy throwing slow, painfully telegraphed punches at gnats until it gases out. It’s like a claymation giant monster flailing around in vain to kill the heroes or Captain Kirk vs. the Gorn. It’s a simple concept often called 4GW(4th generation warfare) to sound hip.
By the early 2000s poor Arabs with home-made road bombs could outmaneuver the richest empire in history. In the 2010s smartphones lead to the Arab Spring and Occupy followed by the Islamic State.
What we are seeing is an increase in the size of 4G organizations until we are looking at something on the scale of nation state with the flexibility of a small organization. As it matures, this kind of system obsoletes the 19th century bureaucracy-bound nation-state.
The nationalist vs. globalist struggle we see across the developed world is the clash of established nation-states with 21st century decentralized networks. As soon as we understand this it’s clear why the establishment is on the wrong side of history and why in spite of their overhwelming power they can only flap about in furious teary rage as their world falls apart. There is a Tao of the universe and those who try to fight it, no matter how mighty, only exhaust themselves.
The election of Trump is only the beginning of their woes as his momentum carries over and they find themselves under siege in Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, France, and even Germany.
There is a new age upon us but it will not be a peaceful age. While steadily dwindling wealth remained above a certain line and there was a USSR to scare people, unity went without serious challenge. Since the year 2000 or so we’ve sunk towards the next dark age with rapidly shrinking wealth, low trust, low innovation, and stringent orthodox persecution of heretical ideas. Furthermore, in a nation-state that treats everyone like replaceable parts from cradle to grave no one feels like they really belong or really matter. They plug into an economy to crank out production points for most of their waking time alive with no purpose in sight. This purpose vacuum was waiting for something to fill it and modern communication brought down a Berlin Wall built from bricks of mechanistic nihilism.
It comes as no surprise then that the new organizations arising are very much like tribes. What others call nationalism I call neo-tribalism. As always some will benefit from change while others perish. An age of tribes promises to be a savage one defined by groups fighting over scarce resources in a world where most niches are already over-saturated.
The main discussion between allied emerging tribes right now is what uniting principles will define the new nation-tribe. Some believe it is about a civic polity, those who can participate at a net benefit for the whole. Others believe that ethnicity will be the core.
I think both are right about some things but neither grasps the whole truth. Disembodied communication allows humans to associate by natural predisposition and neurotype. Some tribes will form coalitions of mutually beneficial types and in those coalitions there will be hierarchies of tribes. In time, the tribal coalition becomes a caste system.
Above all, this means the end is coming for enlightenment philosophy that reduces all questions of society to the individual. In the future, society will not be treated as a machine made of atoms, but as an organism made of cells. Societies themselves will finally be seen correctly as competing organisms in the wild rather than lifeless structures that interchangeable atoms happen to occupy.
FORWARD BASE B 
24 replies on “21st Century Nationalism Is Not The Nation-State”
Giovanni, do you plan on writing another book anytime soon?
I’m actually putting some preliminary thought how I can make a book that unites themes from my different blogs over the years into a unified theory.
Giovanni Dannato,”I’m actually putting some preliminary thought how I can make a book that unites themes from my different blogs over the years into a unified theory.”
You’ve got a tremendous amount of super excellent ideas on your blogs. It’s so broad it would be tough to tie together. It would seem to be successful you would have to have some sort of theme or angle. Have you thought about what that would be? Maybe since it’s broad you could look at the same thing with different themes and show how they are tied together that way you wouldn’t be locked into one idea like Marx (labor the only value).
There’s an excellent book on this that ties societal and political power together. It’s based on what they call Metapolitics which is merely how power is expressed through violence. The technological basis for violence determines the society. The key is the cost of offense vs. defense. If offense is stronger political areas will coalesce into larger units. If defense is stronger then political units will split up into smaller units. Some examples are the Greek city states could afford armor due to their olive crops. A high profit easily stored and transportable product. Another is gunpowder. Gunpowder blew away the the feudal system. It concentrated power in large states that could raise the money for cannons and large armies. A large stone castle could be blasted to bits in days instead of a year long siege. To control an area took a lot of Men not just one small castle. We are still in the aftermath of that system. Now the microprocessor is lowering the cost of defense. If you can have a intelligent missile you can fire it out of sight an hit your target. Bombs can be remote controlled. On line news can bypass the media with multi-million dollar radio transmitters. Facebook replacing newspapers with large printers…and their large cost.
“Blood in the Streets: Investment Profits in a World Gone Mad” (1987)
The Great Reckoning: How the World Will Change in the Depression of the 1990’s (1994)
The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age (1999)
The last book used be cheap. A dollar and postage but recently it’s gone up. The other books are written for investors but have a lot of really good history and back ground information that explain the past and the present.
The powers that be may decide that all these humans are more trouble than they are worth and try to get rid of them all. I believe Zbigniew Brzezinski said “It’s easier to kill people than it is to control them”.
I got the quote wrong it is.
Today it is infinitely easier to kill one million people than to control one million people.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
I think the big idea would outlining the fundamentals of a society that is successful under modern forces, but like you say it’s a huge subject and I’m trying to figure where I ought to focus most.
Also, for something so broad, I’m not sure there’s an audience. I ask myself where I would publish or who would promote it and I do not know. In part because my ideas do not fit neatly into any existing ideology. I’ve self-published before but without a very large reach it’s just one of a million vanity books put out there every day.
Who wrote this metapolitics book? Your quote is precisely why I see the future being possibly quite violent. Especially as peasants cease to become profitable as wage slaves anymore. We’re in a bubble economy on the price of human life. History tells me that people have no problem treating each other as expendable and now we’re only coasting on inertia of custom.
As for defense becoming stronger fueling decentralization, I definitely agree. One saying I’ve repeated is the greatest inspiration of nationhood is the fear of other nations. The fear of conquerors that are even worse is why people have put up with the protection racket governments since the first cities.
Giovanni Dannato,”I think the big idea would outlining the fundamentals of a society that is successful under modern forces…”
It’s big and ambitious. My first thought is if you write this just make money it probably won’t and I’m probably wrong I’m not a book publisher. It would seem that the best motivation would be to clarify your own ideas into some kind of framework and to have a book that you are proud of. You never know you could be on all the talk shows in five years. Maybe you could just call it “Successful Societies” and compare features of the past that were successful, how present societies dealt with the same problems, where they fail and/or how they could improve. I’ve read probably all of your post and there’s a lot of that type comparison going on. Make an outline of what you think are the necessary factors to have a successful society and from there is just picking the order and filling in the blanks (yes I know this is the equivalent of this…
“… I ask myself where I would publish…”
Print on demand. One of many links.
http://www.fonerbooks.com/pod.htm
“…Who wrote this metapolitics book?…”
James Dale Davidson
Investor. Head of the Nation Taxpayers Union. My understanding is he lost money due to the timing if his investment advice on the falling of the US dollar, which hasn’t happened but will. I doubt he’s broke though. He’s got another book called “The Squeeze”(from 1980) that’s about how the government and other monopolist are gradually taking small amounts of fees every time you do anything or even sit still and how that destroys capital.
Sir William Rees-Mogg
Once editor of the Times in England.
I must warn anyone who reads these there’s maybe 25% the book filled with info on currency, bond swaps and stuff like that related to investing. This is not a bad thing it might just bore some people. The reasoning behind these financial maneuvers is some of the most clear headed societal forecasting I’ve ever seen. I think that reading them is like looking through a fortune tellers crystal. That being said their timing was WAY off. They believed that during Clinton’s term the whole country would fall out completely. I think that maybe China’s rise which was not much of anything when they wrote these books slowed things, oil prices declining (fracking) and uncertainty due to the world order being in flux caused people to move into the dollar much more than was anticipated. Probably the resilience of the US surprised a lot of people. Did me.
They predict in “The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age” (1999) that it may be possible to enslave people chemically in the future to get them to do their bidding. The elite are really ruthless. I think if we don’t get some kind of profit sharing or guaranteed income the large mass of people in the US and on the planet will be in really bad shape. Of course that may lead to a mass megadeath of the elite. If they get robots and limited AI then it’s over. I think the Jews will kill everyone off.
“…History tells me that people have no problem treating each other as expendable…”
I was just reading an article on evolutionistx about aborigines.
Damn these people were violent. Even the sociopaths in the hood would be freaked out by these guys.
I’ve considered something like “The Dimensions of Culture” as a title, also the name of an old 6 Heretic’s way post where I ponder why a modern city of 150,000 like Rockford, IL which would have been considered quite large in the ancient world does not have a similar cultural and creative output as a renaissaince Venice that was about the same size.
I guess my basic idea is that the next frontier is to figure out how to organize social technologies that haven’t changed any since Ancient Mesopotamia. And to do that you have to understand social institutions as organs of an organism or parts in a machine.
In the state of nature, there actually is a higher overall standard of living than in most civilizations…for those who make it. Chances of dying violently are quite high and the causes of conflict are of course control of territory and competition over women. The collapse of marriage markets in the modern West is just another reason why the future will be quite violent. When every man must compete to get laid, men are not only expendable but there are positive incentives to get rid of unwanted competition that creates a lower standard of life for everyone. Civilization really is quantity and security over quality and risk proposition. More people stay alive but they have to subsist on rice and only have sex within rule-bound marriages.
The cost of seige trains and a permanent engineering corps was so high that only the most powerful of nation states could project force. See Machevelli’s views towards the French as Venice, let alone Florence, couldn’t afford the cost of maintaining the level of firepower to break down fortified cities.
Gunpowder’s key European change is that attrition of nobles went sky high, and you needed to bring in non nobles to fight effectively. Serfdom is difficult to enforce when you need a man to carry firearms next to your nobles. The pool of mercenaries shrank as war became bloodier.
War, and effective realms, clustered around the early nation states that could afford it, in gold, talent, and manpower.
Look at what defensive castles turned in to. Dirt with low walls to catch cannon balls. Star shaped so you could shoot across any infantry storming the walls. As they were lower you needed this and also lots of Men to man all this real estate. Lots of Men, lots of money. No longer could you put up some stone castle and place a chain across a river and charge the ships. They would blow you away. You needed to control the whole area.
Yeah, you must be smoking crack. There’s nothing “decentralized” about globalism. Washington and the EU are two sides of the same lame “expert” class fucking up everything to amass control to sell as political favors. The nationalism we seek is the only cure for this gang of “cosmopolitan” crooks who see us only as cash cows to steal from. This lame story of how impossible it is to remove millions of low-IQ losers from peoples who never invented the wheel seems pretty stupid when there is a massive criminal conspiracy to bring millions of these diseased losers in every year. All you have to do is get rid of the crooks bringing them in, and then reverse the flow to kick them out. We don’t want savage rapists as our neighbors. We’ll kill anyone who sides with the invaders, trust me on that.
Dude, did you read the article? I describe the globalists as the forces of centralization. Dealing with low IQ groups is one part of the picture and a good first step, but the problems that got us in this dire situation to begin with are still with us.
“…how impossible it is to remove millions of low-IQ losers…”
This is actually not impossible at all if you have the balls to dig in under complete withering criticism and a good bit of mayhem and protest. The problem with Diversity is that the Federal government is purposely spreading it around to White controlled areas. If you control the spread you can reverse it. First the purveyors of Diversity pay zero price for their constant multiplication and spreading of it throughout the country. We should make them pay. Catalog all the counties that vote for Diversity and give it to them good.
There’s a Chinese group called the Broad group. Through careful design and mass production they put up 30 story skyscrapers in 15 days. They build a floor section in a factory with all the utilities installed. They build the walls for that section also with the utilities installed. They stack the walls on the floor and put it on a truck. The truck goes to the site where they put the floor in place, tilt up the walls, bolt the whole thing together and connect the utilities (I mean electrical, water, etc.). It’s incredibly fast and it’s not junk. It’s solid stuff because it’s all done in a controlled environment factory. Anyways. we mass produce these 30 story buildings and build them like madmen in the Diversity loving voters districts. We end section 8 and pile these people in. Also we change it where when a young girl has a kid out of wedlock in the 30 story towers she doesn’t move to a new apartment she stays right where she is with her mother. We could have movable walls to change apartment layout or just move them. After one kid she goes on permanent birth control Shots so she can’t miss them. Over a couple of decades the problem would rapidly solve itself. The Diversity lovers would rapidly start hating Diversity and stop voting for it. The birth rate would go down in the towers. The Diversity lovers would stop being able to push Diversity on everyone else while living the good life in all White communities.
Westphalia always had an element of “lies, mutually agreed upon”.
Speaking as an armchair historian, I’m not sure how much to read into the “4GW” concept so eagerly promoted by some very smart people. It means very different things to Creveld and Lind, as opposed to the people promoting the concept inside the Beltway. The historical trend in American Strategy and Operational Thought has been to centralize decision making authority, with the extreme examples of Johnson during the Tet Offensive and Obama during Neptune Spear, which then creates issues from all of the court politics that follow.
I am also not sure about the role in globalized communications. Communications, in the non-military sense of the word, require an absolutely massive capital investment, be it copper wires, fiber optic fiber, cellular towers, or satellites. It is a nightmare to protect, which is one of the strategic realizations that Molke the Elder came up with that led to his operational doctrine. Near unrestricted communications exist around the world because it’s economically and politically required, not because they are inexpensive. A city-state the size of the historical Florence/Florentine Republic could do it because they have massive wealth and internal security. Gaza only has cell phones because Israelis want the ability to listen in to conversations at will.
The idea of electronic micro-cultures, while a staple of fiction for decades, just doesn’t seem to work without a sustained offline component. I can go into more detail on that if you’re interested.
I have predicted that in the future the organizations that matter will be both larger and smaller than the nation-state. We might see an independent North Italy or Catalonia while having worldwide finance and communications. In a neo-tribal world order, territory won’t be conceived of only or even primarily as land but in terms of people, culture, and wealth. Though all these groups will be seeking their own self-interest, they’ll be able to agree to have mass communications they all rely on.
Neo-tribes will get their initial spark from disembodied communication but take form when there is finally enough traction to associate in “meatspace.” I don’t rule out seeing real world tribes that may have started out as guilds on world of warcraft. As soon as you have a group of people that hire each other, give each other interest-free loans, back each other up, for whatever reason, you have the makings of a tribe.
The modern supply chain is often measured in Thousands of Kilometers, not the historical Tens. Without a reasonably stable currency and an even more stable legal system, most goods, particularly bulk goods or capital goods with expensive repair parts, are going to be far more expensive, purchase power adjusted, than they are now.
Yes, the Hansatic League was able to import grain up the Vista and run the Danish/Sweedish fish trade, but they had a fairly stable political environment to work with there. Venice was able to maintain it’s glass monopoly not because they threatened to execute glassmakers who left, but because all of the parts required to make massive glass production work were too hard to put together anywhere else.
I’m fairly confident that any short or medium-term outlook would have something approaching a stable international medium of exchange, be it Swiss Francs, precious metals, or refined oil products. As long as you have working communications and a trusted counterparty, you can make anything work in the short-term
I’ve been looking at online communities turning into meatspace communities for over 9 years, and it’s an extremely rare occurrence, and usually piggybacking off of something else. It’s not very easy in a socially atomized world, and almost always requires an external supply of capital or interest. While in theory neo-tribes should work, the practice is so much harder that it’s hard to even find a working example.
I think the modern impulse is to shrink and tighten social loyalty while keeping the easy logistics and economies of scale that benefit everyone as long as they can. I don’t think it is as difficult as it sounds because atomized society functions even with a vacuum of purpose and loyalty. Secession and sovereignty I figure will be more social than geo-political for some time. Of course, small groups competing may eventually fracture the trust a large system requires. But the point is in its early stages I imagine tribe states will live within the established framework taking advantage of those who have no tribe to back them up.
I have some readers I’ve interacted with for years. With one, I even experimented with co-founding a small web business. This blog began as a collaboration with some regular readers from my previous blog. You’re right, I’ve found it’s difficult to translate the social currency of the internet into meatspace. But I think it will eventually happen because the demand is there. Both you and I, for example, have expressed an interest in it. If we look at successes like facebook, it seems like real life can translate easily to an electronic medium but not vice versa. I notice, though, that over time, there’s a whole range of shared language and concepts that only other denizens of the same internet region understand, a unique common culture. Find some way to arc that into real life and you have something to work with.
So there will be a new age of stagnation since there would be no international order and will become again a dog-eat-dog environment. Maybe that’s why we will never be able to reach the stars…
“…I’m not sure how much to read into the “4GW” concept so eagerly promoted by some very smart people…”
Related to total war 4GW is complete horseshit. We could go into Iraq today with 30 or 40 thousand troops, some air power and armor and wipe the Iraqis off the face of the Earth.
I’ve posted this link before but it’s so important I repost it often. We have about 10-15 years, maybe 20 depending on software and the whole job market will be consumed by robots.
There’s a gap between the amount of intelligence/computing needed to usefully automate task and present computer power. Computers have the brain power of bugs now. This gap is rapidly closing. You really should read “Dennis M. Bushnell, Future Strategic Issues/Future Warfare [Circa 2025] ” he goes over the trends of technology coming up and how they may play out. His report is not some wild eyed fanaticism it’s based on reasonable trends. Link.
https://archive.org/details/FutureStrategicIssuesFutureWarfareCirca2025
Page 70 gives the computing power trend and around 2025 we get human level computation for $1000. The only way that this can have no meaning is if computers go crazy with human or higher than human level computation. This idea comes from Larry Niven, Pournelle, etc. great Sci-Fi writers in the grand space opera tradition. I just don’t believe it. Every since this computer trend has been established Sci-fi has had a hard time dealing with it. Greg Egan has a great series “culture series” where the computers become partners with us but we have no assurance that this is the case.
It may very well be that when the wealthy control this much computing power they just get rid of the rest of Humanity. Of course 2025 is bad but notice it says”…By 2030, PC has collective computing power of a town full of human
minds…”.
The machines will get rid of the wealthy or they will merge with them. The real problem is not that the machine is smart it that it has no empathy for humans. How does empathy work? I don’t think anyone knows. It’s hard enough to program intelligence. We know people with no empathy cause all sorts of problems. What about psychopathic super machines. It’s frightening
Giovanni Dannato,”I’ve considered something like “The Dimensions of Culture” as a title..”.
I want you to understand that I’m attempting to be constructive. You know I think your writing is fantastic and very insightful. You can’t read facial emotions on the net so I’m spelling it out. Of course I’m probably wrong but the first thing that came to my mind when I read “The Dimensions of Culture” was some local PBS leftist station where they sit around and say silly things. Probably blame White people for something or other. Whatever happened to titles like,”An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the
Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations” by William Playfair? I just have no idea what “The Dimensions of Culture” means. I think you have to spell it out. You might could use a name like that then add the part you said you wanted to cover,”…figure out how to organize social technologies that haven’t changed any since Ancient Mesopotamia…”, reworded of course. How about “Maximizing Culture: how to organize social technologies that haven’t changed any since Ancient Mesopotamia”?? I know it sounds like selling soap but they do sell a hell of a lot of soap. Don’t be so smart that your book goes over everyone’s head and no one reads it.
An interesting twist would be to look at Adam Curtis’s video’s from the BBC and kind of copy his narrative. He’s really good and like you he knows a tremendous amount of trivia that while trivial combined over time to create great changes. Wikipedia,”…Curtis says that his favourite theme is “power and how it works in society”…”. Might be a great model. NLP is big on finding someone who does something successful and just copying it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis
No need for disclaimers. I’m putting it out there to see what you think. I think you may be right about that title not having enough gut impact, not informative if you haven’t already read it, and too close to the language of cultural marxists. I was pissed off when I first wanted to use “social engineering” for some of my ideas but found they had already appropriated it. Your title sells something right away which I like. Carnegie step 1: “An eager want”
19th century people had a market that wasn’t completely saturated I guess and the whole audience of regular readers tended to be smart and/or educated people. Less distractions and time used up by electronic media so they had longer attention spans?
Now’s here’s an idea I got from someone else. He said that he had a friend that owned a concrete company in an area but he had three different company listings. It was all the same company though. The idea being anyone who wanted to get in the business would be discouraged by the extra listings. Sneaky! Why do you have to have just one title? If print on demand has no set up fees and I think some don’t. They just print the files you send them then you could have 4 or 5 titles with each one targeting someone different. All being the same book. “The Dimensions of Culture” could be one. I could see a college professor picking up something like this to see what it was about. You’d need a good preface that outlined what the book was about that could be read online. The title I posted,“Maximizing Culture: how to organize social technologies that haven’t changed any since Ancient Mesopotamia” would probably get the more business minded crowd that also looks at history. Here’s another for the futurist. “Utopian Culture: How Culture has changed since Mesopotamia and how to evolve it to perfection”. Anthropologist,”The Evolution of Culture and it’s final state”. Business,”Winning Culture: How the past can be maximized for the Future”. You get the idea.
Interesting brainstorming! Will help me get started. I realize all a publisher is in modern day is someone who gets the word out more effectively, packages the product professionally. I’ve wondered if I might not even approach some large red pill blogs and ask them to “publish” a kindle book of mine in exchange for a cut of the royalties. Since there is no “impolitically correct socio-political self-help” section at Barnes and Noble next to “paranormal teen romance”, I may have to make up some new strategies to find my market.
“… I’ve wondered if I might not even approach some large red pill blogs and ask them to “publish” a kindle book of mine in exchange for a cut of the royalties…”
That’s a brilliant idea. You could do a summary outline and ad pitch to various red-pill/alt-right blogs. A lot know who you are already or have heard of you. Then set up the ordering where if the buy comes from a small ad on their page they get a cut. 3%-5%. I don’t know maybe even higher. They could also do a review of your book and link to it. I just had a brainstorm of this being a bigger model. The alt-right needs a way to funnel cash. Not much in the think tank opportunity for them. A new model to push/promote, support those in the alt-right. Think about this. The old model was book publisher/book store promotion/New York Times book review/PBS for leftist views. What about self publish/book review blogs/blog ads for alt-right. You might even take this idea and package it as a way to get revenue for everyone’s blog. Another thing is you could raise the portion of profits to the blog order pass through to 40% or so as old time book publishers I believe only gave a dollar or two for each $20 book sold to the actual author. I believe that lower book cost, publish on demand plus less of a chain where everyone takes a bite of the profits could raise authors take. The bad is it being so easy to publish the competition is way higher but if you have a “ring the bell” bestseller it could be profitable. Most authors don’t make any money at all. I’m not trying to be negative but if you can get your book out there and have a few people read it and appreciate it you’ll be doing better than 99% of all the other duffuses out there and should feel that you accomplished something unique.
I wonder just what Vox Days book “SJWs Always Lie” brought in?
You really ought to send an email to James LaFond. He writes about violence and violent fiction/sci-fi. He’s really interesting. He has a huge number of books he self published. Maybe ask him what he did. He knows who I am. Might say Sam J. likes your writing and told you to email him.
http://www.jameslafond.com/
Inquries concerning content:
jameslafond dot com at gmail dot com
After thinking about this in more detail, I’m not so sure that Centralization has been declining since 1992, I’m wondering if Centralization has been declining since 1945.
Potsdam did not change the world as much as Versailles, and Versailles didn’t change the world as much as the Congress of Vienna. In 1939 you could reasonably identify 7 Great Powers, by Potsdam it was 3, and after 1962, it was 2. The remaining now-Superpowers weren’t able to commit their economic or political power like they did before 1945, the USSR gave up on mass population movements after Stalin, and other than toppling their own regimes, took one more country by force (Afganistan), which ended up bleeding them dry. All the other pawns on the chessboard had lives of their own. By the 1970s, both Superpowers were trying to find export markets for their own defense industries.
Today…the Federal Reserve is willing to defy the President-elect of the United States on monetary policy, and local banks failing on one continent can topple entire economies. The presumably most powerful nation-states left, the petro-dictatorships, can’t control their own welfare states, let alone the price of oil.
Since the 1970s, no major power has ever allowed the price of foodstuffs to get out of hand, and yet now the real question is if there will be a foodstuff price crisis, similar to the one before 2008 and the weakening of the US Dollar.