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STATES,
SOVEREIGNTY, AND DIPLOMACY IN THE INFORMATION AGE
James N. Rosenau1
Introduction
. . . the very epoch of the nation-state is near its end. . . . It may well be that the emergent postnational order proves not to be a system of homogeneous units (as with the current system of nation-states) but a system based on relations between heterogeneous units (some social movements, some interest groups, some professional bodies, some nongovernmental organizations, some armed constabularies, some judicial bodies).
Arjun Appadurai2
The world order created in the 1940s is still with us, and in many ways stronger than ever. The challenge . . . is not to imagine and build a new world order but to reclaim and renew the old one-an innovative and durable order that has been hugely successful and largely unheralded.
G. John Ikenberry3
When this process of diffusion collides with cultural or political protectionism, it is culture and protectionism that winds up in the shop for repairs. Innovation accelerates. Productivity increases. Standards of living improve. . . . Indeed, recent experience suggests that, in most cases, economic factors prevail in less than a generation, probably within one or two political cycles (five to ten years). Thus understood, globalization-the spread of economic innovations around the world and the political and cultural adjustments that accompany this diffusion-cannot be stopped.
William W. Lewis and Marvin Harris4
. . . among the "litany of sins" of globalization discourse that we most seek to expose and react to are: its economism; its economic reductionism; its technological determinism; its political cynicism, defeatism, and immobilism; its de-socialization of the subject and re-socialization of risk; its teleological subtext of inexorable global "logic" driven exclusively by capital accumulation and the market; and its ritual exclusion of factors, causes or goals other than capital accumulation and the market from the priority of values to be pursued by social action.
Barry K. Gills5
If nothing else, the first pair of epigraphs tells us that the future of the state is far from clear; the second pair tells us that the dynamics of globalization are highly controversial. Taken together, the four epigraphs tell us, vividly and unqualifiedly, that the underlying nature of world affairs cannot be taken for granted, that observers are deeply divided over where the course of events is taking humankind as one millennium ends and another begins. Formerly understood and shared, such fundamental concepts as the state and its sovereignty are now blurred and divisive, posing questions as to whether globalization is to be welcomed or feared, and whether democracy is thriving or jeopardized.
Unavoidably, therefore, anyone or any group that undertakes to assess the human condition, its present circumstances and its likely futures, is bound to proceed from basic values about the dynamics of change, the constraints of history, the sources of authority, the potentials of organization, the limits of collective action, and the capacities of individuals to learn. We can amass facts that are descriptive in these regards, but in so doing we select some characteristics that seem important and dismiss others that seem trivial-with the result that our factual descriptors also reflect our values.
Closely linked to, perhaps even giving rise to, our values are our temperaments, those inclinations fashioned by our personalities and prior experiences that lead us to ascribe change or continuity to events, to discern orderly or chaotic patterns, to perceive differences or uniformities, to attribute causation to individuals, collectivities, or structures. Thus, where one observer sees change, another sees the recurrence of age-old patterns; where one cites evidence of the emergence of new institutions, another interprets the same evidence as reflecting cultural adaptation; where one treats governments as paralyzed by the growing complexity of globalized societies, another points to the stalemates as products of classic bureaucratic infighting; where one regards globalizing and localizing dynamics as inextricably linked in deep dialectic processes, another presumes that localization derives from cultural origins unique to those who share a common territory; where one values large-scale and coherent orders, another views them as impediments to democracy and prefers a measure of disorder that allows for the clash of ideas in local communities. And more relevant to our immediate concerns, where one observer views states and their sovereignty as fully intact, as undiminished in their competence and ability to control their destinies, another regards information technologies as eroding their capacities and diminishing their sovereignty.
Faced thus with our own humanity, the most we can accomplish is to be ever-sensitive to alternative explanations and to be explicit about the bases of our interpretations and recommendations. Such, as least, is the goal of the ensuing analysis. What follows derives from a point of view, from convictions about the emergent structure of world affairs, but at the same time I appreciate that I may well be in error and that others may reach contrary conclusions. Specifically, I seek here to assess the changing role of states, their sovereignties, and their diplomatic practices in the more encompassing context of dynamic information technologies and the globalizing structures that emerged out of the rubble of the Cold War and the confusion of the immediate post--Cold War era.
An Emergent Epoch
My temperament leaves me somewhere between the foregoing dichotomies, persuaded that change is pervasive but that continuities persist, that orderly patterns are marred by pockets of chaos, that differences across cultures are widespread but so are uniformities, and that the course of events is shaped by individuals as well as by collectivities and structures. In other words, while I have long been convinced that the world is presently undergoing transformations so profound that it is moving into a new epoch-one that I shall label shortly-which may not become fully manifest for decades, at the same time I see the emergent epoch as comprised of lingering tendencies that marked its predecessor. Thus it is an emergent epoch of contradictions, an extensive multiplicity of opposites: Territory and boundaries are still important, but attachments to them are weakening. Domestic and foreign affairs still seem like separate domains, but the line between them is transgressed with increasing frequency.6 The international system is less commanding, but it is still powerful. States are changing, but they are not disappearing. State sovereignty has eroded, but it is still vigorously asserted. Governments are weaker, but they still possess considerable resources and they can still throw their weight around. Company profits are soaring but wages are stagnant. Scenes of unspeakable horror and genocide flicker on our TV screens even as humanitarian organizations mobilize and undertake heroic remedial actions. The United Nations is asked to take on more assignments but not supplied with the funds to undertake them. Defense establishments acknowledge that their roles have drastically altered yet continue to adhere to traditional strategies. At times publics are more demanding, but at other times they are more pliable. Citizens are both more active and more cynical. Borders still keep out intruders, but they are also more porous. In sum, we have come to know that the world we live in is deteriorating in some areas, remaining fixed in others, and thriving in still others-which is another way of concluding that both order and disorder simultaneously sustain global structures.
Perhaps the most incisive way to begin to grasp these contradictions is to locate them in the context of interactive tensions between the fragmenting consequences of conflict and the integrative effects of cooperation. More precisely, the diverse contradictions that mark the emergent epoch derive from myriad ways in which these tensions feed off each other. Since the close links between the tensions are relatively unfamiliar dimensions of world affairs, I have found it useful to bypass conventional modes of analysis and, instead, to focus squarely on the interactive tensions. My label for them may seem awkward, but it has the virtue of calling attention to the primary dynamics of change that underlie the emergent epoch. The label is fragmegration, a concept that juxtaposes the processes of fragmentation and integration occurring within and among organizations, communities, countries, and transnational systems such that it is virtually impossible not to treat them as interactive and causally linked.7 To be sure, the label is probably too grating to ever catch on as the prime descriptor of the epoch8-to speak of the Westphalian system as having given way to the fragmegrative system runs counter to the need for historic landmarks as a basis for thinking about global structures-but it is nonetheless the case that fragmegrative processes are so pervasive and generic that the emergent epoch seems likely to acquire a label reflective of them.9
From a fragmegrative perspective, the world is seen as short on clear-cut distinctions between domestic and foreign affairs, with the result that local problems can become transnational in scope even as global challenges can have repercussions for small communities. Viewed in this way, the global system is so disaggregated that it lacks overall patterns and, instead, is marked by various structures of systemic cooperation and subsystemic conflict in different regions, countries, and issue areas. Accordingly, I argue, the post--Cold War era has ended and been replaced by the age of fragmegration. It is an age marked by processes that are neither unwavering nor unidirectional, that create their own negation even as they foster change, that result in fragile outcomes ever vulnerable to reversal, and that have collapsed the age-old struggle between tradition and innovation into a singular dynamic.
Nor has the emergent epoch escaped public attention. With the fragmenting forces of localization and the integrating dynamics of globalization so interwoven as to be products of each other, people have become increasingly aware that fragmegrative dynamics lie at the core of the emergent epoch. However they may articulate their understanding, individuals everywhere have come to expect, to take for granted, that the advance of globalization poses threats to the long-standing ties of local and national communities and that some groups will contest, even violently fight, the intrusion of global norms even as others will seek to obtain goods, larger market shares, or generalized support beyond their communities.
Sensitivity to the inextricably close links between the integrative and disintegrative forces at work in communities at all levels of aggregation has its roots in those technologies that have collapsed time and space, thereby rendering underlying socioeconomic and political processes more visible. Until recently, the importance of fragmegrative processes could not be readily grasped in a short time frame, thus allowing globalization and localization to be treated as separate and unrelated dynamics. Only as the time frame was lengthened to allow for a full array of the impacts and consequences of each dynamic could the interactions between them be discerned. And even then it was difficult to draw the connections. Their consequences for each other were obscured in the twentieth century by world wars and the Cold War (which focused attention on national concerns) and in earlier centuries by the slower pace at which life unfolded (thus making globalizing and localizing events seem independent of each other). But today, with the superpower rivalry over and diverse technologies quickening the pace at which people and communities are becoming ever more interdependent, the interactions of globalizing and localizing dynamics have become readily evident, widely pervasive, and fully operative as immediate stimuli to tensions that careen through systems at all levels of economic, social, and political organization. In other words, it seems increasingly obvious that the forces of fragmentation are rooted in the psychic comfort people derive from the familiar, close-at-hand values and practices of their neighborhoods and nations and that, contrariwise, the forces of integration stem from the aspiration to benefit from the distant products of the global economy, the efficiencies of regional unity, the efforts to offset environmental challenges such as global warming, the cohering of communities through policies of inclusion that expand their democratic institutions, and the realization drawn from pictures taken in outer space that the earth is a solitary entity in a huge universe.
The Sources of Change and Contradiction
The emergent epoch is driven by numerous transformative dynamics that accelerated with the end of the Cold War but were initiated well before the late 1980s. Among the most powerful of these dynamics are the microelectronic revolution that has facilitated the rapid flow of ideas, information, pictures, and money across continents; the transportation revolution that has hastened the boundary-spanning flow of elites, tourists, immigrants (legal and illegal), migrants, and whole populations; the organizational revolution that has shifted the flow of authority, influence, and power beyond traditional boundaries, and the economic revolution that has redirected the flow of goods, services, capital, and ownership among countries. Taken together, these flows have resulted in the globalization of local, provincial, national, and international affairs-a cumulative process that is both the source and consequence of eroding boundaries, integrating regions, proliferating networks, diminishing territorial attachments, coalescing social movements, weakening states, contracting sovereignty, dispersing authority, demanding publics, and expanding citizen skills-all of which serve as underpinnings of the age of fragmegration.
To repeat, however, the varied dynamics not only sustain globalization; they also generate counter-reactions (i.e., tendencies toward localization; efforts to contest, contain, or reverse the multiple flows that are also fragmenting communities, fostering inequities, and challenging democratic procedures). Thus, the emergent epoch is marked by patterns of both integration and fragmentation, both globalization and localization, both centralization and decentralization, both desirable propensities and noxious tendencies-opposites that are inextricably linked to each other such that most increments of integration, globalization, and centralization tend to foster increments of fragmentation, localization, and decentralization, and vice versa.
The sources of these contradictory processes are numerous, but their roots can be traced to three prime parameters that long served as boundary conditions for the conduct of global politics but that in recent decades have been transformed. 10One involves citizens at the micro level who are posited as experiencing a skill revolution that has enabled them to perceive more clearly where they fit in the course of events and thus to engage more effectively in collective actions designed to serve their interests. A second transformation is occurring at the macro-micro level through which individuals are linked to their collectivities: the argument here is that collectivities everywhere, governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) alike, are undergoing authority crises in which traditional conceptions of legitimacy are being replaced by performance criteria of legitimacy, thus fostering organizational disarray, stalemate, restructuring, and proliferation that, in turn, enhances the readiness of individuals to employ their newly acquired skills on behalf of their perceived self-interests. A third transformation is unfolding at the macro level of global structure, where processes of bifurcation have given rise to two worlds of global politics-the traditional state-centric world of sovereign states and an emergent multi-centric world composed of diverse collectivities such as multinational corporations, ethnic minorities, NGOs, professional associations, social movements, and incipient communities-that are still working out their respective domains as the foundations of the emergent epoch. While in some instances the actors in the two worlds go their separate ways, most of the time they cooperate, conflict, or otherwise interact even as they maintain the boundaries that separate them. In effect, the traditional state-centric world now has a formidable rival in the multi-centric world even as it is beset by authority crises and besieged by more skillful publics.
These three parametric transformations are conceived as having been under way for four decades and as likely to continue into the foreseeable future. And they are also seen as both sources and consequences of the processes that sustain the emergent epoch. These processes are posited as tapping into the skill revolution by sensitizing people to the possibility that the identity and bases of their citizenship may be changing; as tapping into many authority crises by redirecting loyalties and legitimacy sentiments which, in turn, are altering the allegiances collectivities can command; and as tapping into the bifurcation of global structures by weakening the sovereignty and competence of states and hastening the formation or consolidation of collectivities in the multi-centric world. Given the contradictions that underlie the emergent epoch, moreover, it follows that the enhanced analytic skills of some people serve to expand their horizons to include transnational foci, while for other people the skill revolution has facilitated a retreat to local concerns. Likewise, some authority crises have enlarged the scope and authority of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and NGOs, while others have contracted the range of national jurisdictions and extended that of local institutions. Globalization and localization, in short, are uneven and not linear processes, which is why world affairs continue to be murky and elusive.
The complexities of these nonlinear processes in which feedback loops predominate over simple cause-and-effect sequences are difficult to grasp not only because they are new and emergent but because we lack the intellectual equipment with which to analyze how they are altering the contexts wherein sovereignty is maintained, responsibility exercised, and accountability facilitated. Quite aside from the potential distortion our values and temperaments may introduce, our ability to comprehend the dynamics of change lags well behind the changes themselves. We are woefully lacking in a shared grasp of the nature and implications of globalization. We still do not have ways of comprehending the diminished role of states without at the same time privileging them as superior to all the other actors in the global arena. We are still all too ready to presume states are preparing to attack each other, even though the future of organized violence largely precludes interstate war. We have difficulty grasping how the nature of sovereignty has altered as the role of states has shifted and, as a consequence, we use a huge variety of inexact terms-eroding, diffusing, shifting, diminishing, maturing, pooling, sharing, leaking, evaporating11-in an effort to describe the capacity of states to exercise their sovereign rights. We are uncertain as to the ways in which the functions and practices of diplomacy are being transformed by the information technologies that continue to collapse time and space. We are confused about the proper balance between order and disorder and, recognizing that even as we prefer order to disorder, coherence to fragmentation, some forms of order are noxious (e.g., apartheid in South Africa) just as sometimes fragmentation can lead to coherent and democratic local communities. We lack a means for treating the various contradictions as part and parcel of a more encompassing order. We do not have techniques for analyzing the simultaneity of events to identify the full extent of their interconnections.
The need for new conceptual equipment, in short, is not trivial. Concepts matter. They can signify more precise content and, as such, they can enable us to break out of the conceptual jails in which we may have become comfortable and from which we are disinclined to escape. Without new conceptual refinements, our descriptors reinforce our longstanding ways of thinking. They confirm our understanding of who the key actors are, what motivates them, and the processes that sustain their interactions. They impel us to treat states as the primary sources of action, to affirm the importance of sovereignty and downplay its possible erosion, and so on across a number of longstanding presumptions that reinforce our conceptual jails. It is difficult to accord status to new actors, motives, and processes unless one has a way of capturing their essential qualities through concepts that differentiate them from habitual modes of thought. It is this conclusion that has sustained my persistence in developing fragmegration as an analytic framework.
States, Sovereignty, and Diplomacy in a Fragmegrative Era
If the prime dynamics of our time involve the simultaneity of globalizing and localizing pressures, what are the consequences of these tensions for modern states, their sovereignties, their diplomacy, and their capabilities? As already indicated, both states and their sovereignty have been profoundly affected by the advent of a new era. Some would argue-as Ikenberry does in the second epigraph above-that the changes are misleading, that after World War II the interstate system created "hugely successful" foundations for a peaceful order and an effective global economy. However, while the interstate system remains intact and manages to address many problems that have arisen in the intervening years, it seems farfetched to contend that the powerful socioeconomic forces unleashed in recent decades have not altered the competence of states and rendered their sovereignties vulnerable to all the aforementioned boundary-spanning flows precipitated by the microelectronic, transportational, organizational, and economic revolutions that have long been under way. Indeed, it could be said that the successes of the interstate system have led to its own undoing-not to its collapse, but to its transformation from a proactive system to a reactive set of mechanisms for managing the dynamics of fragmegration.
It could hardly be otherwise, given the simultaneity of the upward shift of authority to integrative political institutions, corporate alliances, and transnational regimes; the sideward shift to NGOs and social movements; and the downward, fragmenting shift to a wide range of subnational entities. Two examples nicely illustrate the great extent to which authority has shifted away from the state. The upward shift is indicated by the shifting policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank wherein they not only make lines of credit dependent on the adoption of certain economic policies, but also "for the first time they would use their leverage with poorer nations to stamp out corruption and to promote better governance,"12 the evidence of which would include "emphasizing spending on health and education, overhauling the tax system, improving court practices, strengthening private property rights and opening Government ledgers."13 Similarly, the downward shift of authority is captured in this observation about a credit-rating agency:
Moody's is the credit rating agency that signals the electronic herd of global investors where to plunk down their money, by telling them which countries' bonds are blue-chip and which are junk. That makes Moody's one powerful agency. In fact, you could almost say that we live again in a two-superpower world. There is the U.S. and there is Moody's. The U.S. can destroy a country by leveling it with bombs; Moody's can destroy a country by downgrading its bonds.14
Nor can it be said that the interstate system can halt, by states forming regimes and acting collectively, the outflow of authority from their world. Recently, for example, the twenty-nine Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries signed an agreement banning bribery, but officials made it clear that they did not expect it to be effective, "that they had no illusions that the corruption accord alone would put a huge dent in the multibillion-dollar international bribery business."15
Taken together, these cases point to the conclusion that the dynamics of fragmegration have placed states in the role of traffic cops, or what one observer calls "museum guards"16 : they are agencies for guiding the flow of endless cross-border exchanges over which they have little control other than to press for orderly and equitable processes. Yes, states can pool their resources and reinforce their collective power as traffic managers, but no, they are no longer alone in setting the ground rules for the conduct of public affairs. Due in large part to the forces of globalization and localization, rule-setting authority has been dispersed widely throughout the world's neighborhoods, communities, provinces, and transnational cyberspaces. As one observer aptly noted, the current scene is marked by "a pluralism of authority."17
Accompanying and contributing further to the dispersal of authority in diverse directions has been a surge in the politics of identity, in people redefining who they believe themselves to be in such a way that their commitments to the state and, their national loyalties are lessening. In the United States, for example, serious proposals have recently been voiced questioning the virtues of patriotism.18 A thoughtful proposal to rewrite the national anthem has even found its way into the public domain.19In other words, as the values of multiculturalism become increasingly ascendant throughout the world, states are bound to be weakened, with their capacity to sustain broad consensus around shared goals diminished and their ability to concert the energies of citizens in support of policies reduced.
Another means of understanding the altered role of states is to highlight the significant ways in which territoriality has lost much of its organizing focus. The history of states is a history of territorial division, of clearcut links to geographically bound spaces, but in the emergent fragmegrative epoch these links have become frayed and deterritorialization has become a prime consequence of all the boundary-spanning flows previously mentioned. The advent of the Internet and other electronic mechanisms for transgressing-rather, ignoring-differentiated territorial units is illustrative in this respect, but it is only one of many ways in which the dynamics of globalization have rendered longstanding national boundaries porous and, in some cases, obsolete. As one observer put it, "The [metaphor for the] international system which is now developing . . . is of an egg-box containing the shells of sovereignty, but alongside it a global community omelet is cooking."20
Is this to say that the sovereignty of states has eroded to the point where it is no longer relevant? No, that would be an overstatement. States can still frame policies and exercise police powers that are backed by their sovereign rights to engage in such activities. Still, the scope and reach of their sovereignty claims have narrowed; they are often compelled to yield when faced with fragmegrative dynamics.
Is the decline of states and their sovereignties to be welcomed? The third and fourth epigraphs above suggest the answer is mixed, with much depending on the values one brings to bear on the matter. There can be little doubt that the relentless processes of globalization-which include the easy movement around the world of people, ideas, money, and consumerism as well as goods, services, and production facilities-have had profound consequences for the daily lives of publics and the affairs of states. There is much truth in the third epigraph's assertion that the unleashing of market forces in recent years has made substantial inroads into culture and politics. In some respects these inroads have been beneficial, especially to the extent they have facilitated improved standards of living and, through global television and the vast movement of peoples, have enabled individuals everywhere to refine their skills, sharpen their capacities for judgment, and enhance their ability to imagine life beyond the confines of their immediate locales. Consider, for example, the vast ramifications of this observation:
There is growing evidence that the consumption of the mass media throughout the world often provokes resistance, irony, selectivity, and, in general, agency. Terrorists modeling themselves on Rambo-like figures (who have themselves generated a host of non-Western counterparts); housewives reading romances and soap operas as part of their efforts to construct their own lives; Muslim family gatherings listening to speeches by Islamic leaders on cassette tapes; domestic servants in South India taking packaged tours to Kashmir; these are all examples of the active way in which media are appropriated by people throughout the world. T-shirts, billboards, and graffiti as well as rap music, street dancing, and slum housing all show that the images of the media are quickly moved into local repertoires of irony, anger, humor, and resistance. . . . It is the imagination, in its collective forms, that creates ideas of neighborhood and nationhood, of moral economies and unjust rule, of higher wages and foreign labor prospects. The imagination is today a staging ground for action, and not only for escape.21
This last, italicized sentence is worth pondering. It suggests that globalization, for all its flaws (noted below), has fostered the circumstances whereby collective actions at the grass roots can be stimuli to change, given the will of publics to converge around and act upon their collective aspirations. In view of the skill revolution and the newfound uses of the imagination, it is hardly surprising that people everywhere are forming organizations through which to assert their interests and demand remedies for their grievances. Indeed, there is a profound sense in which the organizational explosion that has rippled across villages and continents throughout the world is no less a force for change than the population explosion.
On the other hand, the dynamics of globalization have also been far from salutary. As the fourth epigraph implies, the inexorable logic of the market is undermining in many ways the ties that bind communities and the noneconomic values to which people might aspire. States are in good part responsible for the negative consequences of globalization. They have been parties to the transnationalization of production and the freeing up of the controls over capital flows, with the result that they have in many ways become subordinate to, even ensnared by, the structural power of transnational corporate interests. More than that, the same interests have pressed states to devolve their roles to local and private authorities, thus further constricting their controls over the uses and abuses of transnational capital. And not mentioned in the "litany of sins" enumerated in the last epigraph are the distressing environmental consequences that have accompanied the movement of capital and production facilities to those parts of the developing world where forests, grasslands, and biodiversity previously flourished and are now being seriously depleted. In the unapologetic words of one observer, "economic activity is what defines the landscape on which all other institutions, including political institutions, [sic] must operate."22 Put in fragmegrative terms, "This 'hollowing out' of the state, the shifting orientation of states' core values away from self-sufficiency, autonomy, and survival to the accommodation of liberal-capitalist interests, and the integration of states both with each other and with regional and international organizations and regimes, signals yet a further dismantling of the architecture of modern world order toward multiple and overlapping layers of authority."23
The Challenge to Diplomacy
If the foregoing analysis is essentially sound, traditional diplomatic functions and practices face severe challenges in the years ahead. The dispersal of authority away from states, the predominance of economics over politics, and the growing role of NGOs, social movements, and other transnational collectivities highlight the need for national governments to alter their modes of interaction with each other and with relevant actors in the multi-centric world. Foreign offices are not headed for oblivion, and in some ways they may continue to function as they always have, but at the same time their functioning seems likely to become increasingly subordinate to the dictates of the market and the decisions of transnational organizations. Traditional diplomatic functions and practices, are threatened by the easy and diverse routes wherein information flows and the acceleration of fragmegrative dynamics results.
Indeed, to some degree the problem is not so much the dispersion of authority as it is the absence of authority, and the replacement of homogeneous and territorial units with de-territorialized heterogeneous collectivities that are to be accountable neither to their memberships nor to each other. It follows that the diplomatic undertakings of the sovereign state are likely to falter as many tasks of governance shift to a multiplicity of rule systems in the multi-centric world.24 Already confronted with pervasive cynicism, the world's territorial politicians may increasingly (and unknowingly) relinquish some of their diplomatic prerogatives to a diverse array of nongovernmental leaders-from corporation executives to drug lords, from issue experts to foundation officials, from crime bosses to populist demagogues-whose domains of power and influence are also shaped by both globalizing dynamics and their localizing counterparts. Julius K. Nyerere succinctly summed up the worst-case scenario that follows from these trends: "When the law of the jungle reigns supreme, where might is right, where the game of moneymaking includes arms trafficking and corruption-what is justice? What is peace? When governments are weak or corrupt or both, who can intervene on behalf of the weak in our poor societies?"25
If states cannot employ traditional diplomatic methods to reverse the tendencies toward jungle law and allow for constructive adjustments to the dynamics of the emergent epoch, how can these methods be altered to help cut paths out of the jungle and reinvigorate the utility of diplomacy? Do the emergent structures of our fragmegrative era highlight new functions diplomacy can usefully perform? Does the information revolution allow for the development of innovative and effective diplomatic practices?
My temperament tells me that positive answers to these questions are feasible. The answers involve thinking not about ways of restoring the predominance of territorial politics sustained by states, but about what diplomatic techniques might be appropriate for states to employ in a fragmegrated world marked by weakened governments and a pluralism of authority. In effect, analysts need to acknowledge that the decline of states has resulted in a diminution of their capabilities, to revise their understanding of the limits of diplomacy, and to allow for the intrusion of constraints upon governmental policymaking processes of a multi-centric world with horizontal and disparate sources of authority rather than vertical and hierarchically structured organizations.
This is not the place to elaborate on the ways in which the information revolution has imposed new limits on the tasks of diplomacy or to expand on the revisions of diplomatic functions and practices that are now possible and desirable. The literature on such matters has recently exploded26 and the other papers of the "virtual diplomacy" project presented at this meeting add further to our grasp of the problems and potentials. However, two quite different implications of these dynamics have not been fully recognized and are thus worthy of brief exploration here. One involves diplomacy on behalf of foreign policy goals; the other revolves around efforts to assist collectivities in the multi-centric world. More specifically, while the former focuses on the ways in which the information revolution has made the provision of proof a central and feasible diplomatic task of a country's foreign policy, the latter concerns the ways in which diplomacy can contribute to the framing and acceptance of new social contracts that are more appropriate to the life of collectivities under fragmegrative conditions than are the traditional state-based contracts of the prefragmegrative epoch.
The Provision of Proof
As the world becomes ever more complex, its contradictions ever more pervasive, and information ever more relevant to the conduct of public affairs, so has knowledge become an ever more important source of power. Indeed, the ability of states to influence each other through the exercise of military capabilities has been increasingly superseded by their ability to use information as a means of prevailing in conflict situations. More precisely, one subset of the new information technologies is what might be called the "technology of eavesdropping"-those electronic and robotic techniques for probing under the sea, behind closed doors, and in outer space in search of information that can serve as evidence and proof in support of diplomatic claims. Stated another way, the diverse technologies of eavesdropping have rendered issues on the global agenda increasingly subject to objective observation and measurement. Generating such data is, to be sure, essentially a task for intelligence communities, but transforming the information into the scientific evidence and proof that is needed to persuade potential friends and enemies abroad of the legitimacy of a position on an issue is a task for foreign offices and their diplomats.
Examples along this line can be found in headlines every day. Whether the fuselage and wiring of a downed airliner can be traced to terrorists or mechanical failures, whether burial grounds in Bosnia can be regarded as indicators of genocide, whether Iraq is manufacturing chemical and biological weapons, whether a government is party to the drug trade, whether the illicit wealth of corrupt leaders is being deposited in offshore banks-these are only a small sample of the kinds of conflicts that have recently persisted on the global agenda as issues in which the adequacy of proof is a central concern. And obviously, the more skilled diplomats are in marshalling and presenting their claims as irrefutable proof, the more successful they will be in conducting their foreign policies.
Success in this regard is highly dependent on the capacity of foreign offices to differentiate among information, evidence, and proof. These three forms of knowledge are quite different from each other. In the value system that sustains industrial societies, all these forms involve description and imply a commitment to empirical observation instead of intuitive or emotional assertion, but nonetheless they differ in key respects: information is neutral as to the portent of what it describes, while evidence and proof are forms of information that have been processed specifically to allow for interpretations as to the meaning of what is described. Evidence is information that is deemed to shed light on the existence of that which is claimed to exist. Proof is evidence arranged so as to demonstrate that the claim is beyond question and thus "true." If by proof is meant "that which scientific procedures affirm," a proven claim is viewed as the derivative of a methodology that is independent of those who used it; it is "objectively" true. Whereas evidence is viewed as indicative, proof is seen as conclusive.
Still, proof may not prevail in a diplomatic skirmish. People see what they want to see and are quite capable of dismissing proof if it does not support their argument. Some cultures value scientific methods, while others are marked with a skepticism which stresses that the same technologies that generate proof can also be used to distort data and doctor photographs. So it falls to diplomats to be conversant in the strengths and limits of the technologies of eavesdropping in order to carry out their tasks. Simply to wave a photograph in the UN Security Council or offer tables of data behind closed doors is not enough. Neither officials nor publics abroad can be won over in a conflict situation unless the diplomatic efforts to prevail are founded on a keen appreciation of the nature of proof and the demonstration of its relevance.27
New Social Contracts
Of course, the bulk of diplomatic efforts are directed toward persuasion that is founded not on scientific proof but on exercising influence in such a way as to alter dearly held values and habitual practices; the difficulties associated with the former task pale in comparison to those involved in the latter. The problems in this regard are especially challenging when states try to effect change in the multi-centric world. Their actions in their own world of other states are founded on the same rules and calculations adhered to by those they seek to influence. But this commonality is not operative when they move into the multi-centric world and seek to shape the outlook and conduct of its organizations and publics, virtually all of which have narrower concerns and interests than do states that are obliged to contend with broad agendas and the well-being of the whole system. Moreover, not only are actors in the multi-centric world diverse in their goals and composition, but a preponderance of them also envision states as potential adversaries, or at least as not ready to support and facilitate their autonomy. Thus successful diplomacy with respect to the multi-centric world is far more problematic than when states try to modify the behavior of other states. Indeed, it can be argued that fragmegrative conditions offer states little room to maneuver among their multi-centric counterparts, that at best they can do little more than serve as mediators or-to return to an aforementioned metaphor-operate as museum guards who make sure that the flow of traffic does not get out of control and that unruly behavior does not jeopardize property. Unavoidably caught between the pressures for integration and fragmentation, the argument would stress, states are weakened by the scarcity of opportunities to affect the course of events.
If this is the case, if states are ill suited to shape how both individuals and societies are going to adapt to the powerful tensions that are transforming world affairs, how can such an adaptation occur? If states are unable to ameliorate fragmegrative tensions, if they cannot muster the political will to intervene amid the contradictions of fragmegration, how will people, organizations, and communities be able to keep their essential structures intact and move toward their goals in the face of the dynamic changes that have given birth to a new epoch? In a decentralized global system undergoing continual processes wherein authority is undermined and relocated, how can publics be mobilized and problems addressed? If the capabilities of states are eroding, are new political structures likely to evolve, or is the world headed for ever greater disarray?
The answers to these questions are complex and elusive. While fragmegrative processes may be patterned, they are also inherently unstable and marked by recurrent imbalances. They unfold differently in different organizations, communities, countries, regions, and issue areas. In some instances the tendencies toward fragmentation, localization, or decentralization are predominant; in others, the opposite tendencies are more pervasive. In some cases the resulting tensions are intense and enduring, while in others they are episodic and cyclical. Uneven as the dynamics of fragmegration may be, however, they highlight the large degree to which the glue that holds communities and societies together is undergoing transformation---change so profound as to necessitate the framing of new social contracts that can generate more effective forms of systemic coherence.28 In the absence of progress toward the forming of new contracts founded on values that enable collectivities to remain intact and move toward their goals, it is reasonable to anticipate that the world is indeed headed for ever greater disarray.
But what might be the bases of new social contracts? Leaving aside the fact that they cannot be imposed from the top, or at least that they must resonate broadly with the affected publics, on what values should the new contracts rest so that localizing and globalizing forces can be reconciled and the tensions between them ameliorated?
In speculating along these lines, there is an ever-present danger of falling back on trite and simplistic, if not unrealistic, formulations. One important way to guard against this danger is to stress the complexity of the emergent epoch, to view it as sustained by a multiplicity of interactive dynamics, no one of which steers the processes of fragmegration. Such a perspective can be readily maintained if it is presumed, as elaborated elsewhere, that the major dynamics of the emergent epoch include an acceleration of their technological foundations; a decrease in the salience of territoriality such that landscapes are being superseded by mediascapes, financescapes, ethnoscapes, ideoscapes, and technoscapes; an increase in the analytic, emotional, and imaginative skills of people everywhere; an enormous proliferation of organizations at all levels of community; an endless movement of people, goods, and ideas that have vastly increased the variety and number of boundary-spanning activities and further confounded the meaning of territoriality; and a decrease in the competence and sovereignty of states corresponding to the enhanced vitality of the skill revolution, the organizational proliferation, the diverse boundary-spanning activities, and the new "scapes" that crowd the horizon.29
For all these reasons and more, the global stage has become highly dense and complex, marked by innumerable actors in the multi-centric world that far exceed the 190 states recognized as members of the state-centric world. This bifurcation of the underlying structures of world politics has to be acknowledged in any effort to lay out the bases for new social contracts.30
Perhaps the most important implication of the foregoing dynamics is the question of who will be the parties to the new social contracts. In the past two centuries the parties have been the national state on the one hand and its individuals and publics on the other. But such contracts have lost some of their viability as the territorial states have weakened and publics have become more skillful, their organizations more numerous, their boundary-spanning activities more extensive, and their coalescence in cyberspace more secure. Clearly, the new social contracts must be among more than two parties; and, the state can no longer be the only collective agent who strikes a bargain with individuals; and, the many collective agents cannot be exclusively founded on territoriality.
While these criteria for the new collective agents who will fashion and sustain the new social contracts are seemingly so unfamiliar as to make the task exceedingly difficult, a basis for developing them does appear feasible. As developed at length elsewhere, the collective agents with whom individuals may strike new social contracts are to be found wherever authority has been and continues to be in the emergent epoch. The new epoch calls for viewing the world as consisting of spheres of authority (SOAs), instead of as organized in terms of sovereign states.31 Some of these SOAs may be partially founded on territoriality, but none can be fully grounded in the same kind of geographic space that has marked the nation-state era. Rather, the boundaries of the bargaining agents, the SOAs, are defined by those entities to whom people accord legitimacy and thereby attach their loyalties. Thus an SOA can be an issue regime, a professional organization, a neighborhood, a network of the like-minded, a social movement, a local or provincial government, a diaspora, a regional association, and so on across all the diverse collectivities that have become major sources of decisional authority in the ever more complex multi-centric world. To be sure, the array of SOAs may include some states that manage to cling to sufficient authority to be the focus of the legitimacy sentiments of their citizens, but the advent of SOAs in the multi-centric world capable of drawing up meaningful social contracts with their adherents has reduced the number of states with the kind of unqualified authority that marked their counterparts in the past.
If the nation-state is viewed as having always been an imagined community- a political entity that exists by virtue of the fact that its citizens believe it to exist and thus abide by its institutions, regulations, and policies32 -the emergent epoch is one in which communities are being reimagined.33 The multiple dynamics of our fragmegrative epoch combine to allow people to envision themselves as tied to others whose connective tissues constitute an authority structure to which they are responsive. Such structures may be short-lived, as when a social movement achieves its goals and its SOA ceases to exist, but effective authority is embedded in their activities for whatever period of time they endure. The population of collectivities that comprise the multi-centric world undergoes continual shifts in its composition.
Given a skill revolution that is enabling people to become increasingly adept at managing multiple identities and loyalties, in the early stages of the evolution of SOAs there is likely to be considerable overlap among them, with the result that their boundaries may initially be obscure and the scope of their authority ambiguous. Nor is there any certainty that eventually the boundaries of SOAs will evolve such that the overlaps are eliminated and SOAs become the focus of ultimate loyalties, much as the nation-state has long been the terminal community insofar as loyalties are concerned. Indeed, it is exactly the nature of the complexities underlying the emergent epoch that the notion of terminal loyalties has to be treated as highly problematic. Just because states have enjoyed such a status, it would be erroneous to view them as evidence that their successors will become terminal entities. On the contrary, given the large extent to which SOAs are founded on nonterritorial sources of legitimacy, the greater likelihood is that some overlaps will endure, that people will be responsive to one of their SOAs under certain conditions and to others under different circumstances, so that what evolves through time is clarity about where the legitimacy of one SOA ends and another begins.
This is another way of saying that the fragmegrative epoch will not be marked by neo-medieval structures. Many observers have noted that if the interstate system breaks down, global structures will return to the arrangements that prevailed prior to the onset of the modern era of the nation-state. To be sure, the fragmegrative epoch will be distinguished by decentralized structures of authority and a vast array of political entities, but these will not resemble the medieval era in that people will have multiple loyalties toward and affiliations with numerous SOAs. In the medieval period individuals did have ultimate loyalties-to a king or fiefdom-whereas few SOAs in the fragmegrative era will be terminal collectivities. Rather, people will learn to balance diverse and even conflicting commitments in the absence of a terminal state.
Assuming a multiplicity of new social contracts between diverse SOAs and the individuals responsive to them, is there a core set of values on which all the contracts can be founded? While each SOA will doubtless have clauses in its contract that are unique to its circumstances, at least two clusters of values come to mind as plausible core values for any contract. One involves an appreciation that no SOA has exclusive authority with respect to those within its purview. In a fragmegrated world people have too many identities and affiliations to accord any SOA the sole legitimacy to make decisions about every aspect of their lives. Rather, recognizing that they cannot be responsive to the directives of all the SOAs to which they owe allegiance, their contracts are likely to require them to accept that their various SOAs might issue contradictory directives and that they are obliged to frame a set of priorities for responding to them. Second, faced with contradictory directives, people will be obliged by their contracts to be open to dialogue across-as well as within-the various SOAs relevant to their circumstances. The agenda for such dialogues is likely to consist precisely of those contradictory issues that span their SOAs-issues such as when it is appropriate to accept or resist compromises on such matters, or under what conditions it is acceptable to move out of the purview of one SOA in favor of another.
The obvious question arises as to whether people will be amenable to adopting and living by these new contracts. Conceivably, it could be argued, the longstanding impulse to have a highest loyalty will prevent most people from abiding by a contract in which no SOA is accorded exclusive claims on those within its purview. And if this is the case, the argument would stress, surely there will be no basis for accepting an obligation to engage in dialogues that continuously redefine where the boundaries of SOAs are drawn. If the need for a terminal entity to which to attach the highest loyalty is strong, how can it be expected that the new contracts will attract sufficient signatories to be meaningful?
While this pessimistic line of reasoning can hardly be discounted, it may be exaggerated. It fails to allow for the power and urgency of the underlying currents sustaining the emergent epoch. The disarray that is likely to attend the dispersion of authority under pervasive fragmegrative conditions may well serve to encourage an appreciation of the need for a new social contract based on the foregoing criteria. To be sure, compliance with authority is rooted in habit-driven behavior and people are thus likely to be slow in acknowledging the need for a new social contract and then agreeing to it; but at the same time most people are capable of learning and adapting when conditions change, so that in the long run it is possible to conceive of a readiness to negotiate new social contracts that are not founded on an exclusive acquiescence to the authority of states. Already a dialogue and literature on the idea of a global civil society have evolved that are deep and broad enough to suggest movement in the direction of some kind of new contractual foundations. Moreover, if it is recalled that the age of fragmegration is pervaded with uncertainties, ambiguities, and anomalies, there are ample incentives to seek, or at least accept, a new social contract that will better channel, stabilize, or even reduce the instabilities of life than its state-bound predecessor does.
It is with respect to these incentives that diplomacy has a key role to play. Like museum guards, those who represent states can draw upon whatever legitimacy they may have to inform and educate actors in the multi-centric world who seek guidance on the framing and contents of new social contracts. Ultimately the commitment to framing and accepting the new contracts must come from those in the multi-centric world as they become increasingly intolerant of living with the clashing tensions between globalizing and localizing forces, but diplomats can put their experience in persuading recalcitrant publics abroad to good use by stressing the need for the new contracts and explaining the values around which they are negotiated.
Conclusions
What are the implications of this analysis for the immediate and long-term future? My own estimate is that the dynamics of fragmegration may continue to unfold. There is no basis for anticipating that globalizing processes will decelerate, so the trends toward integration in the worlds of business and government are likely to continue and may move more swiftly as regions begin to see virtues in special forms of cooperation, as businesses find that alliances enhance their bottom lines, and as states are pressed to share responsibility for common problems by forming regimes or otherwise integrating their policies. At the same time the negative, localizing consequences of globalization are likely to be ever more widely felt and to spawn increasing numbers of politicians like Patrick Buchanan of the United States, Jean-Marie Le Pen of France, and Pauline Hansen of Australia who appeal to local and racial identities as bases for exclusionary economic, immigration, and political policies.
It would be satisfying to conclude that the ultimate outcome of the clashes between these contradictory forces will amount to a continuing, if slow and halting, trend in which states and actors in the multi-centric world enter into new social contracts that manage to bring the fragmegrative dynamics under control and enable the world to move beyond its many contradictions toward less conflictual and more progressive values. Such an outcome, however, will depend on whether the dynamics of fragmegration are cyclical or dialectical. If they are the latter, the new contracts may serve as the syntheses that emerge out of the globalizing theses that generate localizing antitheses.
If the organization explosion continues at the grass roots and the multi-centric world thus becomes ever more populated and marked by an ever greater dispersion of authority-if the lines awaiting entry into the museum get ever longer and the crowds within ever more dense-the contradictions of fragmegrative conditions are likely to beome increasingly intolerable and provide added weight to those who call for syntheses through new social contracts. Stated in still another way, since the powerful tensions that sustain fragmegration-the forces of fragmentation that are rooted in the psychic comfort people derive from the familiar and close-at-hand values and practices of their neighborhoods and nations and the forces of integration that derive from the aspiration to share in the distant products of the global economy, to benefit from the efficiencies of regional unity, to avoid the dangers of environmental challenges such as global warming, and to yield to the implications of the pictures taken from outer space that depict the earth as a solitary entity in a huge universe-dominate the agendas of political systems at every level of community, they are as likely to highlight the virtues of achieving syntheses through new social contracts as they are to promote cyclical movement among the globalizing and localizing dynamics.
Endnotes
1. A paper prepared for presentation at the Panel on "Virtual Diplomacy: A Revolution in Diplomatic Affairs--Theory," Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association (Washington, D.C.: February 18, 1998). The first three sections of the paper were previously presented under the title "States and Sovereignty in a Globalized World" at the seminar on "International Solidarity for the Age of Globalization: In Search of New Strategies," sponsored by the Swedish Government and the Colombian Presidency of the Non-Aligned Movement (Stockholm, October 27-28, 1997). [I am grateful to David Johnson and Hongying Wang for their reactions to the earlier draft.]
2. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 19, 23.
3. "The Myth of Post-Cold War Chaos," Foreign Affairs, vol. 75 (May/June 1996), p. 79.
4. "Why Globalization Must Prevail," The McKinsey Quarterly, 1992, no. 2, p. 115.
5. "Editorial: 'Globalization' and the 'Politics of Resistance,'" New Political Economy, vol. 2 (March 1997), p. 12.
6. For an extended inquiry into the dynamics that have obscured the boundaries between national and international affairs, see James N. Rosenau, Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier: Exploring Governance in a Turbulent World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
7. This concept was first developed in James N. Rosenau, "`Fragmegrative' Challenges to National Security," in Terry Heyns (ed.), Understanding U.S. Strategy: A Reader (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University, 1983), pp. 65-82. For a more recent and elaborate formulation, see James N. Rosenau, "New Dimensions of Security: The Interaction of Globalizing and Localizing Dynamics," Security Dialogue, vol. 25 (September 1994), pp. 255-82.
8. Other terms suggestive of the contradictory tensions that pull systems toward coherence and collapse are "chaord," a label that juxtaposes the dynamics of chaos and order, and "glocalization," which points to the simultaneity of globalizing and localizing dynamics. The former designation is proposed in Dee W. Hock, "Institutions in the Age of Mindcrafting," a paper presented at the Bionomics annual conference (San Francisco, CA: photocopy, October 22, 1994), pp. 1-2, while the latter term is elaborately developed in Roland Robertson, "Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity," in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (eds.), Global Modernities (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), pp. 25-44. Here the term "fragmegration" is preferred because it does not imply a territorial scale and broadens the focus to include tensions at work in organizations as well as those that pervade communities.
9. One observer has suggested that the world has entered "the age of deregulation," but this label lacks any hint of the integrative dynamics at work on the world scene, and it also fails to specify a historic landmark, which may be why one reviewer "suspects . . . [the label] will not catch on as the paradigm of the year." The deregulation label is offered by Richard Haas in The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States after the Cold War (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1997), and the suspicion it will not take hold is expressed in Foreign Affairs, vol. 76 (July/August 1997), p. 155.
10. The transformation of the three parameters is assessed at length in James N. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), especially Chaps. 8-15.
11. Sohail M. Hashmi, "Introduction," in S.M. Hashmi (ed.), State Sovereignty (photocopy, forthcoming), p. 4.
12. Paul Lewis, "2 Global Lenders Use Leverage to Combat Corruption," New York Times, August 11, 1997, p. A4
13. Paul Lewis, "I.M.F. Seeks Argentine Deal Linking Credit to Governing," New York Times, July 15, 1997, p. D1.
14. Thomas L. Friedman, "Don't Mess With Moody's," New York Times, February 22, 1995, p. A19.
15. David E. Sanger, "29 Nations Agree to a Bribery Ban," New York Times, May 24, 1997, p. A1.
16. The custodial metaphor is noted in Dennis Farney, "Even U.S. Politics Are Being Reshaped in a Global Economy," Wall Street Journal, October 28, 1992, p. A1.
17. Zygmunt Bauman, "A Sociological Theory of Postmodernity," in Peter Beilharz, Gillian Robinson, and John Rundell (eds.), Between Totalitarianism and Postmodernity: A Thesis Eleven Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 160.
18. Joshua Cohen (ed.), For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
19. Hendrik Hertzberg, "Star-Spangled Banter," The New Yorker, July 21, 1997, pp. 4-5.
20. Ken Booth, "Security in Anarchy," International Affairs, vol. 57, No. 3 (1991), p. 542.
21. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 7. (last sentence italicized for emphasis).
22. Kenichi Ohmae, "Putting Global Logic First," Harvard Business Review (January-February 1995), p. 119.
23. Ronald Deibert, Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 206-207.
24. For incisive analyses of these shifts, see the essays in James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel (eds.), Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
25. Julius K. Nyerere, "Peace Comes From Justice, Not Absence of Violence," Peace Initiatives, vol. III (March-April 1997), p. 28.
26. See, for example, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Reinventing Diplomacy in the Information Age.
27. An extended discussion of "relations of proof" in world politics is provided in Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics, pp. 198-209.
28. Although the conception of new social contracts developed here is not to be found elsewhere, pieces of it can be found in the following formulations: Greg Hill, "Reason and Will in Contemporary Social Contract Theory," Political Research Quarterly, vol. 48 (March 1995), pp. 101-16; Thomas Fleiner, "Nation State and Autonomy for Ethnic Communities," Peace and the Sciences (December 1994), pp. 1-10; G.M. Tamas, "A Disquisition on Civil Society," Social Research, vol. 61 (Summer 1994), pp. 205-22; Bryan S. Turner, "Outline of a Theory of Human Rights," Sociology, vol. 27 (August 1993), pp. 489-512; Philip J. Frankenfeld, "Technological Citizenship: A Normative Framework for Risk Studies," Science, Technology and Human Values, vol. 17 (Autumn 1992), pp. 459-484; and Manfred Henningsen, "Democracy: The Future of a Western Political Formation," Alternatives, vol. 14 (July 1989), pp. 327-342.
29. For elaboration of these various presumptions, see the works cited in footnotes 3, 4, and 10.
30. The notion of bifurcated global structures is most elaborately developed in Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics, Chap. 10.
31. The spheres-of-authority concept is spelled out in Rosenau, Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier.
32. Cf. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (New York: Verso, 1991).
33. See James N. Rosenau, "Material and Imagined Communities in Globalized Space," in Donald H. McMillen (ed.) Globalization and Regional Communities: Geoeconomic, Sociocultural and Security Implications for Australia (Toowomba, Australia: USQ Press, 1997), pp. 24-40, and the various essays in Daniele Archibugi, David Held, and Martin Khler (eds.), Re-Imagining Political Community (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
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