Slashdot Mirror

Right Here. Interesting read. Yeah, yeah, causation, correlation, but still an interesting read.

You again, mistake effect for cause - and demonstrate that state propaganda has displaced investigation and observation as the basis from which you derive your exalted opinions.

The entire cause of the Balkan conflicts of the 1990's was engineered by external political and financial entities: "The West" as a part of the program to re-orient the profitable engines of conflict, after the Cold War.

First, several NATO states supported nationalist secessionist movements within Yugoslavia, especially Croatian separatism. A war in Croatia followed - incidentally diverting attention from the successful Slovenian secession. The war spread to Bosnia, and the NATO powers encouraged atrocities, to justify NATO intervention there. A political coalition for an anti-Serbian intervention was formed in the NATO states, and an occupation force was stationed in Bosnia: first IFOR, then SFOR. Bosnia became a de facto protectorate. Nevertheless Serbia itself was not targeted at that time , and the Republika Srpska (Bosnia Serbs) got half of Bosnia. In the subsequent Kosovo war, Serbia was attacked: the regime collapsed under internal and external pressure. And what was the purpose of this all? The World Bank later explained:

"...greater emphasis must be placed on establishing a viable institutional structure for effective and countrywide governance, as outlined in the Dayton Agreement, and on undertaking the key structural reforms for transforming the old socialist economic structure into a new, market-based economy."
(World Bank 1997, p. xii)

In historical perspective, that is the moral crusade which underlies the whole episode: the crusade of the liberal market-democracies, to remake the world in their own image.

http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/bosnia.html

Why? Yugoslavia was under Tito, a relatively successful non-aligned state, which had a good standard of living and was neither beholden to massive Western capital interests for its continuing future success, nor dependent on Soviet military subsidization.

After the Soviet stalemate faded, it could not be allowed to continue. Yugoslavia was like the small but successful corner-shop, which "owed" back-rent to the protection racket.

Lost in the barrage of images and self-serving analyses are the economic and social causes of the conflict. The deep-seated economic crisis which preceded the civil war had long been forgotten. The strategic interests of Germany and the US in laying the groundwork for the disintegration of Yugoslavia go unmentioned, as does the role of external creditors and international financial institutions. In the eyes of the global media, Western powers bear no responsibility for the impoverishment and destruction of a nation of 24 million people.

But through their domination of the global financial system, the Western powers, in pursuit of national and collective strategic interests, helped bring the Yugoslav economy to its knees and stirred its simmering ethnic and social conflicts. Now it is the turn of Yugoslavia's war-ravaged successor states to feel the tender mercies of the international financial community.

As the world focused on troop movements and cease-fires, the international financial institutions were busily collecting former Yugoslavia's external debt from its remnant states, while transforming the Balkans into a safe-haven for free enterprise. With a Bosnian peace settlement holding under NATO guns, the West had in late 1995 unveiled a "reconstruction" program that stripped that brutalized country of sovereignty to a degree not seen in Europe since the end of World War II. It consisted largely of making Bosnia a divided territory under NATO military occupation and Western administration.

http://www.glo

Wow, lots more commenters than moderators on this thread. I'll add my voice to the din. Sound quality articles catch my interest, from coat hangers to codecs, but I haven't paid much attention to this particular topic. Here's a short list of 24-bit FAQs for end users.

Existing sites like HDtracks.com, linnrecords.com, naimlabel.com, and Society of Sound offer 24-bit files with sample rates ranging from 44.1 KHz to 192 KHz, with 96 KHz being the most popular. Popular formats (in decreasing order of popularity) include FLAC, Apple lossless (ALAC), and WMA lossless.

FLAC seems to have more diverse support, but ALAC has arguably broader support, including iTunes and iPods. WMA appears to compress better than FLAC, which appears to compress better than ALAC. (FLAC's compression levels don't seem to change the ratio much, except at the lowest/fastest levels.) FLAC seems to have the fastest decoder, but ALAC has the handy property that you can simply discard the eight low-order bits (as iPods apparently do). [Sources: Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase, hvdh at inter.nl.net, and FLAC comparison.]

I also came across some discussion of high-definition compatible digital (HDCD), a patented mastering fad from the late 90s that encodes about twenty bits on a CD, subsequently bought and buried by Microsoft. Apparently there are only two models of machines in the world that can encode HDCD, and they're both discontinued, with replacement parts in jeopardy as well.

Scrounging through CDs in the attic, I found some HDCD CDs from Capitol, High Street (Windham Hill), Red House, Sony, and Warner Bros. Goodwin's High End has an extensive list. As a quick test, I ripped Deana Carter's "Strawberry Wine" to a 16-bit WAV (51.4 MB) with XLD, converted to a 24-bit WAV (77.1 MB) with hdcd.exe (Windows only, but seems to work in WINE), then converted to 24-bit ALAC (56.4 MB) with XLD. I don't have the time or gear for an ABX test right now. The HDCD conversion is noticably quieter, for what it's worth.

Another quick way to try this at home is to torrent the 24/96 FLACs of the The Slip from nin.com (email registration required).

Care to share details of the USB implementation?

And you may be interested in John Kortink's MMC card storage system for BBC B and Master (at http://web.inter.nl.net/users/J.Kortink/home/hardware/gommc/index.htm )

But yes, I would have bitched at the front counter asking them when it would get fixed. That at least would have called some attention to it.

Indeed... that is why the ones that you really have to watch for aren't complete fake machines, but little recording devices placed in front of the real machine. You put your card in, enter the code, get your cash... and 5 minutes later some criminal in Eastern Europe runs off a copy of your card and cleans out your account.

A nice example of such a skim job is this one. The page is in Dutch but the pics are interesting... the guy happened to notice the false front was just a tad too clean, and on closer inspection noticed a recording head just behind the card slot. He ripped the thing from the machine and made a few pictures of it before turning it in to the police. The guy might have been observant, but thousands of people already had put their card through the machine without a second glance. I probably would not have noticed this myself either.

These criminals are getting more sophisticated now that people watch for false fronts, and machines are being altered to make it impossible to add them. These days they simple break into stores, open up card readers at the checkout counters, and add devices that record PINs and magnetic strips. One week later they break in again to retrieve their devices... some even use WiFi to read the data remotely from a nearby van, reducing the chances of getting caught.

Thankfully the banks here refund any skimmed funds as a rule.

http://web.inter.nl.net/users/hvdh/lossless/lossle ss.htm

if you have some contrary evidence (snide remarks don't count), please post it.

Good job. You've just outlawed verbal support for the colonials that wanted to rebel against the British Crown (ever heard of the American revolution?) including the founding fathers.

This type of thing is now indeed illegal in the EU. Take the EU's Council Framework Decision 2002/475/JHA on the definition of terrorism as an example: violent acts aimed at seriously intimidating a population, or unduly compelling a government or international organisation to perform or abstain from performing any act, or seriously destabilising or destroying the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a country or an international organisation. I assume this is the basis for the definition of terrorism in recent anti-terrorism legislation in EU member states, and abetting terrorism will also usually be illegal.

Here in the Netherlands, widely misunderstood as a very liberal state, the state recently locked up 6 people for promoting terrorism. Promoting terrorism in this case consisted of having muslim fundamentalist documents available. Charges were also brought for "threatening a member of parliament" even though the only audience present to the threat was the Dutch secret service officer listening to the bugs built into the walls of the house of one of the suspects (the American Jason Walters) before he moved in, but considering this a "threat" fortunately went too far for the court.

Oddly, the EU definition of terrorism does not cover conservative violent acts directed at preserving or stabilising the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a country. The definition is inherently political: most EU member states were themselves established by terrorist organizations by the EU's definition. This is why the EU Committee on Petitions was petitioned to legalize terrorism again by a concerned Dutch citizen in 2002, but the EU hasn't answered yet.

Free nvidia drivers might not be that far off anymore.
Take a look at the free haiku drivers that ALREADY WORK!
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/be-hold/BeOS/NVdrive r/index.html

Also of interest is this project which aims to make a similar free driver but
for gnu/linux systems.
http://nouveau.sourceforge.net/

Also, regarding ATI cards, I don't know why many people are complaining so much.
I have a radeon 9700 pro in my laptop, using the free dri r300 drivers which perform very well.

Bottom line is: There are skilled people who have already had considerable success in reverse engineering
both nvidia cards and ATI cards, and the more they succeed, the less we will have to depend on ATI and nvidia
for drivers and the more documentation will be written for those chips.

In the long run, we will get our way (ie. good free drivers).

I would disagree. You omitted the last part of the statement : "except not live in a prison state". In essence, you seem to be saying that if your cage is comfy enough, that is "free". Think of it a different way: mandelbrot set.

Mandelbrot is too abstract for me. Another answer I considered is that your prison state is an absolute monarchy, where only one has that freedom, since the total freedom of choice of one interferes with the freedom of choice of any other.

Since I do happen to live in a real world monarchy: the metaphor of the golden cage is common here, the monarch being the one person who is categorically denied his freedom of speech by the constitution. The monarch also doesn't vote, cannot choose his own career etc. The subjects cage the monarch, and the monarch is there to be a symbolic caged master because the people never could decide on another master.

One of the things I learned from Ofra Bengio's book "Saddam's Word", is that Saddam's rule was not Orwellian in character. Saddam was there because he was the strongest warlord, and the people are divided. Hitler could never have become a communist. Saddam could easily switch from being a pan-arabic nationalist to being a fake muslim fanatic. Saddam was an absolute monarch.

A Christian Fundamentalist Totalitarian State might seem more free if you happen to be of that mindset.

Indeed. Since freedom interferes with the freedom of others, there is only a limited amount of it that everyone can have at the same time. The trick is to align it with what people generally want. Most people can live with the restriction that they cannot interfere with the physical integrity, and honor and dignity of other people, for instance. Some can't.

To some freedom is a democracy, to others a theocracy, monarchy, or communist state. Others want to be a Nazi executioner. Democracy does not help those who fail to recognize what the viable options are, and fail to recognize who really is their master. Democracy, free market rhetoric, and libertarianism make very strong assumptions about people's autonomy. Liberalism (in the European sense, and including Kuyper's political calvinism) and socialism assume that people first have to be liberated by educating them before they recognize their true interests.

If Kuyper were right, no oppressive empires would have ever been made. You underestimate the power of bread and circuses backed by the threat of force.

Within his own frame of reference, Kuyper, who was a calvinist political leader and philosopher, is still right. He would note that the people cannot free themselves because of their own moral defects. Because the citizens of those oppressive empires weren't true calvinists. To oppress true calvinists indefinitely you would have to take their bible, and that would have to happen first. Human nature as it really is, is not part of his equation. People get the government they deserve. Other types of liberals and socialists would have a similar answer on how to 'safeguard the revolution'. The true marxist revolution will come when a people is ready for it.

You can't escape this problem by having no state. That's not freedom, but a Hobbesian state of nature where anyone can be your master. In Somalia you aren't free, even though there is no state.

*insert Orwellian comment here*

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- George Orwell

Even the Catholic church could never end truth. It is always there to be rediscovered, when the people are ready. At any time, some people will feel oppressed while others feel mostly free to do what they want. Orwell's state exists only as a caricature, that is as much a description of the democratic world we live in as it is descriptive of the Soviet Union, or medieval Europe. We make caricatures of our enemies.

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. -- George Orwell

For people with an Orwellian outlook this site by an intelligent lunatic is wonderful. It explains why democracy, human rights, liberalism, libertarianism, and the free market are totalitarian. To him at least.

Perhaps "mercantilism" would be the better term. A free market, by definition, doesn't involve organized violence. Or, in other terms, it's not a very free market for the people who get killed.

Communism, by definition, also doesn't involve violence. It's just that you have to kill so many dissidents on the fast track to communism.

Capitalism does not create free markets. Marx was not criticizing free markets, but real markets (or transactions involving labour for money to be specific).

Capitalist rethoric always presents us models of voluntary transactions between two people, but the real victims of those transactions are usually not even involved in the transaction. Even if they are, they are often not making a real choice. Necessitas non habet legem.

Or perhaps they starve thanks to modern day mercantilists and their eternal cry of imperialist nationalism: "They're taking our jobs!"

It's not just about protectionism on our side, but also that our lending conditions prohibit protectionism on their side.

In eastern Ethiopia, there is no longer an incentive to sell agricultural surpluses in western Ethiopia in return for goats because there is a world market where they can get more meat for their agricultural products. Illiterate marginal farmers are outcompeted by farmers a continent away, and they are not in a position to switch to flipping burgers at McDonalds.

In economic terms, there is no demand for food in the west while people starve. They don't have the instinct for collectivism that we take for granted, because they belong to different tribes.

It is possible to create a world economy in which every one can participate, but the road from here to there is not "the free market" but redistribution of wealth so that their children will be able to compete.

The areas in the former USSR where the statues of Lenin still stand (in private gardens), are those areas, in Central Asia and eastern Siberia, that benefitted enormously from redistribution through central planning. Redistribution is also why the people of Wyoming are so much better of than the people of Mongolia even though they live in similar hellholes.

You are not the first to observe this. Only a few cables need to be cut in the right place to create a local Internet. Some political weirdos (text available in English, German, and Russian) advocate cutting the world off from the US by cutting the communication cables that link it to the rest of the world.

...would have found this immediately.

use it.

...can be seen, re-animated, at this site.

How right you are..

This is just around the time when Muybridge was doing his work on the motion of horses and people.

For those who don't know this reference, it is to Eadweard Muybridge, an American immigrant from Britain who created created the first prototypical movie in the 1870, well before Edison or the Lumiere brothers, by having multiple cameras expose in sequence. He was asked to settle a bet on whether all four of a galloping horse's feet are ever all off the ground at the same time.

I've resurrected my Beeb recently and got into Repton 2 again, which rocks, as they say :-) I liked it much better than 1 and 3 (with the annoying fungus). Also ELITE of course.

Another favourite was Labyrinth, which featured a bizarre screen mode using remarkably only four colours to simulate many more with pixel patterns. Very cool game.

There are many great Beeb sites out there, particularly 8BS.com - see also my list of (mostly) Beeb games

Have fun!

>_

I'm talking about the AMD 5x86, which is a pin-compatible clone of the Intel 80486, and runs at 133MHz. Read all about it here.

They might not have come from Intel, but they do exist.

You use a poor-man's motion capture. You video tape an actor (or a creature?) and anlyze its movements. How many frames does it take a step? What frame does it shift its weight?

Depending on what kind of critter you're looking for this work has already been done a long time ago by Eadweard Mubridge. You can get some of the motion shots online (click on the links in the right hand nav bar). There are also several Muybridge books you can purchase with all the motion capture shots (both for humans and Animals). I believe the books are called "Humans In Motion" and "Animals in Motion" respectively.

-Pato

http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~phjk/BoundsChecking.html and http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/Haj.Ten.Brugge/

Rich.

Sure, electing representatives who then elect/appoint other officials who elect/appoint other people who ... who finally decide about everything, makes you feel like you aren't really doing anything. But Imho, if you want democracy to scale you need to add layers to it. Of course a lot of people disagree with me but while they do a great job of bashing the current situation, I find their proposals to be lacking, absurd or a combination of the two.

I think that Direct democracy is next to impossible these days due to the size of our communities, since getting everydody together to argue and vote about every issue is impossible. You could argue that with computers and the internet you don't need to get everybody together, but you still have another problem: the number of issues to argue about and vote on is too great for a single person to manage even if he was arguing/ voting 24/7.

Finally there's the issue about the ignorant masses that you mention. Giving every fool the right to vote on everything would probably result in a mess VERY quickly. Think taxes for example: most idiots would vote them down to zero and then complain about the lack of public services. Sure, on the long run they might actually get a clue and vote in a reasonable way, but the initial damage might be too great (also, in the long run we are all dead *).

There are also those who oppose democracy in either form but, as with the direct democracy people their solutions are not my cup of coffee.

So, yes I can tell the difference betweed direct and representative democracy, and I sure as hell know that representative democracy is so far from perfect it isn't even funny, but I'm still scratching my head as to what would be better.

* John Maynard Keynes

of how to solve problems with people who want to implement parts into your program you don't want can be found here. It's a game for the Palm, and the coder added a large FAQ section where every feature that has been asked for / suggested is discribed, along with a text why he didn't add it (yet). this way, people who suggest something to your program don't get all mad-n-stuff(tm) if you decline one of their ideas.

I use a freeware utility that checks my POP server for new messages, and also keeps my clock up to date.
See SyTinem

For Linux I use NTPDATE and run a cron job a few times a day to keep it on track.

Works for me!

SHOULD ART BE DESTROYED?

by Paul Treanor

Art, whatever the definition, has certain characteristics. It is equivalent to an entity, perpetuating itself across generations. As a result, it is permanent. Art also implies certain value claims, about the precedence of accumulative creativity over destruction. Permanence and accumulation cannot be ethically legitimised. In practice, there is a stable geo-cultural structure, of ethnic and national art. This structure is not ethically legitimised. The best response is a territorial separation of art.

KABUL, March 1 2001 (AFP via Yahoo News)

Afghanistan's ruling Taliban authorities said Thursday they have started destroying all statues in the country, including the world's tallest standing Buddha statue in the central province of Bamiyan.

"The work started about five hours ago but I do not know how much of it (the Bamiyan Buddhas) has been destroyed," Taliban Information and Culture Minister Qudratullah Jamal told AFP.

"It will be destroyed by every means. All the statues are being destroyed."

The poor, the weak and the oppressed do not speak in defence of art. The voice of art is the voice of privilege. But if that was the only defect of art, then equality would legitimise art. There is not just privilege, there is eternal privilege, for art continues. Art is ancient tradition: worse than privilege. Is it not time to destroy it?

Art is wrong because it is the past, because it perpetuates itself, because it is transgenerational, because it is culture, and because it requires the suppression of anti-art to exist.

People argue about what art is. High art is still contrasted to popular culture. In the 1970's some class theories opposed elitist art. However, in Britain, where Art an Enemy of the People was published in 1978, the response to "high art" was not rejection. It was the demand for subsidies - for community art, minority art, women's art, or art of colour. A similar pattern applies all over western Europe. The existence of art is not an issue. Policy simply accepts art: this is true for artists, for individual governments, and for the European Union. A policy consensus implies a definitional consensus.

Despite the apparent disunity about what constitutes high art or authentic art, there is a deep negative consensus about its nature. This negative consensus is common to all modern societies. Some things are not art, never:

a trans-Sahel railway
state formation
justice
a single European currency.

Seen from this perspective, it is the agreement about Art which is remarkable. Evidently there is something called art: and so to its defects.

The first defect of art is the antiquity of art. Some art is recent, of course, but there is no planned future art. In urban planning, for instance, there are those who plan cities which are not yet built, and those who study urban history. In art, however, there is only art history: art is past-oriented, almost by definition. Art is tens of thousands of years old. There is an immense volume of art from the past, even though most works of art are destroyed deliberately (of that, more later). The sacrality of art is a sacrality of the past.

Art perpetuates itself. True, this is a reification, but it is an accurate one. It is the actions of people which perpetuate art: but the effect for the opponents of art is as if art defended itself. I will use here exactly the same metaphor and analogy, that I used to describe the defects of sustainability, the ethic of eternal structures.

Compare the lives of two twins, born in identical circumstances. However, one is pro-art, the other is anti-art. The pro-art twin can go to art school, or study art history. There is no equivalent for the anti-art twin: no school of art incineration. Great social pressure to accept art is applied to one twin. No similar pressure to accept art-destruction is applied to the other twin. Because art is a core value in all existing societies, the social and employment opportunities of the anti-art twin will be limited. It is also the pro-art twin who is more likely to be elected or appointed to political office.

The value attached to art limits the opportunity of its opponents to take action against it. In this way art is a self-preserving structure. It is like a religion, whose adherents systematically discriminate non-believers: if such a religion is in a majority, it will constantly improve its position of power.

The strength and functioning of this self-preserving structure can be appreciated, by imagining that there was no art, and no pro-art structures. Transferring from an art-free world into the existing world, can be compared to transferring from this world, into a world objectionably different. Cannibalism is a useful characteristic for this comparison, because it is almost universally taboo. Being transferred into a cannibal world, from this world, would be extremely unpleasant for most people. They would be forced to accept that something they abhor is a normal part of society: that there is apparently no possibility of reform, since everyone accepts it as normal. This is the situation for opponents of art in the existing world.

Art also perpetuates itself in a more indirect way. Art is often described as human endeavour or achievement, and it is indeed a product of human activity. People are encouraged to consider art as a valued activity, to the exclusion of other activity. In many cultures it is regarded as a high form of achievement: that in itself is a valuing of conservatism. Artists strive to produce good art, but what they produce is art, because the activity takes place only in an art framework, a framework that already exists. It is accurate to say that art is conformity in itself, since artists must conform to the norm of what art is. That norm will vary across cultures and in time, but only in the limiting case that everything is accepted as art, does it cease to be restrictive. In practice, creative approaches to non-art areas are often socially un-accepted, or considered strange.

Art is transgenerational and open-ended. It perpetuates itself in the structural form described above, but art cannot be otherwise. So long as art is in opposition to iconoclasm, for instance, then there is a difference in the value socially ascribed to activities. In almost all cases (and certainly in modern societies) the accepted pattern is, that creation takes place by accumulation only. Iconoclasm (in the broad sense of art destruction) is defined as a non-creative act.

There is no inherent logical basis for the restriction of creativity to accumulation. However, it is the form art takes, and that form is socially accepted. Although there are millions of paintings already, painting a new one is defined as a creative activity. Reducing the existing stock is not. Destruction is not considered of equal value to creation.

On the contrary, destruction of art is considered a crime, and a sign of mental illness. Entering a museum and destroying a painting is considered shocking. Such acts are widely reported in the media, if they affect well-known works of art. This cannot be logically derived from a sacred status. In religious activity, sacred is not always permanent. Sacrificial animals were killed in some religions, offerings were burnt. It would be logically possible to treat art like this, but that does not occur. Art is not just sacred, its own accumulation is sacred, its permanence is sacred.

The continuance of art is therefore inherent in art. Art is for ever. That which can not end, is wrong, and must be ended. Permanence of any entity constitutes a claim to all time for its existence, specifically against its non-existence. Claims to time are contra-ethical or morally arbitrary: one state (existence of art) is favoured over another (non-existence of art) merely because it happened to exist first. It is possible to claim value for firstness or primacy (as nationalist organisations of indigenous peoples do), but this cannot be logically derived. It is itself an arbitrary value.

The transmission of art also requires, that injustice be done to done who oppose it. Their opposition is valid, since there is no moral ground for the permanence of art, yet they are discriminated against, as indicated above. Some employers, perhaps almost all, would refuse a job to anyone who openly advocated the destruction of art. If such injustice is a necessary condition of art, and there is no other legitimation of its existence, then the existence of art is an injustice, and should be terminated.

Just or unjust, self-perpetuating cycles and transgenerational structures, are contra-ethical. Art perpetuates itself, by accumulation, and the transmission of the value of this accumulation. Cultures include, over generations, reverence for the permanence of art. More than this, art perpetuates the transmission of culture including itself. Art is a central aspect of many cultures.

This permanence of art has been described here in abstract terms. In practice some real destruction of art does take place. The place of art in culture determines this: real art is ethnic art, or national art. Art that disappears, has lost its central place in an existing culture - usually because that culture itself has disappeared. The second part of this article, about cultures and art, is less abstract and more political.

There exists a geo-cultural structure, approximately corresponding to geopolitical structures. In practice, people refer daily to English culture, or French culture, to ancient Egyptian art, to Brazilian art, or to the art of the Islamic world. The entities of this geo-cultural structure may be cultures of nation states, of ethnic groups, of regions, or of larger entities called world-cultures or civilisations. They may overlap, in fact they usually do, but that does not mean there is no structure.

The complexity of culture is sometimes used to deny its rigid and structural nature. However, internal complexity can be great, and yet exclude external complexity. The possible moves in a game of chess are astronomically large, yet all chess games are chess games.

Consider a simple model, with unitary cultures of tribes. Tribe A invades the land of tribe B. Soon, within culture B there are pro-A collaborative cultural tendencies, there are anti-A "B nationalists", there are A+B "multi-culturalists", their opponents in A, and B, who oppose cultural mixing, and B revanchists. The land of A+B then invades the land of C. Now, in this land C, there pro-A collaborators, pro-B collaborators, pro A+B collaborators. There are anti-A "C nationalists", anti-B "C nationalists", and anti A+B "C nationalists". And more: even at this level, the multiplying combinations exceed simple factorials.

In the past there were thousands of cultures, associated with thousand of peoples. By some estimates, there still are. Combinations of their interactions can generate an immense diversity of culture. Yet, none of that culture will be anything other than a combination of unitary cultures of geopolitical entities.

There is every reason to believe that this is an accurate model of human culture and art: apparent diversity is hiding a huge range of possibilities which do not fit the existing geo-cultural model. This applies to art as well. The implication of this is, that the models of culture developed in anthropology in the 1940's and 1950's are accurate. (In fact these models reflect the general use of national or ethnic terms to describe culture).

These models were often linked to the idea of culture growth and decay, and similar organic or life-cycle metaphors. Their basis, however, was the idea of a unitary culture corresponding to some geopolitical entity. A. L. Kroeber's 1944 Configurations of Culture Growth is a classic work of this kind. In 1959 Rushton Coulborn could still take this approach to cultures or civilisations:


The style of a civilization is perceived as its aesthetic aspect: it is exhibited in everything the society produces and does, pre-eminently in its arts, but also in its thought, its politics, its institutions, its traditions, and in all its ways. It is possible to qualify a society's style, to comment upon it, to judge it even, yet hardly to describe it. It is the Chineseness" of what is Chinese, the "Egyptianness" of what is Egyptian, the "Westernness of what is Western. Since that time, this approach has disappeared from mainstream anthropology, only to reappear in the last 10 years, under the influence of ethnic studies. An Afro-centric approach to art history, for instance, implies almost by definition a geo-cultural structure.


Why pretend, that there is no such a thing as African art, or English art? Partly because such approaches were discredited by their association with Nazi Germany, or at least with Oswald Spengler and organic-social models of cultural history. But it was a common approach to history in the 1920's and 1930s, and is now "rehabilitated" by the interest in ethnicity and identity. The model is cyclically in and out of academic fashion.

In any case, this approach is still, and always has been, the accepted approach in art history. Any introduction to art history (for students in Europe) will present the standard sequence of styles in Europe: Romanesque, gothic, renaissance, baroque, rococo, neo-classicism. After that comes a section on Islamic Art, or Oriental Art, which are assumed to have their own style sequence. In this case, the academic wisdom seems to be right.

In the end it cannot be proved that there is a geo-cultural structure of this kind: that is too much a question of interpretation. However, it does seem extremely difficult to take the opposite position, that no culture or art is in any way associated with any particular people, culture, or territory.

In turn, this suggests an explanation of art: it is hyper-ethnic. Art is that within a culture which most approaches the core of that culture, and is least accessible to outsiders. Art is the visible soul of the people, just as nationalists say. The question is, whether that gives it existence rights. It is here that the manipulation of art-historical theory in defence of art must be noted. If art is associated with peoples, it can be associated with their state, and so with the policies of that state - which may be unacceptable for many. Yet art never suffers from attribution of guilt by association: definitions are manipulated, to absolve it.

If a person who is clearly a German Nazi, insists on the existence of a German art, and indicates clearly which works of art are German, what is in that circumstance anti-Nazism? The non-Nazi defenders of art deny the truth of the claims: they say the possession of art must be disputed. They would probably say, that in this case anti-Nazism consists in claiming that art belongs to all humanity: that it is universal. This opposition between Nazism and universality cannot, however, justify the existence of art.

The alternative anti-Nazi position is to accept the claims as true, and destroy the German art, which the Nazi person has so conveniently listed. Not just Nazi Germans produce such specifications: there are official lists of national art heritage, in most states in Europe. They are not intended for the convenience of anti-nationalist iconoclasts, but they can serve that purpose.

If art is national, then it can have no legitimacy other than within the values of nationalism. If all art is national then it is legitimate to destroy it, if anti-nationalism is itself legitimate. This legitimacy of destruction extends beyond nation states, to a geo-cultural structure in general. A geo-cultural structure is merely one of many possible structures. The present structure is complex, but not self-legitimising. It is legitimate to oppose pan-Africanism as a form of nationalism, and for instance, to destroy African art for that goal. Equally, it is legitimate to oppose a geo-cultural planetary structure that includes all art, and in doing so to destroy all art.

Why not? Art is being destroyed all the time. So long as there has been art, it has been destroyed. In reality, the sacrality of art applies mainly to "our art", not to "their art". If pan-Africanism, in 10 years time, is regarded as a form of imperialism oppressing the regional identities of the continent, then perhaps people will burn portraits of Nkrumah. 20 years ago, statues of Lenin were art in part of Berlin. Now they are considered "propaganda of the unjust SED state". 60 years ago, statues of Hitler were art in Berlin: now public display of any Nazi symbol is illegal. Today, art in Germany means for instance statues of Konrad Adenauer, the pro-western post-war Chancellor.

The only constant seems to be, that art serves privilege, the nation state, the powerful, the established, the unjust. In general, art serves the existing, which is exactly what is consistent with a self-perpetuating social structure.

It is acceptable to oppose art in general, and specific national, regional, world-cultural, or civilisational art. However, there is no wide support for the break-up of the geo-cultural structure. The values of that structure itself are incompatible with its reform or abolition. It can however be limited in its effects.

I therefore propose territorial separation of art. Formally, the best course would be to destroy existing art, then choose if the planet was to be art-provided or art-free. However, there is no prospect of any global agreement on this. Art will be in opposition to non-art, inherently.

Specifically, I propose that the United States of America should become a zone of art. The existing cultural preference in the USA for collecting art, (especially from Europe) should be expanded into a prime function of state.

Art should be transferred from Europe to the USA, beginning with the art listed in national heritage lists, and with recognised European heritage. I propose as an initial step, the transfer of the Mona Lisa, the best known European artwork, to the USA. The Mona Lisa is old, and heritage. It is better, that the past should burden the USA, than burden Europe. All artists, and those who wish to continue employment in the art sector, should be transferred to the USA.

Any attempt at such a transfer would probably result in military intervention in support of art, perhaps by the USA. However, the nature of such a military intervention is outside the scope of this article. In any case, it is probably true that, given the fundamental opposition between art and its destruction, military conflict is inevitable in the long term.

Taylor, R. Art an Enemy of the People. Hassocks: Harvester 1978.
Kroeber, A. L. Configurations of Culture Growth. Berkeley: University of California Press 1944.
Coulborn, R. The Origin of Civilized Societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1959. (Quote, p. 22).

No Globalisation
by Paul Treanor

Logically, there can be no process of globalisation in a world order of nation states. A world order is already global, by definition. The logic of 'globalisation' is false, but the idea has become an ideology. For different reasons, different people claim that there is globalisation. The word "globalisation" started as an academic and media hype. Just when it was going out of fashion, the 1999 Seattle summit revived media attention for the issue. Pro-globalisation and anti-globalisation ideologies (and movements) have emerged. That fact remains, that the underlying 'globalisation' process simply does not exist. People are often talking about something else - about neoliberalism or about normative globalism, for instance.

Is there globalisation? Nation states still dominate the social and economic structures of this planet. But nation states are themselves a global order - a specific arrangement of a specific type of state. Globalisation only appears logical, if you see nation states as isolated islands, but that is not the historical reality.

Supporters of the globalisation thesis claim, that a world of isolated nation states existed in the recent past. Perhaps before 1989, or more approximately, before 1950. They claim that these isolated nation states are now being eroded, in a global process. This thesis is often presented as a absolute truth, which globalisation researchers have discovered. Academic snobbism is important in sustaining globalisation research, especially since the thesis appeals to both the right and the left. People are considered stupid, if they question globalisation.

Saskia Sassen, who uses globalisation as a "negative future" to promote a global civil society, summarises the logic. (In: Losing Control: Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization, Columbia University Press 1996).


Economic globalization represents a major transformation in the territorial organization of economic activity and politico-economic power....The sovereignty of the modern state was concentrated in mutually exclusive territories and the concentration of sovereignty in nations...economic globalization has contributed to a denationalizing of national territory... But nations are not mutually exclusive. Every existing nation state, supports the division of the world into nation states. Even a total surrender of national sovereignty to another nation, does not de-nationalise territory. When nations re-unite, for instance, states can completely disappear. At some future date, Moldova (Moldavia) might accede to Romania. That would mean the state Moldova completely ceased to exist: but that would not mean the end of nations. In fact it would be a victory for the nationalistic 'Greater Romania' ideal. Another example: the Republic of Ireland has abandoned its claim to sovereignty over Northern Ireland. However, a future majority in Northern Ireland might wants to accede to the Republic of Ireland. In those circumstances, the United Kingdom has said it will abandon its claim to the territory. Yet, either way, there are still two nation states in the British Isles. The border might shift, but the nation state as such does not disappear in such cases.


The relevant question, at global level, is whether the global order of nation states is disappearing - anywhere. And there is no collapse of the nation state, in the face of globalisation. Nation states have not suffered anything comparable to the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman empires. All that remains of these empires, are oversized palaces in Vienna and Istanbul. The rest of their institutions have completely disappeared: there is not a square millimetre of Habsburg or Ottoman territory left in Europe. There is no longer an Austro-Hungarian imperial army, or police, or courts, of universities. The nation states succeeded the multi-ethnic empires, and seized all their territory. The replacement was total.

But where is the so-called 'collapse' of the nation state visible? There are very few places on earth where there are no institutions of a nation state - perhaps in Somalia, but that is not the result of globalization. If the world was truly 'globalised' then it would be full of disused national parliament buildings - and not a national army in sight. The world is not like that, and will not be like that, in the immediate future. In other words, 'globalisation' remains a hype - pure hype and not reality.

Anti-nationalists know this, better than anyone else. So people who claim that 'globalisation' is eroding nations are in any case not anti-nationalists. At worst, the opposite: they are simply nationalists. The globalisation hype can be a form of nationalist propaganda.

The popular globalisation myth

A popular version of the globalisation myth has existed for about 10 years. It claims that until 1989, the world consisted of separate, sovereign, autonomous nation states, with separate histories. Then, borders collapsed, the internet appeared, but also the international Mafia. So now it is a dangerous world, but also perhaps full of opportunities.

You can find this version, almost literally, in Ruud Lubbers' article The Globalization of Economy and Society (now offline):


The term "globalization" implies that the becoming and making worldwide of various phenomena has accelerated at such a pace that it is giving rise to a variety of new phenomena. Globalization entails a quantitative shift of several autonomous national economies to a global marketplace for production, distribution, and technology. All this has resulted in the emergence of a worldwide confrontation of political, societal, and ethical insights...


Lubbers was a former Netherlands premier, and is now UN High Commissioner for Refugees. He filled the time between these posts as a Professor of Globalization Studies at Tilburg University. Lubbers explains what caused the 'quantitative shift'...

The far-reaching integration of electronics and computers on the one hand, and communication technology, on the other, led to what Toffler christened "the third wave." And thus today's world came into being....People everywhere were confronted with the effects of the emergence of modern communication technologies and the Sputnik, Soyuz, and Apollo heralded the birth of a new world. CNN and the Internet, global sourcing, electronic capital flows signalled the emergence of the information and communication age. It has been said that the bits provoke one world, accomplishing the globalization of information/communication and technology.

The language of globalisation claims

The globalisation myth has developed its own slang, related to themes in globalisation research...


turmoil, chaos, breakdown, instability, disorder
global, globalised, planetary, planetary order, global governance, world consciousness
trans-state, transnational, cross-border, borderlands, transgression, boundary erosion, inter-cultural, transcultural
multiple actors, multiplicity, multi-voiced, fragmented, break-up, splitting up
flow, space of flows, trade volume, stream, link, network, linked by flows


Here is an example of globalisation-speak from Global Cyberculture Reconsidered: Cyberspace, Identity, and the Global Informational City


There are two forces at work in globalization: the spread of the Net internationally follows urban infrastructures, and nations around the world are cooperating in the creation of a global network economy by creating networks of globalized informational cities that require liberalized financial and trade policies.


And the Globalization and World Cities research group declares:


Our mission is to promote a different metageographical image of the world, a space of flows held together by a network of cities. There are a myriad of networks which make up our contemporary world, the Internet, for example, to which you are currently linked to, is an important example. We have chosen to focus upon the network of world cities because it is the most obvious concrete manifestation of a contemporary space of flows which can challenge traditional metageographies.


This language is self-referential: it exists within the world of globalisation research. That is how they talk to one another. Like all slang, it establishes membership of a social group. It is not a guide to the real world.

The logic and evidence of globalisation claims Suppose there was a global state. Suppose the 'Global Self-Sufficient Villages Party' won the global elections. It would implement its policies: it would make the world self-sufficient at local level. In the end, there would be a world of self-sufficient villages, with no inter-local trade - let alone inter-continental trade.

Is this globalisation? Is this global? The answer must be yes, it is at least global. A global state implementing a global policy is global. It is perfectly logical for a global state or society to exist, without the conventional indicators of globalisation. A fully globalised, homogenous, world can be a world of autarkic communities - if that is the global political culture. That applies to any intermediate between autarky and full interaction. If the global norm is to trade 10% of gross National Product, then a fully globalised planet could exist where all states traded 10% of GNP. If the norm is 90%, then it would be 90%. There is no way to infer from the statistic alone, whether the planet is 'globalised' or not. Indicators such as trade volume and trade policy can even be used in logically contradictory ways.

For example, if I discover that nation states are abandoning protectionist polices, is that evidence of globalisation? Supporters of the globalisation thesis will say, that nation states increasingly compete with all other nation states. Trade increases, and protectionism will be abandoned. So, they will say, the trend is evidence of globalisation. But I could equally claim, that protectionism is caused by increasing competition among nation states. So, I could say, that the abandonment of protectionism shows that globalisation has ended.

But what if I discover a trend to protectionist polices? This time the globalisation fans will say, "logical, increasing competition means more protectionism." The conclusion will be reversed to suit the evidence. But I can do that as well. I could say, that protectionism is a symptom of the end of globalisation - after all, it limits trade.

This is just one example of a large class of paradoxes. Many apparently solid statistical indicators of globalisation, can be used as evidence either way. And other evidence may point to the opposite conclusion. International air traffic is growing - but so are regional airlines. Cultural evidence is equally double-sided. The first books published were all in one language, Latin: since then publishing has become increasingly 'local', not global. The number of published languages has increased, not decreased. In the end, there is no point in detailed argument, about trade volumes, capital flows, and information flows. They will never conclusively establish globalisation.

However, supporters of the globalisation thesis continue to quote fabricated and illogical 'evidence'. Any social or economic phenomenon is treated as possible 'evidence' of globalisation. If there is a Chinese restaurant in a town, it shows global culture. If these is no Chinese restaurant, it shows the town is lagging behind in the globalisation process.

Global processes is deliberately confused with global erosion of borders. Trade among nations may be global: that does not mean nations are dissolving in trade. Recent trade flows are used as evidence of recent globalisation, but inter-continental trade has existed for thousands of years. Even the present pattern of all-continent trade is 200 years old. The supporters of the globalisation thesis use nominalist arguments: the label "globalisation" is attached to any cross-border phenomenon. If you call all animals 'Martians', then every day you will see evidence that the Martians have landed.

The claim that there is a globalisation process is endlessly repeated, ignoring historical context. The claimed 'instrument of globalisation' varies from one decade to the next. Some people said the hot air balloon would end borders. But people said the same thing about the telegraph, the railway, the steam ship, wireless telegraphy, the airship, radio, air travel, television, pictures of the world from space, satellite television, CNN, and the Internet. Borders are still here: there are probably more border guards, than at any previous time in history.

So belief in globalisation is like any other belief system. Facts are not necessarily relevant. Some adherents of globalisation share the characteristics of religious cults, especially cults which believe in the end of the world. These apocalyptic cults sometimes announce a date for the end of the world. When the world does not end, their members are not disillusioned: often their belief is reinforced. For the 'true believers' of globalisation, any event can reinforce the belief in globalisation - and nothing can contradict it. Those who do not believe in globalisation, are seen as inferior. Several times people called me "blind", for not believing in globalisation.

The belief / myth / hype of globalisation is probably here for a long time. Belief systems disappear only slowly. As political legitimation, 'globalisation' is useful to many groups: its factual existence is certainly irrelevant in politics.

The nation state

Nation states are one of many possible forms of state. The very existence of a world of nation states, indicates some form of global order of nation states. What these nation states do - trade or no trade, flows or no flows - is irrelevant to that issue. What is already global can not logically be globalised: therefore there is no globalisation. The 'false premise' in the globalisation thesis is the nationalist claim, that nations are separate and particular entities. In fact they are a global and universalist structure: the functional equivalent of a nationalist world state.

The world functions as if a nationalist world government had seized power in the last century, led by Mazzini and Garibaldi and friends. Most existing states were indeed established by nationalist groups. The idea presented in Structures of Nationalism is simple. Nationalists are not competing. They co-operate to maintain one (nationalist) world order and exclude others. The nation state is not a particularity, existing by itself in isolation, but part of a global design.

Consider the issue of sovereignty and multinational corporations (TNC's). A world run by 180 global corporations would mean: no national sovereignty, no national parliaments, no national laws, no national armies. But equally, a world run by 180 nation states means: no women's sovereignty, no women's parliaments, no women's laws, no women's armies. A world run by global corporations is alternative to the world order of nation states. But that order itself is alternative, to a possible world order of gender states. A national parliament could be closed - just as the Austro-Hungarian imperial parliament closed - and replaced by gender parliaments.

Of course, that idea is offensive to nationalists. For them not gender, but the nation, is the fundamental human social order. Therefore, they claim, it should be the unit of state formation: "one people, one government". This claim has no inherent validity - the slogan "one gender, one government" would be equally valid, in logical terms. But historically, nation states were established by logic anyway. Usually, they were a reaction against a former imperial or colonial order. A reaction against globalisation, real or imagined, might sustain the nation state for several more generations.

The 'threat of globalisation' confers no existence rights on a nation state. It does not give national parliaments any more right to exist, than gender parliaments. A person A has no valid claims against person B, simply on the basis of threats from entity C. If the nation state was inherently good, there might be a moral obligation to support it. But no-one is obliged to support the nation state, simply because it is threatened by globalisation, or anything else. In any case, this comparison with a possible alternative world order only emphasises, that nation states have not been 'eroded'. No completely different world order has emerged - as different from the present world, as a world of gender states would be.

If you ignore all these possible worlds, and just look at existing nations, then it is true that cross-border interaction seems important. If you close your eyes to everything except France and Germany, then all you see is France, Germany and Franco-German interaction. The whole universe shrinks to one issue: how much Franco-German interaction? Similarly, if you see the present order of 180 nation states as the only multi-state world order, then you see only two alternative worlds. You see either 180 nation states, or some form of global entity. The supporters of the globalisation thesis have shrunk their field of view in this way. They see 180 nation states, and the interactions among the 180 nation states, and conclude there is globalisation. It is a weak and false logic.

Say globalisation, mean neoliberalism

Most of the confusion about globalisation occurs when nation states pursue neoliberal policies. This is what Tony Blair means, when he talks about the "opportunities" of globalisation - his reaction to the Genoa summit protests. The neoliberal attitude to the national economy is more accurately described as neo-mercantilist. Neoliberals see the nation as an economic unit, competing with other similar units: they often compare the nation to a business firm. Neoliberal economic policies, within the nation state, are designed to meet the needs of this imaginary business - 'Great Britain Limited', 'Deutschland GmbH', 'BV Nederland'.

This does not mean that the nation state is a business firm. That would be impossible within a liberal democracy anyway - it would require a totalitarian level of economic planning. Businesses are not run like nation states, for good reasons - and nation states can probably not be run like a business. Neoliberals also contradict themselves, by insisting that regions and cities should also compete with each other, like business firms. This would make a national economic policy impossible.

What neoliberals promote is a set of social goals, a model of a society arranged for the benefit of the entrepreneur. This is usually called 'competitiveness', a favourite word for Tony Blair and other neoliberal politicians. Economists compile league tables, in which nations are ranked by competitiveness. But this does not mean that nation states are forced to be 'competitive' by some all-powerful global organisation. They are not even forced in a metaphorical sense, by the global market. The 'competitiveness' is an internal policy, a neoliberal social policy. It may not even be competitive. (If it was taken to the extremes suggested by some neoliberals, it would probably cause economic collapse).

So when western political leaders speak positively of globalisation, this is usually what they are talking about. This is usually what the media are talking about, when they use the word 'globalisation'. It has nothing to do with the erosion of the nation state. It also has very little to do with classic market liberalism, which advocates unlimited competition between every single entrepreneur. Classic market liberals would call 'Great Britain Limited' a cartel.

The ideology of 'competitiveness' has everything to do with nationalism. It is a modern version of the old nationalist insistence, that the whole nation should work together. It is a new form of jingoism, chauvinism, flag-waving and foreigner-bashing (particularly suited for Tony Blair). It is not in any way an indicator that a new global order has superseded the order of nation states, or that they have been colonised by global financial institutions.

Who else says there is globalisation?

Three groups have an interest in claiming that globalisation is a reality. Firstly, all kinds of nationalists: globalisation provides a clear enemy, to unite the national group.

The western media image of globalisation is derived largely from anti-globalisation activists. Many are clearly economic nationalists. The opposition of North American labour unions (trade unions) to new free trade zones is an example. In the European Union this is less of an issue, partly because the present EU members have comparable economies, and partly because the EU is long established anyway. (In the EU, economic nationalism takes the form of opposition to EU enlargement, rather than opposition to the EU).

Walden Bello, an anti-globalisation activist from the Philippines, has a comprehensive national alternative to globalisation, which he calls 'de-globalization':

I am not talking about withdrawing from the international economy. I am speaking about reorienting our economies from production for export to the local market....

- about creating a new production and exchange complex that includes community cooperatives, private enterprises, and state enterprises, and excludes transnational corporations (TNCs);
- about enshrining the principle of subsidiarity in economic life by encouraging production of goods to take place at the community and national level...

The Struggle for the Future

This is more than simple protectionism. It implies that the State, business, and community organisations should coordinate their policies, in some form of corporatist society. Economic nationalism and corporatism are often associated: they appeal to business in vulnerable sectors of the economy. It is not true that business is uniformly pro-globalisation - any more than Turkish business uniformly supports EU membership. Even in advanced economies, entrepreneurs often have an interest in presenting globalisation as a threat.

In western Europe, fear of globalisation is used to claim government aid for 'national industries'. Business likes subsidies, and appeals to national pride were a traditional way of getting them, long before the term 'globalisation' was used. Recently the approach has become more sophisticated: the subsidies go not just to one firm, but to whole sectors, or to a large part of the 'national economy'. The businessmen demand the subsidies, but say they are protecting the national standard of living.

However, even the living standards of Britons or Germans are no reason to support the nation state Britain, or the nation state Germany. Activists often claim, that transnational corporations "erode the ability of nation states to regulate their own economies". That does not oblige anyone to support any nation state either. Remember: the nation states themselves eroded the former multi-ethnic empires. That does not oblige anyone to restore these empires.

Nationalists have a long history of appealing to external threats, to enforce national unity. The nation must unite and work together, they said - to defeat the Hun, or the Bolshevik threat, or the Yellow Peril, or the enemy within the gates, or the Cali cartel, or Osama bin Ladin. Appeals to unite in the face of 'globalisation' are in the same dishonourable category. Economic-nationalist propaganda is in the worst nationalist traditions.

A second group claims, that there are good and bad forms of globalisation. They then cast themselves in the role of the 'good globalisers'. Advocates of a global civil society claim it provides the opposition to global neoliberalism. In reality, 'global civil society' is a loose coalition of western (and western-funded) NGO's, who dream of being subsidised by global taxes.

The third group are the normative globalists: the people who want a global society. Usually they want a global state, although they may not call it that. They have an interest in presenting globalisation as an inevitable historical development. This is historicism - political demands based on historical process, real or imagined.

Any global state would have the basic structure of a nation state: unified constitution, laws, parliament, administration, and executive powers. This normative globalism is simply a form of pan-nationalism. For now, the exact form of world government remains a hobby for International Relations theorists: but the claimed process of globalisation can be used to legitimise the idea.

SHOULD ART BE DESTROYED?

by Paul Treanor

Art, whatever the definition, has certain characteristics. It is equivalent to an entity, perpetuating itself across generations. As a result, it is permanent. Art also implies certain value claims, about the precedence of accumulative creativity over destruction. Permanence and accumulation cannot be ethically legitimised. In practice, there is a stable geo-cultural structure, of ethnic and national art. This structure is not ethically legitimised. The best response is a territorial separation of art.

KABUL, March 1 2001 (AFP via Yahoo News)

Afghanistan's ruling Taliban authorities said Thursday they have started destroying all statues in the country, including the world's tallest standing Buddha statue in the central province of Bamiyan.

"The work started about five hours ago but I do not know how much of it (the Bamiyan Buddhas) has been destroyed," Taliban Information and Culture Minister Qudratullah Jamal told AFP.

"It will be destroyed by every means. All the statues are being destroyed."

The poor, the weak and the oppressed do not speak in defence of art. The voice of art is the voice of privilege. But if that was the only defect of art, then equality would legitimise art. There is not just privilege, there is eternal privilege, for art continues. Art is ancient tradition: worse than privilege. Is it not time to destroy it?

Art is wrong because it is the past, because it perpetuates itself, because it is transgenerational, because it is culture, and because it requires the suppression of anti-art to exist.

People argue about what art is. High art is still contrasted to popular culture. In the 1970's some class theories opposed elitist art. However, in Britain, where Art an Enemy of the People was published in 1978, the response to "high art" was not rejection. It was the demand for subsidies - for community art, minority art, women's art, or art of colour. A similar pattern applies all over western Europe. The existence of art is not an issue. Policy simply accepts art: this is true for artists, for individual governments, and for the European Union. A policy consensus implies a definitional consensus.

Despite the apparent disunity about what constitutes high art or authentic art, there is a deep negative consensus about its nature. This negative consensus is common to all modern societies. Some things are not art, never:

a trans-Sahel railway
state formation
justice
a single European currency.

Seen from this perspective, it is the agreement about Art which is remarkable. Evidently there is something called art: and so to its defects.

The first defect of art is the antiquity of art. Some art is recent, of course, but there is no planned future art. In urban planning, for instance, there are those who plan cities which are not yet built, and those who study urban history. In art, however, there is only art history: art is past-oriented, almost by definition. Art is tens of thousands of years old. There is an immense volume of art from the past, even though most works of art are destroyed deliberately (of that, more later). The sacrality of art is a sacrality of the past.

Art perpetuates itself. True, this is a reification, but it is an accurate one. It is the actions of people which perpetuate art: but the effect for the opponents of art is as if art defended itself. I will use here exactly the same metaphor and analogy, that I used to describe the defects of sustainability, the ethic of eternal structures.

Compare the lives of two twins, born in identical circumstances. However, one is pro-art, the other is anti-art. The pro-art twin can go to art school, or study art history. There is no equivalent for the anti-art twin: no school of art incineration. Great social pressure to accept art is applied to one twin. No similar pressure to accept art-destruction is applied to the other twin. Because art is a core value in all existing societies, the social and employment opportunities of the anti-art twin will be limited. It is also the pro-art twin who is more likely to be elected or appointed to political office.

The value attached to art limits the opportunity of its opponents to take action against it. In this way art is a self-preserving structure. It is like a religion, whose adherents systematically discriminate non-believers: if such a religion is in a majority, it will constantly improve its position of power.

The strength and functioning of this self-preserving structure can be appreciated, by imagining that there was no art, and no pro-art structures. Transferring from an art-free world into the existing world, can be compared to transferring from this world, into a world objectionably different. Cannibalism is a useful characteristic for this comparison, because it is almost universally taboo. Being transferred into a cannibal world, from this world, would be extremely unpleasant for most people. They would be forced to accept that something they abhor is a normal part of society: that there is apparently no possibility of reform, since everyone accepts it as normal. This is the situation for opponents of art in the existing world.

Art also perpetuates itself in a more indirect way. Art is often described as human endeavour or achievement, and it is indeed a product of human activity. People are encouraged to consider art as a valued activity, to the exclusion of other activity. In many cultures it is regarded as a high form of achievement: that in itself is a valuing of conservatism. Artists strive to produce good art, but what they produce is art, because the activity takes place only in an art framework, a framework that already exists. It is accurate to say that art is conformity in itself, since artists must conform to the norm of what art is. That norm will vary across cultures and in time, but only in the limiting case that everything is accepted as art, does it cease to be restrictive. In practice, creative approaches to non-art areas are often socially un-accepted, or considered strange.

Art is transgenerational and open-ended. It perpetuates itself in the structural form described above, but art cannot be otherwise. So long as art is in opposition to iconoclasm, for instance, then there is a difference in the value socially ascribed to activities. In almost all cases (and certainly in modern societies) the accepted pattern is, that creation takes place by accumulation only. Iconoclasm (in the broad sense of art destruction) is defined as a non-creative act.

There is no inherent logical basis for the restriction of creativity to accumulation. However, it is the form art takes, and that form is socially accepted. Although there are millions of paintings already, painting a new one is defined as a creative activity. Reducing the existing stock is not. Destruction is not considered of equal value to creation.

On the contrary, destruction of art is considered a crime, and a sign of mental illness. Entering a museum and destroying a painting is considered shocking. Such acts are widely reported in the media, if they affect well-known works of art. This cannot be logically derived from a sacred status. In religious activity, sacred is not always permanent. Sacrificial animals were killed in some religions, offerings were burnt. It would be logically possible to treat art like this, but that does not occur. Art is not just sacred, its own accumulation is sacred, its permanence is sacred.

The continuance of art is therefore inherent in art. Art is for ever. That which can not end, is wrong, and must be ended. Permanence of any entity constitutes a claim to all time for its existence, specifically against its non-existence. Claims to time are contra-ethical or morally arbitrary: one state (existence of art) is favoured over another (non-existence of art) merely because it happened to exist first. It is possible to claim value for firstness or primacy (as nationalist organisations of indigenous peoples do), but this cannot be logically derived. It is itself an arbitrary value.

The transmission of art also requires, that injustice be done to done who oppose it. Their opposition is valid, since there is no moral ground for the permanence of art, yet they are discriminated against, as indicated above. Some employers, perhaps almost all, would refuse a job to anyone who openly advocated the destruction of art. If such injustice is a necessary condition of art, and there is no other legitimation of its existence, then the existence of art is an injustice, and should be terminated.

Just or unjust, self-perpetuating cycles and transgenerational structures, are contra-ethical. Art perpetuates itself, by accumulation, and the transmission of the value of this accumulation. Cultures include, over generations, reverence for the permanence of art. More than this, art perpetuates the transmission of culture including itself. Art is a central aspect of many cultures.

This permanence of art has been described here in abstract terms. In practice some real destruction of art does take place. The place of art in culture determines this: real art is ethnic art, or national art. Art that disappears, has lost its central place in an existing culture - usually because that culture itself has disappeared. The second part of this article, about cultures and art, is less abstract and more political.

There exists a geo-cultural structure, approximately corresponding to geopolitical structures. In practice, people refer daily to English culture, or French culture, to ancient Egyptian art, to Brazilian art, or to the art of the Islamic world. The entities of this geo-cultural structure may be cultures of nation states, of ethnic groups, of regions, or of larger entities called world-cultures or civilisations. They may overlap, in fact they usually do, but that does not mean there is no structure.

The complexity of culture is sometimes used to deny its rigid and structural nature. However, internal complexity can be great, and yet exclude external complexity. The possible moves in a game of chess are astronomically large, yet all chess games are chess games.

Consider a simple model, with unitary cultures of tribes. Tribe A invades the land of tribe B. Soon, within culture B there are pro-A collaborative cultural tendencies, there are anti-A "B nationalists", there are A+B "multi-culturalists", their opponents in A, and B, who oppose cultural mixing, and B revanchists. The land of A+B then invades the land of C. Now, in this land C, there pro-A collaborators, pro-B collaborators, pro A+B collaborators. There are anti-A "C nationalists", anti-B "C nationalists", and anti A+B "C nationalists". And more: even at this level, the multiplying combinations exceed simple factorials.

In the past there were thousands of cultures, associated with thousand of peoples. By some estimates, there still are. Combinations of their interactions can generate an immense diversity of culture. Yet, none of that culture will be anything other than a combination of unitary cultures of geopolitical entities.

There is every reason to believe that this is an accurate model of human culture and art: apparent diversity is hiding a huge range of possibilities which do not fit the existing geo-cultural model. This applies to art as well. The implication of this is, that the models of culture developed in anthropology in the 1940's and 1950's are accurate. (In fact these models reflect the general use of national or ethnic terms to describe culture).

These models were often linked to the idea of culture growth and decay, and similar organic or life-cycle metaphors. Their basis, however, was the idea of a unitary culture corresponding to some geopolitical entity. A. L. Kroeber's 1944 Configurations of Culture Growth is a classic work of this kind. In 1959 Rushton Coulborn could still take this approach to cultures or civilisations:


The style of a civilization is perceived as its aesthetic aspect: it is exhibited in everything the society produces and does, pre-eminently in its arts, but also in its thought, its politics, its institutions, its traditions, and in all its ways. It is possible to qualify a society's style, to comment upon it, to judge it even, yet hardly to describe it. It is the Chineseness" of what is Chinese, the "Egyptianness" of what is Egyptian, the "Westernness of what is Western. Since that time, this approach has disappeared from mainstream anthropology, only to reappear in the last 10 years, under the influence of ethnic studies. An Afro-centric approach to art history, for instance, implies almost by definition a geo-cultural structure.


Why pretend, that there is no such a thing as African art, or English art? Partly because such approaches were discredited by their association with Nazi Germany, or at least with Oswald Spengler and organic-social models of cultural history. But it was a common approach to history in the 1920's and 1930s, and is now "rehabilitated" by the interest in ethnicity and identity. The model is cyclically in and out of academic fashion.

In any case, this approach is still, and always has been, the accepted approach in art history. Any introduction to art history (for students in Europe) will present the standard sequence of styles in Europe: Romanesque, gothic, renaissance, baroque, rococo, neo-classicism. After that comes a section on Islamic Art, or Oriental Art, which are assumed to have their own style sequence. In this case, the academic wisdom seems to be right.

In the end it cannot be proved that there is a geo-cultural structure of this kind: that is too much a question of interpretation. However, it does seem extremely difficult to take the opposite position, that no culture or art is in any way associated with any particular people, culture, or territory.

In turn, this suggests an explanation of art: it is hyper-ethnic. Art is that within a culture which most approaches the core of that culture, and is least accessible to outsiders. Art is the visible soul of the people, just as nationalists say. The question is, whether that gives it existence rights. It is here that the manipulation of art-historical theory in defence of art must be noted. If art is associated with peoples, it can be associated with their state, and so with the policies of that state - which may be unacceptable for many. Yet art never suffers from attribution of guilt by association: definitions are manipulated, to absolve it.

If a person who is clearly a German Nazi, insists on the existence of a German art, and indicates clearly which works of art are German, what is in that circumstance anti-Nazism? The non-Nazi defenders of art deny the truth of the claims: they say the possession of art must be disputed. They would probably say, that in this case anti-Nazism consists in claiming that art belongs to all humanity: that it is universal. This opposition between Nazism and universality cannot, however, justify the existence of art.

The alternative anti-Nazi position is to accept the claims as true, and destroy the German art, which the Nazi person has so conveniently listed. Not just Nazi Germans produce such specifications: there are official lists of national art heritage, in most states in Europe. They are not intended for the convenience of anti-nationalist iconoclasts, but they can serve that purpose.

If art is national, then it can have no legitimacy other than within the values of nationalism. If all art is national then it is legitimate to destroy it, if anti-nationalism is itself legitimate. This legitimacy of destruction extends beyond nation states, to a geo-cultural structure in general. A geo-cultural structure is merely one of many possible structures. The present structure is complex, but not self-legitimising. It is legitimate to oppose pan-Africanism as a form of nationalism, and for instance, to destroy African art for that goal. Equally, it is legitimate to oppose a geo-cultural planetary structure that includes all art, and in doing so to destroy all art.

Why not? Art is being destroyed all the time. So long as there has been art, it has been destroyed. In reality, the sacrality of art applies mainly to "our art", not to "their art". If pan-Africanism, in 10 years time, is regarded as a form of imperialism oppressing the regional identities of the continent, then perhaps people will burn portraits of Nkrumah. 20 years ago, statues of Lenin were art in part of Berlin. Now they are considered "propaganda of the unjust SED state". 60 years ago, statues of Hitler were art in Berlin: now public display of any Nazi symbol is illegal. Today, art in Germany means for instance statues of Konrad Adenauer, the pro-western post-war Chancellor.

The only constant seems to be, that art serves privilege, the nation state, the powerful, the established, the unjust. In general, art serves the existing, which is exactly what is consistent with a self-perpetuating social structure.

It is acceptable to oppose art in general, and specific national, regional, world-cultural, or civilisational art. However, there is no wide support for the break-up of the geo-cultural structure. The values of that structure itself are incompatible with its reform or abolition. It can however be limited in its effects.

I therefore propose territorial separation of art. Formally, the best course would be to destroy existing art, then choose if the planet was to be art-provided or art-free. However, there is no prospect of any global agreement on this. Art will be in opposition to non-art, inherently.

Specifically, I propose that the United States of America should become a zone of art. The existing cultural preference in the USA for collecting art, (especially from Europe) should be expanded into a prime function of state.

Art should be transferred from Europe to the USA, beginning with the art listed in national heritage lists, and with recognised European heritage. I propose as an initial step, the transfer of the Mona Lisa, the best known European artwork, to the USA. The Mona Lisa is old, and heritage. It is better, that the past should burden the USA, than burden Europe. All artists, and those who wish to continue employment in the art sector, should be transferred to the USA.

Any attempt at such a transfer would probably result in military intervention in support of art, perhaps by the USA. However, the nature of such a military intervention is outside the scope of this article. In any case, it is probably true that, given the fundamental opposition between art and its destruction, military conflict is inevitable in the long term.

Taylor, R. Art an Enemy of the People. Hassocks: Harvester 1978.
Kroeber, A. L. Configurations of Culture Growth. Berkeley: University of California Press 1944.
Coulborn, R. The Origin of Civilized Societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1959. (Quote, p. 22).

No Globalisation
by Paul Treanor

Logically, there can be no process of globalisation in a world order of nation states. A world order is already global, by definition. The logic of 'globalisation' is false, but the idea has become an ideology. For different reasons, different people claim that there is globalisation. The word "globalisation" started as an academic and media hype. Just when it was going out of fashion, the 1999 Seattle summit revived media attention for the issue. Pro-globalisation and anti-globalisation ideologies (and movements) have emerged. That fact remains, that the underlying 'globalisation' process simply does not exist. People are often talking about something else - about neoliberalism or about normative globalism, for instance.

Is there globalisation? Nation states still dominate the social and economic structures of this planet. But nation states are themselves a global order - a specific arrangement of a specific type of state. Globalisation only appears logical, if you see nation states as isolated islands, but that is not the historical reality.

Supporters of the globalisation thesis claim, that a world of isolated nation states existed in the recent past. Perhaps before 1989, or more approximately, before 1950. They claim that these isolated nation states are now being eroded, in a global process. This thesis is often presented as a absolute truth, which globalisation researchers have discovered. Academic snobbism is important in sustaining globalisation research, especially since the thesis appeals to both the right and the left. People are considered stupid, if they question globalisation.

Saskia Sassen, who uses globalisation as a "negative future" to promote a global civil society, summarises the logic. (In: Losing Control: Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization, Columbia University Press 1996).


Economic globalization represents a major transformation in the territorial organization of economic activity and politico-economic power....The sovereignty of the modern state was concentrated in mutually exclusive territories and the concentration of sovereignty in nations...economic globalization has contributed to a denationalizing of national territory... But nations are not mutually exclusive. Every existing nation state, supports the division of the world into nation states. Even a total surrender of national sovereignty to another nation, does not de-nationalise territory. When nations re-unite, for instance, states can completely disappear. At some future date, Moldova (Moldavia) might accede to Romania. That would mean the state Moldova completely ceased to exist: but that would not mean the end of nations. In fact it would be a victory for the nationalistic 'Greater Romania' ideal. Another example: the Republic of Ireland has abandoned its claim to sovereignty over Northern Ireland. However, a future majority in Northern Ireland might wants to accede to the Republic of Ireland. In those circumstances, the United Kingdom has said it will abandon its claim to the territory. Yet, either way, there are still two nation states in the British Isles. The border might shift, but the nation state as such does not disappear in such cases.


The relevant question, at global level, is whether the global order of nation states is disappearing - anywhere. And there is no collapse of the nation state, in the face of globalisation. Nation states have not suffered anything comparable to the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman empires. All that remains of these empires, are oversized palaces in Vienna and Istanbul. The rest of their institutions have completely disappeared: there is not a square millimetre of Habsburg or Ottoman territory left in Europe. There is no longer an Austro-Hungarian imperial army, or police, or courts, of universities. The nation states succeeded the multi-ethnic empires, and seized all their territory. The replacement was total.

But where is the so-called 'collapse' of the nation state visible? There are very few places on earth where there are no institutions of a nation state - perhaps in Somalia, but that is not the result of globalization. If the world was truly 'globalised' then it would be full of disused national parliament buildings - and not a national army in sight. The world is not like that, and will not be like that, in the immediate future. In other words, 'globalisation' remains a hype - pure hype and not reality.

Anti-nationalists know this, better than anyone else. So people who claim that 'globalisation' is eroding nations are in any case not anti-nationalists. At worst, the opposite: they are simply nationalists. The globalisation hype can be a form of nationalist propaganda.

The popular globalisation myth

A popular version of the globalisation myth has existed for about 10 years. It claims that until 1989, the world consisted of separate, sovereign, autonomous nation states, with separate histories. Then, borders collapsed, the internet appeared, but also the international Mafia. So now it is a dangerous world, but also perhaps full of opportunities.

You can find this version, almost literally, in Ruud Lubbers' article The Globalization of Economy and Society (now offline):


The term "globalization" implies that the becoming and making worldwide of various phenomena has accelerated at such a pace that it is giving rise to a variety of new phenomena. Globalization entails a quantitative shift of several autonomous national economies to a global marketplace for production, distribution, and technology. All this has resulted in the emergence of a worldwide confrontation of political, societal, and ethical insights...


Lubbers was a former Netherlands premier, and is now UN High Commissioner for Refugees. He filled the time between these posts as a Professor of Globalization Studies at Tilburg University. Lubbers explains what caused the 'quantitative shift'...

The far-reaching integration of electronics and computers on the one hand, and communication technology, on the other, led to what Toffler christened "the third wave." And thus today's world came into being....People everywhere were confronted with the effects of the emergence of modern communication technologies and the Sputnik, Soyuz, and Apollo heralded the birth of a new world. CNN and the Internet, global sourcing, electronic capital flows signalled the emergence of the information and communication age. It has been said that the bits provoke one world, accomplishing the globalization of information/communication and technology.

The language of globalisation claims

The globalisation myth has developed its own slang, related to themes in globalisation research...


turmoil, chaos, breakdown, instability, disorder
global, globalised, planetary, planetary order, global governance, world consciousness
trans-state, transnational, cross-border, borderlands, transgression, boundary erosion, inter-cultural, transcultural
multiple actors, multiplicity, multi-voiced, fragmented, break-up, splitting up
flow, space of flows, trade volume, stream, link, network, linked by flows


Here is an example of globalisation-speak from Global Cyberculture Reconsidered: Cyberspace, Identity, and the Global Informational City


There are two forces at work in globalization: the spread of the Net internationally follows urban infrastructures, and nations around the world are cooperating in the creation of a global network economy by creating networks of globalized informational cities that require liberalized financial and trade policies.


And the Globalization and World Cities research group declares:


Our mission is to promote a different metageographical image of the world, a space of flows held together by a network of cities. There are a myriad of networks which make up our contemporary world, the Internet, for example, to which you are currently linked to, is an important example. We have chosen to focus upon the network of world cities because it is the most obvious concrete manifestation of a contemporary space of flows which can challenge traditional metageographies.


This language is self-referential: it exists within the world of globalisation research. That is how they talk to one another. Like all slang, it establishes membership of a social group. It is not a guide to the real world.

The logic and evidence of globalisation claims Suppose there was a global state. Suppose the 'Global Self-Sufficient Villages Party' won the global elections. It would implement its policies: it would make the world self-sufficient at local level. In the end, there would be a world of self-sufficient villages, with no inter-local trade - let alone inter-continental trade.

Is this globalisation? Is this global? The answer must be yes, it is at least global. A global state implementing a global policy is global. It is perfectly logical for a global state or society to exist, without the conventional indicators of globalisation. A fully globalised, homogenous, world can be a world of autarkic communities - if that is the global political culture. That applies to any intermediate between autarky and full interaction. If the global norm is to trade 10% of gross National Product, then a fully globalised planet could exist where all states traded 10% of GNP. If the norm is 90%, then it would be 90%. There is no way to infer from the statistic alone, whether the planet is 'globalised' or not. Indicators such as trade volume and trade policy can even be used in logically contradictory ways.

For example, if I discover that nation states are abandoning protectionist polices, is that evidence of globalisation? Supporters of the globalisation thesis will say, that nation states increasingly compete with all other nation states. Trade increases, and protectionism will be abandoned. So, they will say, the trend is evidence of globalisation. But I could equally claim, that protectionism is caused by increasing competition among nation states. So, I could say, that the abandonment of protectionism shows that globalisation has ended.

But what if I discover a trend to protectionist polices? This time the globalisation fans will say, "logical, increasing competition means more protectionism." The conclusion will be reversed to suit the evidence. But I can do that as well. I could say, that protectionism is a symptom of the end of globalisation - after all, it limits trade.

This is just one example of a large class of paradoxes. Many apparently solid statistical indicators of globalisation, can be used as evidence either way. And other evidence may point to the opposite conclusion. International air traffic is growing - but so are regional airlines. Cultural evidence is equally double-sided. The first books published were all in one language, Latin: since then publishing has become increasingly 'local', not global. The number of published languages has increased, not decreased. In the end, there is no point in detailed argument, about trade volumes, capital flows, and information flows. They will never conclusively establish globalisation.

However, supporters of the globalisation thesis continue to quote fabricated and illogical 'evidence'. Any social or economic phenomenon is treated as possible 'evidence' of globalisation. If there is a Chinese restaurant in a town, it shows global culture. If these is no Chinese restaurant, it shows the town is lagging behind in the globalisation process.

Global processes is deliberately confused with global erosion of borders. Trade among nations may be global: that does not mean nations are dissolving in trade. Recent trade flows are used as evidence of recent globalisation, but inter-continental trade has existed for thousands of years. Even the present pattern of all-continent trade is 200 years old. The supporters of the globalisation thesis use nominalist arguments: the label "globalisation" is attached to any cross-border phenomenon. If you call all animals 'Martians', then every day you will see evidence that the Martians have landed.

The claim that there is a globalisation process is endlessly repeated, ignoring historical context. The claimed 'instrument of globalisation' varies from one decade to the next. Some people said the hot air balloon would end borders. But people said the same thing about the telegraph, the railway, the steam ship, wireless telegraphy, the airship, radio, air travel, television, pictures of the world from space, satellite television, CNN, and the Internet. Borders are still here: there are probably more border guards, than at any previous time in history.

So belief in globalisation is like any other belief system. Facts are not necessarily relevant. Some adherents of globalisation share the characteristics of religious cults, especially cults which believe in the end of the world. These apocalyptic cults sometimes announce a date for the end of the world. When the world does not end, their members are not disillusioned: often their belief is reinforced. For the 'true believers' of globalisation, any event can reinforce the belief in globalisation - and nothing can contradict it. Those who do not believe in globalisation, are seen as inferior. Several times people called me "blind", for not believing in globalisation.

The belief / myth / hype of globalisation is probably here for a long time. Belief systems disappear only slowly. As political legitimation, 'globalisation' is useful to many groups: its factual existence is certainly irrelevant in politics.

The nation state

Nation states are one of many possible forms of state. The very existence of a world of nation states, indicates some form of global order of nation states. What these nation states do - trade or no trade, flows or no flows - is irrelevant to that issue. What is already global can not logically be globalised: therefore there is no globalisation. The 'false premise' in the globalisation thesis is the nationalist claim, that nations are separate and particular entities. In fact they are a global and universalist structure: the functional equivalent of a nationalist world state.

The world functions as if a nationalist world government had seized power in the last century, led by Mazzini and Garibaldi and friends. Most existing states were indeed established by nationalist groups. The idea presented in Structures of Nationalism is simple. Nationalists are not competing. They co-operate to maintain one (nationalist) world order and exclude others. The nation state is not a particularity, existing by itself in isolation, but part of a global design.

Consider the issue of sovereignty and multinational corporations (TNC's). A world run by 180 global corporations would mean: no national sovereignty, no national parliaments, no national laws, no national armies. But equally, a world run by 180 nation states means: no women's sovereignty, no women's parliaments, no women's laws, no women's armies. A world run by global corporations is alternative to the world order of nation states. But that order itself is alternative, to a possible world order of gender states. A national parliament could be closed - just as the Austro-Hungarian imperial parliament closed - and replaced by gender parliaments.

Of course, that idea is offensive to nationalists. For them not gender, but the nation, is the fundamental human social order. Therefore, they claim, it should be the unit of state formation: "one people, one government". This claim has no inherent validity - the slogan "one gender, one government" would be equally valid, in logical terms. But historically, nation states were established by logic anyway. Usually, they were a reaction against a former imperial or colonial order. A reaction against globalisation, real or imagined, might sustain the nation state for several more generations.

The 'threat of globalisation' confers no existence rights on a nation state. It does not give national parliaments any more right to exist, than gender parliaments. A person A has no valid claims against person B, simply on the basis of threats from entity C. If the nation state was inherently good, there might be a moral obligation to support it. But no-one is obliged to support the nation state, simply because it is threatened by globalisation, or anything else. In any case, this comparison with a possible alternative world order only emphasises, that nation states have not been 'eroded'. No completely different world order has emerged - as different from the present world, as a world of gender states would be.

If you ignore all these possible worlds, and just look at existing nations, then it is true that cross-border interaction seems important. If you close your eyes to everything except France and Germany, then all you see is France, Germany and Franco-German interaction. The whole universe shrinks to one issue: how much Franco-German interaction? Similarly, if you see the present order of 180 nation states as the only multi-state world order, then you see only two alternative worlds. You see either 180 nation states, or some form of global entity. The supporters of the globalisation thesis have shrunk their field of view in this way. They see 180 nation states, and the interactions among the 180 nation states, and conclude there is globalisation. It is a weak and false logic.

Say globalisation, mean neoliberalism

Most of the confusion about globalisation occurs when nation states pursue neoliberal policies. This is what Tony Blair means, when he talks about the "opportunities" of globalisation - his reaction to the Genoa summit protests. The neoliberal attitude to the national economy is more accurately described as neo-mercantilist. Neoliberals see the nation as an economic unit, competing with other similar units: they often compare the nation to a business firm. Neoliberal economic policies, within the nation state, are designed to meet the needs of this imaginary business - 'Great Britain Limited', 'Deutschland GmbH', 'BV Nederland'.

This does not mean that the nation state is a business firm. That would be impossible within a liberal democracy anyway - it would require a totalitarian level of economic planning. Businesses are not run like nation states, for good reasons - and nation states can probably not be run like a business. Neoliberals also contradict themselves, by insisting that regions and cities should also compete with each other, like business firms. This would make a national economic policy impossible.

What neoliberals promote is a set of social goals, a model of a society arranged for the benefit of the entrepreneur. This is usually called 'competitiveness', a favourite word for Tony Blair and other neoliberal politicians. Economists compile league tables, in which nations are ranked by competitiveness. But this does not mean that nation states are forced to be 'competitive' by some all-powerful global organisation. They are not even forced in a metaphorical sense, by the global market. The 'competitiveness' is an internal policy, a neoliberal social policy. It may not even be competitive. (If it was taken to the extremes suggested by some neoliberals, it would probably cause economic collapse).

So when western political leaders speak positively of globalisation, this is usually what they are talking about. This is usually what the media are talking about, when they use the word 'globalisation'. It has nothing to do with the erosion of the nation state. It also has very little to do with classic market liberalism, which advocates unlimited competition between every single entrepreneur. Classic market liberals would call 'Great Britain Limited' a cartel.

The ideology of 'competitiveness' has everything to do with nationalism. It is a modern version of the old nationalist insistence, that the whole nation should work together. It is a new form of jingoism, chauvinism, flag-waving and foreigner-bashing (particularly suited for Tony Blair). It is not in any way an indicator that a new global order has superseded the order of nation states, or that they have been colonised by global financial institutions.

Who else says there is globalisation?

Three groups have an interest in claiming that globalisation is a reality. Firstly, all kinds of nationalists: globalisation provides a clear enemy, to unite the national group.

The western media image of globalisation is derived largely from anti-globalisation activists. Many are clearly economic nationalists. The opposition of North American labour unions (trade unions) to new free trade zones is an example. In the European Union this is less of an issue, partly because the present EU members have comparable economies, and partly because the EU is long established anyway. (In the EU, economic nationalism takes the form of opposition to EU enlargement, rather than opposition to the EU).

Walden Bello, an anti-globalisation activist from the Philippines, has a comprehensive national alternative to globalisation, which he calls 'de-globalization':

I am not talking about withdrawing from the international economy. I am speaking about reorienting our economies from production for export to the local market....

- about creating a new production and exchange complex that includes community cooperatives, private enterprises, and state enterprises, and excludes transnational corporations (TNCs);
- about enshrining the principle of subsidiarity in economic life by encouraging production of goods to take place at the community and national level...

The Struggle for the Future

This is more than simple protectionism. It implies that the State, business, and community organisations should coordinate their policies, in some form of corporatist society. Economic nationalism and corporatism are often associated: they appeal to business in vulnerable sectors of the economy. It is not true that business is uniformly pro-globalisation - any more than Turkish business uniformly supports EU membership. Even in advanced economies, entrepreneurs often have an interest in presenting globalisation as a threat.

In western Europe, fear of globalisation is used to claim government aid for 'national industries'. Business likes subsidies, and appeals to national pride were a traditional way of getting them, long before the term 'globalisation' was used. Recently the approach has become more sophisticated: the subsidies go not just to one firm, but to whole sectors, or to a large part of the 'national economy'. The businessmen demand the subsidies, but say they are protecting the national standard of living.

However, even the living standards of Britons or Germans are no reason to support the nation state Britain, or the nation state Germany. Activists often claim, that transnational corporations "erode the ability of nation states to regulate their own economies". That does not oblige anyone to support any nation state either. Remember: the nation states themselves eroded the former multi-ethnic empires. That does not oblige anyone to restore these empires.

Nationalists have a long history of appealing to external threats, to enforce national unity. The nation must unite and work together, they said - to defeat the Hun, or the Bolshevik threat, or the Yellow Peril, or the enemy within the gates, or the Cali cartel, or Osama bin Ladin. Appeals to unite in the face of 'globalisation' are in the same dishonourable category. Economic-nationalist propaganda is in the worst nationalist traditions.

A second group claims, that there are good and bad forms of globalisation. They then cast themselves in the role of the 'good globalisers'. Advocates of a global civil society claim it provides the opposition to global neoliberalism. In reality, 'global civil society' is a loose coalition of western (and western-funded) NGO's, who dream of being subsidised by global taxes.

The third group are the normative globalists: the people who want a global society. Usually they want a global state, although they may not call it that. They have an interest in presenting globalisation as an inevitable historical development. This is historicism - political demands based on historical process, real or imagined.

Any global state would have the basic structure of a nation state: un

SHOULD ART BE DESTROYED?

by Paul Treanor

Art, whatever the definition, has certain characteristics. It is equivalent to an entity, perpetuating itself across generations. As a result, it is permanent. Art also implies certain value claims, about the precedence of accumulative creativity over destruction. Permanence and accumulation cannot be ethically legitimised. In practice, there is a stable geo-cultural structure, of ethnic and national art. This structure is not ethically legitimised. The best response is a territorial separation of art.

KABUL, March 1 2001 (AFP via Yahoo News)

Afghanistan's ruling Taliban authorities said Thursday they have started destroying all statues in the country, including the world's tallest standing Buddha statue in the central province of Bamiyan.

"The work started about five hours ago but I do not know how much of it (the Bamiyan Buddhas) has been destroyed," Taliban Information and Culture Minister Qudratullah Jamal told AFP.

"It will be destroyed by every means. All the statues are being destroyed."

The poor, the weak and the oppressed do not speak in defence of art. The voice of art is the voice of privilege. But if that was the only defect of art, then equality would legitimise art. There is not just privilege, there is eternal privilege, for art continues. Art is ancient tradition: worse than privilege. Is it not time to destroy it?

Art is wrong because it is the past, because it perpetuates itself, because it is transgenerational, because it is culture, and because it requires the suppression of anti-art to exist.

People argue about what art is. High art is still contrasted to popular culture. In the 1970's some class theories opposed elitist art. However, in Britain, where Art an Enemy of the People was published in 1978, the response to "high art" was not rejection. It was the demand for subsidies - for community art, minority art, women's art, or art of colour. A similar pattern applies all over western Europe. The existence of art is not an issue. Policy simply accepts art: this is true for artists, for individual governments, and for the European Union. A policy consensus implies a definitional consensus.

Despite the apparent disunity about what constitutes high art or authentic art, there is a deep negative consensus about its nature. This negative consensus is common to all modern societies. Some things are not art, never:

a trans-Sahel railway
state formation
justice

a single European currency.

Seen from this perspective, it is the agreement about Art which is remarkable. Evidently there is something called art: and so to its defects.

The first defect of art is the antiquity of art. Some art is recent, of course, but there is no planned future art. In urban planning, for instance, there are those who plan cities which are not yet built, and those who study urban history. In art, however, there is only art history: art is past-oriented, almost by definition. Art is tens of thousands of years old. There is an immense volume of art from the past, even though most works of art are destroyed deliberately (of that, more later). The sacrality of art is a sacrality of the past.

Art perpetuates itself. True, this is a reification, but it is an accurate one. It is the actions of people which perpetuate art: but the effect for the opponents of art is as if art defended itself. I will use here exactly the same metaphor and analogy, that I used to describe the defects of sustainability, the ethic of eternal structures.

Compare the lives of two twins, born in identical circumstances. However, one is pro-art, the other is anti-art. The pro-art twin can go to art school, or study art history. There is no equivalent for the anti-art twin: no school of art incineration. Great social pressure to accept art is applied to one twin. No similar pressure to accept art-destruction is applied to the other twin. Because art is a core value in all existing societies, the social and employment opportunities of the anti-art twin will be limited. It is also the pro-art twin who is more likely to be elected or appointed to political office.

The value attached to art limits the opportunity of its opponents to take action against it. In this way art is a self-preserving structure. It is like a religion, whose adherents systematically discriminate non-believers: if such a religion is in a majority, it will constantly improve its position of power.

The strength and functioning of this self-preserving structure can be appreciated, by imagining that there was no art, and no pro-art structures. Transferring from an art-free world into the existing world, can be compared to transferring from this world, into a world objectionably different. Cannibalism is a useful characteristic for this comparison, because it is almost universally taboo. Being transferred into a cannibal world, from this world, would be extremely unpleasant for most people. They would be forced to accept that something they abhor is a normal part of society: that there is apparently no possibility of reform, since everyone accepts it as normal. This is the situation for opponents of art in the existing world.

Art also perpetuates itself in a more indirect way. Art is often described as human endeavour or achievement, and it is indeed a product of human activity. People are encouraged to consider art as a valued activity, to the exclusion of other activity. In many cultures it is regarded as a high form of achievement: that in itself is a valuing of conservatism. Artists strive to produce good art, but what they produce is art, because the activity takes place only in an art framework, a framework that already exists. It is accurate to say that art is conformity in itself, since artists must conform to the norm of what art is. That norm will vary across cultures and in time, but only in the limiting case that everything is accepted as art, does it cease to be restrictive. In practice, creative approaches to non-art areas are often socially un-accepted, or considered strange.

Art is transgenerational and open-ended. It perpetuates itself in the structural form described above, but art cannot be otherwise. So long as art is in opposition to iconoclasm, for instance, then there is a difference in the value socially ascribed to activities. In almost all cases (and certainly in modern societies) the accepted pattern is, that creation takes place by accumulation only. Iconoclasm (in the broad sense of art destruction) is defined as a non-creative act.

There is no inherent logical basis for the restriction of creativity to accumulation. However, it is the form art takes, and that form is socially accepted. Although there are millions of paintings already, painting a new one is defined as a creative activity. Reducing the existing stock is not. Destruction is not considered of equal value to creation.

On the contrary, destruction of art is considered a crime, and a sign of mental illness. Entering a museum and destroying a painting is considered shocking. Such acts are widely reported in the media, if they affect well-known works of art. This cannot be logically derived from a sacred status. In religious activity, sacred is not always permanent. Sacrificial animals were killed in some religions, offerings were burnt. It would be logically possible to treat art like this, but that does not occur. Art is not just sacred, its own accumulation is sacred, its permanence is sacred.

The continuance of art is therefore inherent in art. Art is for ever. That which can not end, is wrong, and must be ended. Permanence of any entity constitutes a claim to all time for its existence, specifically against its non-existence. Claims to time are contra-ethical or morally arbitrary: one state (existence of art) is favoured over another (non-existence of art) merely because it happened to exist first. It is possible to claim value for firstness or primacy (as nationalist organisations of indigenous peoples do), but this cannot be logically derived. It is itself an arbitrary value.

The transmission of art also requires, that injustice be done to done who oppose it. Their opposition is valid, since there is no moral ground for the permanence of art, yet they are discriminated against, as indicated above. Some employers, perhaps almost all, would refuse a job to anyone who openly advocated the destruction of art. If such injustice is a necessary condition of art, and there is no other legitimation of its existence, then the existence of art is an injustice, and should be terminated.

Just or unjust, self-perpetuating cycles and transgenerational structures, are contra-ethical. Art perpetuates itself, by accumulation, and the transmission of the value of this accumulation. Cultures include, over generations, reverence for the permanence of art. More than this, art perpetuates the transmission of culture including itself. Art is a central aspect of many cultures.

This permanence of art has been described here in abstract terms. In practice some real destruction of art does take place. The place of art in culture determines this: real art is ethnic art, or national art. Art that disappears, has lost its central place in an existing culture - usually because that culture itself has disappeared. The second part of this article, about cultures and art, is less abstract and more political.

There exists a geo-cultural structure, approximately corresponding to geopolitical structures. In practice, people refer daily to English culture, or French culture, to ancient Egyptian art, to Brazilian art, or to the art of the Islamic world. The entities of this geo-cultural structure may be cultures of nation states, of ethnic groups, of regions, or of larger entities called world-cultures or civilisations. They may overlap, in fact they usually do, but that does not mean there is no structure.

The complexity of culture is sometimes used to deny its rigid and structural nature. However, internal complexity can be great, and yet exclude external complexity. The possible moves in a game of chess are astronomically large, yet all chess games are chess games.

Consider a simple model, with unitary cultures of tribes. Tribe A invades the land of tribe B. Soon, within culture B there are pro-A collaborative cultural tendencies, there are anti-A "B nationalists", there are A+B "multi-culturalists", their opponents in A, and B, who oppose cultural mixing, and B revanchists. The land of A+B then invades the land of C. Now, in this land C, there pro-A collaborators, pro-B collaborators, pro A+B collaborators. There are anti-A "C nationalists", anti-B "C nationalists", and anti A+B "C nationalists". And more: even at this level, the multiplying combinations exceed simple factorials.

In the past there were thousands of cultures, associated with thousand of peoples. By some estimates, there still are. Combinations of their interactions can generate an immense diversity of culture. Yet, none of that culture will be anything other than a combination of unitary cultures of geopolitical entities.

There is every reason to believe that this is an accurate model of human culture and art: apparent diversity is hiding a huge range of possibilities which do not fit the existing geo-cultural model. This applies to art as well. The implication of this is, that the models of culture developed in anthropology in the 1940's and 1950's are accurate. (In fact these models reflect the general use of national or ethnic terms to describe culture).

These models were often linked to the idea of culture growth and decay, and similar organic or life-cycle metaphors. Their basis, however, was the idea of a unitary culture corresponding to some geopolitical entity. A. L. Kroeber's 1944 Configurations of Culture Growth is a classic work of this kind. In 1959 Rushton Coulborn could still take this approach to cultures or civilisations:


The style of a civilization is perceived as its aesthetic aspect: it is exhibited in everything the society produces and does, pre-eminently in its arts, but also in its thought, its politics, its institutions, its traditions, and in all its ways. It is possible to qualify a society's style, to comment upon it, to judge it even, yet hardly to describe it. It is the Chineseness" of what is Chinese, the "Egyptianness" of what is Egyptian, the "Westernness of what is Western. Since that time, this approach has disappeared from mainstream anthropology, only to reappear in the last 10 years, under the influence of ethnic studies. An Afro-centric approach to art history, for instance, implies almost by definition a geo-cultural structure.


Why pretend, that there is no such a thing as African art, or English art? Partly because such approaches were discredited by their association with Nazi Germany, or at least with Oswald Spengler and organic-social models of cultural history. But it was a common approach to history in the 1920's and 1930s, and is now "rehabilitated" by the interest in ethnicity and identity. The model is cyclically in and out of academic fashion.

In any case, this approach is still, and always has been, the accepted approach in art history. Any introduction to art history (for students in Europe) will present the standard sequence of styles in Europe: Romanesque, gothic, renaissance, baroque, rococo, neo-classicism. After that comes a section on Islamic Art, or Oriental Art, which are assumed to have their own style sequence. In this case, the academic wisdom seems to be right.

In the end it cannot be proved that there is a geo-cultural structure of this kind: that is too much a question of interpretation. However, it does seem extremely difficult to take the opposite position, that no culture or art is in any way associated with any particular people, culture, or territory.

In turn, this suggests an explanation of art: it is hyper-ethnic. Art is that within a culture which most approaches the core of that culture, and is least accessible to outsiders. Art is the visible soul of the people, just as nationalists say. The question is, whether that gives it existence rights. It is here that the manipulation of art-historical theory in defence of art must be noted. If art is associated with peoples, it can be associated with their state, and so with the policies of that state - which may be unacceptable for many. Yet art never suffers from attribution of guilt by association: definitions are manipulated, to absolve it.

If a person who is clearly a German Nazi, insists on the existence of a German art, and indicates clearly which works of art are German, what is in that circumstance anti-Nazism? The non-Nazi defenders of art deny the truth of the claims: they say the possession of art must be disputed. They would probably say, that in this case anti-Nazism consists in claiming that art belongs to all humanity: that it is universal. This opposition between Nazism and universality cannot, however, justify the existence of art.

The alternative anti-Nazi position is to accept the claims as true, and destroy the German art, which the Nazi person has so conveniently listed. Not just Nazi Germans produce such specifications: there are official lists of national art heritage, in most states in Europe. They are not intended for the convenience of anti-nationalist iconoclasts, but they can serve that purpose.

If art is national, then it can have no legitimacy other than within the values of nationalism. If all art is national then it is legitimate to destroy it, if anti-nationalism is itself legitimate. This legitimacy of destruction extends beyond nation states, to a geo-cultural structure in general. A geo-cultural structure is merely one of many possible structures. The present structure is complex, but not self-legitimising. It is legitimate to oppose pan-Africanism as a form of nationalism, and for instance, to destroy African art for that goal. Equally, it is legitimate to oppose a geo-cultural planetary structure that includes all art, and in doing so to destroy all art.

Why not? Art is being destroyed all the time. So long as there has been art, it has been destroyed. In reality, the sacrality of art applies mainly to "our art", not to "their art". If pan-Africanism, in 10 years time, is regarded as a form of imperialism oppressing the regional identities of the continent, then perhaps people will burn portraits of Nkrumah. 20 years ago, statues of Lenin were art in part of Berlin. Now they are considered "propaganda of the unjust SED state". 60 years ago, statues of Hitler were art in Berlin: now public display of any Nazi symbol is illegal. Today, art in Germany means for instance statues of Konrad Adenauer, the pro-western post-war Chancellor.

The only constant seems to be, that art serves privilege, the nation state, the powerful, the established, the unjust. In general, art serves the existing, which is exactly what is consistent with a self-perpetuating social structure.

It is acceptable to oppose art in general, and specific national, regional, world-cultural, or civilisational art. However, there is no wide support for the break-up of the geo-cultural structure. The values of that structure itself are incompatible with its reform or abolition. It can however be limited in its effects.

I therefore propose territorial separation of art. Formally, the best course would be to destroy existing art, then choose if the planet was to be art-provided or art-free. However, there is no prospect of any global agreement on this. Art will be in opposition to non-art, inherently.

Specifically, I propose that the United States of America should become a zone of art. The existing cultural preference in the USA for collecting art, (especially from Europe) should be expanded into a prime function of state.

Art should be transferred from Europe to the USA, beginning with the art listed in national heritage lists, and with recognised European heritage. I propose as an initial step, the transfer of the Mona Lisa, the best known European artwork, to the USA. The Mona Lisa is old, and heritage. It is better, that the past should burden the USA, than burden Europe. All artists, and those who wish to continue employment in the art sector, should be transferred to the USA.

Any attempt at such a transfer would probably result in military intervention in support of art, perhaps by the USA. However, the nature of such a military intervention is outside the scope of this article. In any case, it is probably true that, given the fundamental opposition between art and its destruction, military conflict is inevitable in the long term.

Taylor, R. Art an Enemy of the People. Hassocks: Harvester 1978.
Kroeber, A. L. Configurations of Culture Growth. Berkeley: University of California Press 1944.
Coulborn, R. The Origin of Civilized Societies. Prin

No Globalisation
by Paul Treanor

Logically, there can be no process of globalisation in a world order of nation states. A world order is already global, by definition. The logic of 'globalisation' is false, but the idea has become an ideology. For different reasons, different people claim that there is globalisation. The word "globalisation" started as an academic and media hype. Just when it was going out of fashion, the 1999 Seattle summit revived media attention for the issue. Pro-globalisation and anti-globalisation ideologies (and movements) have emerged. That fact remains, that the underlying 'globalisation' process simply does not exist. People are often talking about something else - about neoliberalism or about normative globalism, for instance.

Is there globalisation? Nation states still dominate the social and economic structures of this planet. But nation states are themselves a global order - a specific arrangement of a specific type of state. Globalisation only appears logical, if you see nation states as isolated islands, but that is not the historical reality.

Supporters of the globalisation thesis claim, that a world of isolated nation states existed in the recent past. Perhaps before 1989, or more approximately, before 1950. They claim that these isolated nation states are now being eroded, in a global process. This thesis is often presented as a absolute truth, which globalisation researchers have discovered. Academic snobbism is important in sustaining globalisation research, especially since the thesis appeals to both the right and the left. People are considered stupid, if they question globalisation.

Saskia Sassen, who uses globalisation as a "negative future" to promote a global civil society, summarises the logic. (In: Losing Control: Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization, Columbia University Press 1996).


Economic globalization represents a major transformation in the territorial organization of economic activity and politico-economic power....The sovereignty of the modern state was concentrated in mutually exclusive territories and the concentration of sovereignty in nations...economic globalization has contributed to a denationalizing of national territory... But nations are not mutually exclusive. Every existing nation state, supports the division of the world into nation states. Even a total surrender of national sovereignty to another nation, does not de-nationalise territory. When nations re-unite, for instance, states can completely disappear. At some future date, Moldova (Moldavia) might accede to Romania. That would mean the state Moldova completely ceased to exist: but that would not mean the end of nations. In fact it would be a victory for the nationalistic 'Greater Romania' ideal. Another example: the Republic of Ireland has abandoned its claim to sovereignty over Northern Ireland. However, a future majority in Northern Ireland might wants to accede to the Republic of Ireland. In those circumstances, the United Kingdom has said it will abandon its claim to the territory. Yet, either way, there are still two nation states in the British Isles. The border might shift, but the nation state as such does not disappear in such cases.


The relevant question, at global level, is whether the global order of nation states is disappearing - anywhere. And there is no collapse of the nation state, in the face of globalisation. Nation states have not suffered anything comparable to the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman empires. All that remains of these empires, are oversized palaces in Vienna and Istanbul. The rest of their institutions have completely disappeared: there is not a square millimetre of Habsburg or Ottoman territory left in Europe. There is no longer an Austro-Hungarian imperial army, or police, or courts, of universities. The nation states succeeded the multi-ethnic empires, and seized all their territory. The replacement was total.

But where is the so-called 'collapse' of the nation state visible? There are very few places on earth where there are no institutions of a nation state - perhaps in Somalia, but that is not the result of globalization. If the world was truly 'globalised' then it would be full of disused national parliament buildings - and not a national army in sight. The world is not like that, and will not be like that, in the immediate future. In other words, 'globalisation' remains a hype - pure hype and not reality.

Anti-nationalists know this, better than anyone else. So people who claim that 'globalisation' is eroding nations are in any case not anti-nationalists. At worst, the opposite: they are simply nationalists. The globalisation hype can be a form of nationalist propaganda.

The popular globalisation myth

A popular version of the globalisation myth has existed for about 10 years. It claims that until 1989, the world consisted of separate, sovereign, autonomous nation states, with separate histories. Then, borders collapsed, the internet appeared, but also the international Mafia. So now it is a dangerous world, but also perhaps full of opportunities.

You can find this version, almost literally, in Ruud Lubbers' article The Globalization of Economy and Society (now offline):


The term "globalization" implies that the becoming and making worldwide of various phenomena has accelerated at such a pace that it is giving rise to a variety of new phenomena. Globalization entails a quantitative shift of several autonomous national economies to a global marketplace for production, distribution, and technology. All this has resulted in the emergence of a worldwide confrontation of political, societal, and ethical insights...


Lubbers was a former Netherlands premier, and is now UN High Commissioner for Refugees. He filled the time between these posts as a Professor of Globalization Studies at Tilburg University. Lubbers explains what caused the 'quantitative shift'...

The far-reaching integration of electronics and computers on the one hand, and communication technology, on the other, led to what Toffler christened "the third wave." And thus today's world came into being....People everywhere were confronted with the effects of the emergence of modern communication technologies and the Sputnik, Soyuz, and Apollo heralded the birth of a new world. CNN and the Internet, global sourcing, electronic capital flows signalled the emergence of the information and communication age. It has been said that the bits provoke one world, accomplishing the globalization of information/communication and technology.

The language of globalisation claims

The globalisation myth has developed its own slang, related to themes in globalisation research...


turmoil, chaos, breakdown, instability, disorder
global, globalised, planetary, planetary order, global governance, world consciousness
trans-state, transnational, cross-border, borderlands, transgression, boundary erosion, inter-cultural, transcultural
multiple actors, multiplicity, multi-voiced, fragmented, break-up, splitting up
flow, space of flows, trade volume, stream, link, network, linked by flows


Here is an example of globalisation-speak from Global Cyberculture Reconsidered: Cyberspace, Identity, and the Global Informational City


There are two forces at work in globalization: the spread of the Net internationally follows urban infrastructures, and nations around the world are cooperating in the creation of a global network economy by creating networks of globalized informational cities that require liberalized financial and trade policies.


And the Globalization and World Cities research group declares:


Our mission is to promote a different metageographical image of the world, a space of flows held together by a network of cities. There are a myriad of networks which make up our contemporary world, the Internet, for example, to which you are currently linked to, is an important example. We have chosen to focus upon the network of world cities because it is the most obvious concrete manifestation of a contemporary space of flows which can challenge traditional metageographies.


This language is self-referential: it exists within the world of globalisation research. That is how they talk to one another. Like all slang, it establishes membership of a social group. It is not a guide to the real world.

The logic and evidence of globalisation claims Suppose there was a global state. Suppose the 'Global Self-Sufficient Villages Party' won the global elections. It would implement its policies: it would make the world self-sufficient at local level. In the end, there would be a world of self-sufficient villages, with no inter-local trade - let alone inter-continental trade.

Is this globalisation? Is this global? The answer must be yes, it is at least global. A global state implementing a global policy is global. It is perfectly logical for a global state or society to exist, without the conventional indicators of globalisation. A fully globalised, homogenous, world can be a world of autarkic communities - if that is the global political culture. That applies to any intermediate between autarky and full interaction. If the global norm is to trade 10% of gross National Product, then a fully globalised planet could exist where all states traded 10% of GNP. If the norm is 90%, then it would be 90%. There is no way to infer from the statistic alone, whether the planet is 'globalised' or not. Indicators such as trade volume and trade policy can even be used in logically contradictory ways.

For example, if I discover that nation states are abandoning protectionist polices, is that evidence of globalisation? Supporters of the globalisation thesis will say, that nation states increasingly compete with all other nation states. Trade increases, and protectionism will be abandoned. So, they will say, the trend is evidence of globalisation. But I could equally claim, that protectionism is caused by increasing competition among nation states. So, I could say, that the abandonment of protectionism shows that globalisation has ended.

But what if I discover a trend to protectionist polices? This time the globalisation fans will say, "logical, increasing competition means more protectionism." The conclusion will be reversed to suit the evidence. But I can do that as well. I could say, that protectionism is a symptom of the end of globalisation - after all, it limits trade.

This is just one example of a large class of paradoxes. Many apparently solid statistical indicators of globalisation, can be used as evidence either way. And other evidence may point to the opposite conclusion. International air traffic is growing - but so are regional airlines. Cultural evidence is equally double-sided. The first books published were all in one language, Latin: since then publishing has become increasingly 'local', not global. The number of published languages has increased, not decreased. In the end, there is no point in detailed argument, about trade volumes, capital flows, and information flows. They will never conclusively establish globalisation.

However, supporters of the globalisation thesis continue to quote fabricated and illogical 'evidence'. Any social or economic phenomenon is treated as possible 'evidence' of globalisation. If there is a Chinese restaurant in a town, it shows global culture. If these is no Chinese restaurant, it shows the town is lagging behind in the globalisation process.

Global processes is deliberately confused with global erosion of borders. Trade among nations may be global: that does not mean nations are dissolving in trade. Recent trade flows are used as evidence of recent globalisation, but inter-continental trade has existed for thousands of years. Even the present pattern of all-continent trade is 200 years old. The supporters of the globalisation thesis use nominalist arguments: the label "globalisation" is attached to any cross-border phenomenon. If you call all animals 'Martians', then every day you will see evidence that the Martians have landed.

The claim that there is a globalisation process is endlessly repeated, ignoring historical context. The claimed 'instrument of globalisation' varies from one decade to the next. Some people said the hot air balloon would end borders. But people said the same thing about the telegraph, the railway, the steam ship, wireless telegraphy, the airship, radio, air travel, television, pictures of the world from space, satellite television, CNN, and the Internet. Borders are still here: there are probably more border guards, than at any previous time in history.

So belief in globalisation is like any other belief system. Facts are not necessarily relevant. Some adherents of globalisation share the characteristics of religious cults, especially cults which believe in the end of the world. These apocalyptic cults sometimes announce a date for the end of the world. When the world does not end, their members are not disillusioned: often their belief is reinforced. For the 'true believers' of globalisation, any event can reinforce the belief in globalisation - and nothing can contradict it. Those who do not believe in globalisation, are seen as inferior. Several times people called me "blind", for not believing in globalisation.

The belief / myth / hype of globalisation is probably here for a long time. Belief systems disappear only slowly. As political legitimation, 'globalisation' is useful to many groups: its factual existence is certainly irrelevant in politics.

The nation state

Nation states are one of many possible forms of state. The very existence of a world of nation states, indicates some form of global order of nation states. What these nation states do - trade or no trade, flows or no flows - is irrelevant to that issue. What is already global can not logically be globalised: therefore there is no globalisation. The 'false premise' in the globalisation thesis is the nationalist claim, that nations are separate and particular entities. In fact they are a global and universalist structure: the functional equivalent of a nationalist world state.

The world functions as if a nationalist world government had seized power in the last century, led by Mazzini and Garibaldi and friends. Most existing states were indeed established by nationalist groups. The idea presented in Structures of Nationalism is simple. Nationalists are not competing. They co-operate to maintain one (nationalist) world order and exclude others. The nation state is not a particularity, existing by itself in isolation, but part of a global design.

Consider the issue of sovereignty and multinational corporations (TNC's). A world run by 180 global corporations would mean: no national sovereignty, no national parliaments, no national laws, no national armies. But equally, a world run by 180 nation states means: no women's sovereignty, no women's parliaments, no women's laws, no women's armies. A world run by global corporations is alternative to the world order of nation states. But that order itself is alternative, to a possible world order of gender states. A national parliament could be closed - just as the Austro-Hungarian imperial parliament closed - and replaced by gender parliaments.

Of course, that idea is offensive to nationalists. For them not gender, but the nation, is the fundamental human social order. Therefore, they claim, it should be the unit of state formation: "one people, one government". This claim has no inherent validity - the slogan "one gender, one government" would be equally valid, in logical terms. But historically, nation states were established by logic anyway. Usually, they were a reaction against a former imperial or colonial order. A reaction against globalisation, real or imagined, might sustain the nation state for several more generations.

The 'threat of globalisation' confers no existence rights on a nation state. It does not give national parliaments any more right to exist, than gender parliaments. A person A has no valid claims against person B, simply on the basis of threats from entity C. If the nation state was inherently good, there might be a moral obligation to support it. But no-one is obliged to support the nation state, simply because it is threatened by globalisation, or anything else. In any case, this comparison with a possible alternative world order only emphasises, that nation states have not been 'eroded'. No completely different world order has emerged - as different from the present world, as a world of gender states would be.

If you ignore all these possible worlds, and just look at existing nations, then it is true that cross-border interaction seems important. If you close your eyes to everything except France and Germany, then all you see is France, Germany and Franco-German interaction. The whole universe shrinks to one issue: how much Franco-German interaction? Similarly, if you see the present order of 180 nation states as the only multi-state world order, then you see only two alternative worlds. You see either 180 nation states, or some form of global entity. The supporters of the globalisation thesis have shrunk their field of view in this way. They see 180 nation states, and the interactions among the 180 nation states, and conclude there is globalisation. It is a weak and false logic.

Say globalisation, mean neoliberalism

Most of the confusion about globalisation occurs when nation states pursue neoliberal policies. This is what Tony Blair means, when he talks about the "opportunities" of globalisation - his reaction to the Genoa summit protests. The neoliberal attitude to the national economy is more accurately described as neo-mercantilist. Neoliberals see the nation as an economic unit, competing with other similar units: they often compare the nation to a business firm. Neoliberal economic policies, within the nation state, are designed to meet the needs of this imaginary business - 'Great Britain Limited', 'Deutschland GmbH', 'BV Nederland'.

This does not mean that the nation state is a business firm. That would be impossible within a liberal democracy anyway - it would require a totalitarian level of economic planning. Businesses are not run like nation states, for good reasons - and nation states can probably not be run like a business. Neoliberals also contradict themselves, by insisting that regions and cities should also compete with each other, like business firms. This would make a national economic policy impossible.

What neoliberals promote is a set of social goals, a model of a society arranged for the benefit of the entrepreneur. This is usually called 'competitiveness', a favourite word for Tony Blair and other neoliberal politicians. Economists compile league tables, in which nations are ranked by competitiveness. But this does not mean that nation states are forced to be 'competitive' by some all-powerful global organisation. They are not even forced in a metaphorical sense, by the global market. The 'competitiveness' is an internal policy, a neoliberal social policy. It may not even be competitive. (If it was taken to the extremes suggested by some neoliberals, it would probably cause economic collapse).

So when western political leaders speak positively of globalisation, this is usually what they are talking about. This is usually what the media are talking about, when they use the word 'globalisation'. It has nothing to do with the erosion of the nation state. It also has very little to do with classic market liberalism, which advocates unlimited competition between every single entrepreneur. Classic market liberals would call 'Great Britain Limited' a cartel.

The ideology of 'competitiveness' has everything to do with nationalism. It is a modern version of the old nationalist insistence, that the whole nation should work together. It is a new form of jingoism, chauvinism, flag-waving and foreigner-bashing (particularly suited for Tony Blair). It is not in any way an indicator that a new global order has superseded the order of nation states, or that they have been colonised by global financial institutions.

Who else says there is globalisation?

Three groups have an interest in claiming that globalisation is a reality. Firstly, all kinds of nationalists: globalisation provides a clear enemy, to unite the national group.

The western media image of globalisation is derived largely from anti-globalisation activists. Many are clearly economic nationalists. The opposition of North American labour unions (trade unions) to new free trade zones is an example. In the European Union this is less of an issue, partly because the present EU members have comparable economies, and partly because the EU is long established anyway. (In the EU, economic nationalism takes the form of opposition to EU enlargement, rather than opposition to the EU).

Walden Bello, an anti-globalisation activist from the Philippines, has a comprehensive national alternative to globalisation, which he calls 'de-globalization':

I am not talking about withdrawing from the international economy. I am speaking about reorienting our economies from production for export to the local market....

- about creating a new production and exchange complex that includes community cooperatives, private enterprises, and state enterprises, and excludes transnational corporations (TNCs);
- about enshrining the principle of subsidiarity in economic life by encouraging production of goods to take place at the community and national level...

The Struggle for the Future

This is more than simple protectionism. It implies that the State, business, and community organisations should coordinate their policies, in some form of corporatist society. Economic nationalism and corporatism are often associated: they appeal to business in vulnerable sectors of the economy. It is not true that business is uniformly pro-globalisation - any more than Turkish business uniformly supports EU membership. Even in advanced economies, entrepreneurs often have an interest in presenting globalisation as a threat.

In western Europe, fear of globalisation is used to claim government aid for 'national industries'. Business likes subsidies, and appeals to national pride were a traditional way of getting them, long before the term 'globalisation' was used. Recently the approach has become more sophisticated: the subsidies go not just to one firm, but to whole sectors, or to a large part of the 'national economy'. The businessmen demand the subsidies, but say they are protecting the national standard of living.

However, even the living standards of Britons or Germans are no reason to support the nation state Britain, or the nation state Germany. Activists often claim, that transnational corporations "erode the ability of nation states to regulate their own economies". That does not oblige anyone to support any nation state either. Remember: the nation states themselves eroded the former multi-ethnic empires. That does not oblige anyone to restore these empires.

Nationalists have a long history of appealing to external threats, to enforce national unity. The nation must unite and work together, they said - to defeat the Hun, or the Bolshevik threat, or the Yellow Peril, or the enemy within the gates, or the Cali cartel, or Osama bin Ladin. Appeals to unite in the face of 'globalisation' are in the same dishonourable category. Economic-nationalist propaganda is in the worst nationalist traditions.

A second group claims, that there are good and bad forms of globalisation. They then cast themselves in the role of the 'good globalisers'. Advocates of a global civil society claim it provides the opposition to global neoliberalism. In reality, 'global civil society' is a loose coalition of western (and western-funded) NGO's, who dream of being subsidised by global taxes.

The third group are the normative globalists: the people who want a global society. Usually they want a global state, although they may not call it that. They have an interest in presenting globalisation as an inevitable historical development. This is historicism - political demands based on historical process, real or imagined.

Any global state would have the basic structure of a nation state: unified constitution, laws, parliament, administration, and executive powers. This normative globalism is simply a form of pan-nationalism. For now, the exact form of world government remains a hobby for International Relations theorists: but the claimed process of globalisation can be used to legitimise the idea.

by Paul Treanor

SHOULD ART BE DESTROYED?

Art, whatever the definition, has certain characteristics. It is equivalent to an entity, perpetuating itself across generations. As a result, it is permanent. Art also implies certain value claims, about the precedence of accumulative creativity over destruction. Permanence and accumulation cannot be ethically legitimised. In practice, there is a stable geo-cultural structure, of ethnic and national art. This structure is not ethically legitimised. The best response is a territorial separation of art.

KABUL, March 1 2001 (AFP via Yahoo News)

Afghanistan's ruling Taliban authorities said Thursday they have started destroying all statues in the country, including the world's tallest standing Buddha statue in the central province of Bamiyan.

"The work started about five hours ago but I do not know how much of it (the Bamiyan Buddhas) has been destroyed," Taliban Information and Culture Minister Qudratullah Jamal told AFP.

"It will be destroyed by every means. All the statues are being destroyed."

The poor, the weak and the oppressed do not speak in defence of art. The voice of art is the voice of privilege. But if that was the only defect of art, then equality would legitimise art. There is not just privilege, there is eternal privilege, for art continues. Art is ancient tradition: worse than privilege. Is it not time to destroy it?

Art is wrong because it is the past, because it perpetuates itself, because it is transgenerational, because it is culture, and because it requires the suppression of anti-art to exist.

People argue about what art is. High art is still contrasted to popular culture. In the 1970's some class theories opposed elitist art. However, in Britain, where Art an Enemy of the People was published in 1978, the response to "high art" was not rejection. It was the demand for subsidies - for community art, minority art, women's art, or art of colour. A similar pattern applies all over western Europe. The existence of art is not an issue. Policy simply accepts art: this is true for artists, for individual governments, and for the European Union. A policy consensus implies a definitional consensus.

Despite the apparent disunity about what constitutes high art or authentic art, there is a deep negative consensus about its nature. This negative consensus is common to all modern societies. Some things are not art, never:

a trans-Sahel railway
state formation
justice

a single European currency. Seen from this perspective, it is the agreement about Art which is remarkable. Evidently there is something called art: and so to its defects.

The first defect of art is the antiquity of art. Some art is recent, of course, but there is no planned future art. In urban planning, for instance, there are those who plan cities which are not yet built, and those who study urban history. In art, however, there is only art history: art is past-oriented, almost by definition. Art is tens of thousands of years old. There is an immense volume of art from the past, even though most works of art are destroyed deliberately (of that, more later). The sacrality of art is a sacrality of the past.

Art perpetuates itself. True, this is a reification, but it is an accurate one. It is the actions of people which perpetuate art: but the effect for the opponents of art is as if art defended itself. I will use here exactly the same metaphor and analogy, that I used to describe the defects of sustainability, the ethic of eternal structures.

Compare the lives of two twins, born in identical circumstances. However, one is pro-art, the other is anti-art. The pro-art twin can go to art school, or study art history. There is no equivalent for the anti-art twin: no school of art incineration. Great social pressure to accept art is applied to one twin. No similar pressure to accept art-destruction is applied to the other twin. Because art is a core value in all existing societies, the social and employment opportunities of the anti-art twin will be limited. It is also the pro-art twin who is more likely to be elected or appointed to political office.

The value attached to art limits the opportunity of its opponents to take action against it. In this way art is a self-preserving structure. It is like a religion, whose adherents systematically discriminate non-believers: if such a religion is in a majority, it will constantly improve its position of power.

The strength and functioning of this self-preserving structure can be appreciated, by imagining that there was no art, and no pro-art structures. Transferring from an art-free world into the existing world, can be compared to transferring from this world, into a world objectionably different. Cannibalism is a useful characteristic for this comparison, because it is almost universally taboo. Being transferred into a cannibal world, from this world, would be extremely unpleasant for most people. They would be forced to accept that something they abhor is a normal part of society: that there is apparently no possibility of reform, since everyone accepts it as normal. This is the situation for opponents of art in the existing world.

Art also perpetuates itself in a more indirect way. Art is often described as human endeavour or achievement, and it is indeed a product of human activity. People are encouraged to consider art as a valued activity, to the exclusion of other activity. In many cultures it is regarded as a high form of achievement: that in itself is a valuing of conservatism. Artists strive to produce good art, but what they produce is art, because the activity takes place only in an art framework, a framework that already exists. It is accurate to say that art is conformity in itself, since artists must conform to the norm of what art is. That norm will vary across cultures and in time, but only in the limiting case that everything is accepted as art, does it cease to be restrictive. In practice, creative approaches to non-art areas are often socially un-accepted, or considered strange.

Art is transgenerational and open-ended. It perpetuates itself in the structural form described above, but art cannot be otherwise. So long as art is in opposition to iconoclasm, for instance, then there is a difference in the value socially ascribed to activities. In almost all cases (and certainly in modern societies) the accepted pattern is, that creation takes place by accumulation only. Iconoclasm (in the broad sense of art destruction) is defined as a non-creative act.

There is no inherent logical basis for the restriction of creativity to accumulation. However, it is the form art takes, and that form is socially accepted. Although there are millions of paintings already, painting a new one is defined as a creative activity. Reducing the existing stock is not. Destruction is not considered of equal value to creation.

On the contrary, destruction of art is considered a crime, and a sign of mental illness. Entering a museum and destroying a painting is considered shocking. Such acts are widely reported in the media, if they affect well-known works of art. This cannot be logically derived from a sacred status. In religious activity, sacred is not always permanent. Sacrificial animals were killed in some religions, offerings were burnt. It would be logically possible to treat art like this, but that does not occur. Art is not just sacred, its own accumulation is sacred, its permanence is sacred.

The continuance of art is therefore inherent in art. Art is for ever. That which can not end, is wrong, and must be ended. Permanence of any entity constitutes a claim to all time for its existence, specifically against its non-existence. Claims to time are contra-ethical or morally arbitrary: one state (existence of art) is favoured over another (non-existence of art) merely because it happened to exist first. It is possible to claim value for firstness or primacy (as nationalist organisations of indigenous peoples do), but this cannot be logically derived. It is itself an arbitrary value.

The transmission of art also requires, that injustice be done to done who oppose it. Their opposition is valid, since there is no moral ground for the permanence of art, yet they are discriminated against, as indicated above. Some employers, perhaps almost all, would refuse a job to anyone who openly advocated the destruction of art. If such injustice is a necessary condition of art, and there is no other legitimation of its existence, then the existence of art is an injustice, and should be terminated.

Just or unjust, self-perpetuating cycles and transgenerational structures, are contra-ethical. Art perpetuates itself, by accumulation, and the transmission of the value of this accumulation. Cultures include, over generations, reverence for the permanence of art. More than this, art perpetuates the transmission of culture including itself. Art is a central aspect of many cultures.

This permanence of art has been described here in abstract terms. In practice some real destruction of art does take place. The place of art in culture determines this: real art is ethnic art, or national art. Art that disappears, has lost its central place in an existing culture - usually because that culture itself has disappeared. The second part of this article, about cultures and art, is less abstract and more political.

There exists a geo-cultural structure, approximately corresponding to geopolitical structures. In practice, people refer daily to English culture, or French culture, to ancient Egyptian art, to Brazilian art, or to the art of the Islamic world. The entities of this geo-cultural structure may be cultures of nation states, of ethnic groups, of regions, or of larger entities called world-cultures or civilisations. They may overlap, in fact they usually do, but that does not mean there is no structure.

The complexity of culture is sometimes used to deny its rigid and structural nature. However, internal complexity can be great, and yet exclude external complexity. The possible moves in a game of chess are astronomically large, yet all chess games are chess games.

Consider a simple model, with unitary cultures of tribes. Tribe A invades the land of tribe B. Soon, within culture B there are pro-A collaborative cultural tendencies, there are anti-A "B nationalists", there are A+B "multi-culturalists", their opponents in A, and B, who oppose cultural mixing, and B revanchists. The land of A+B then invades the land of C. Now, in this land C, there pro-A collaborators, pro-B collaborators, pro A+B collaborators. There are anti-A "C nationalists", anti-B "C nationalists", and anti A+B "C nationalists". And more: even at this level, the multiplying combinations exceed simple factorials.

In the past there were thousands of cultures, associated with thousand of peoples. By some estimates, there still are. Combinations of their interactions can generate an immense diversity of culture. Yet, none of that culture will be anything other than a combination of unitary cultures of geopolitical entities.

There is every reason to believe that this is an accurate model of human culture and art: apparent diversity is hiding a huge range of possibilities which do not fit the existing geo-cultural model. This applies to art as well. The implication of this is, that the models of culture developed in anthropology in the 1940's and 1950's are accurate. (In fact these models reflect the general use of national or ethnic terms to describe culture).

These models were often linked to the idea of culture growth and decay, and similar organic or life-cycle metaphors. Their basis, however, was the idea of a unitary culture corresponding to some geopolitical entity. A. L. Kroeber's 1944 Configurations of Culture Growth is a classic work of this kind. In 1959 Rushton Coulborn could still take this approach to cultures or civilisations:
The style of a civilization is perceived as its aesthetic aspect: it is exhibited in everything the society produces and does, pre-eminently in its arts, but also in its thought, its politics, its institutions, its traditions, and in all its ways. It is possible to qualify a society's style, to comment upon it, to judge it even, yet hardly to describe it. It is the Chineseness" of what is Chinese, the "Egyptianness" of what is Egyptian, the "Westernness of what is Western. Since that time, this approach has disappeared from mainstream anthropology, only to reappear in the last 10 years, under the influence of ethnic studies. An Afro-centric approach to art history, for instance, implies almost by definition a geo-cultural structure.

Why pretend, that there is no such a thing as African art, or English art? Partly because such approaches were discredited by their association with Nazi Germany, or at least with Oswald Spengler and organic-social models of cultural history. But it was a common approach to history in the 1920's and 1930s, and is now "rehabilitated" by the interest in ethnicity and identity. The model is cyclically in and out of academic fashion.

In any case, this approach is still, and always has been, the accepted approach in art history. Any introduction to art history (for students in Europe) will present the standard sequence of styles in Europe: Romanesque, gothic, renaissance, baroque, rococo, neo-classicism. After that comes a section on Islamic Art, or Oriental Art, which are assumed to have their own style sequence. In this case, the academic wisdom seems to be right.

In the end it cannot be proved that there is a geo-cultural structure of this kind: that is too much a question of interpretation. However, it does seem extremely difficult to take the opposite position, that no culture or art is in any way associated with any particular people, culture, or territory.

In turn, this suggests an explanation of art: it is hyper-ethnic. Art is that within a culture which most approaches the core of that culture, and is least accessible to outsiders. Art is the visible soul of the people, just as nationalists say. The question is, whether that gives it existence rights. It is here that the manipulation of art-historical theory in defence of art must be noted. If art is associated with peoples, it can be associated with their state, and so with the policies of that state - which may be unacceptable for many. Yet art never suffers from attribution of guilt by association: definitions are manipulated, to absolve it.

If a person who is clearly a German Nazi, insists on the existence of a German art, and indicates clearly which works of art are German, what is in that circumstance anti-Nazism? The non-Nazi defenders of art deny the truth of the claims: they say the possession of art must be disputed. They would probably say, that in this case anti-Nazism consists in claiming that art belongs to all humanity: that it is universal. This opposition between Nazism and universality cannot, however, justify the existence of art.

The alternative anti-Nazi position is to accept the claims as true, and destroy the German art, which the Nazi person has so conveniently listed. Not just Nazi Germans produce such specifications: there are official lists of national art heritage, in most states in Europe. They are not intended for the convenience of anti-nationalist iconoclasts, but they can serve that purpose.

If art is national, then it can have no legitimacy other than within the values of nationalism. If all art is national then it is legitimate to destroy it, if anti-nationalism is itself legitimate. This legitimacy of destruction extends beyond nation states, to a geo-cultural structure in general. A geo-cultural structure is merely one of many possible structures. The present structure is complex, but not self-legitimising. It is legitimate to oppose pan-Africanism as a form of nationalism, and for instance, to destroy African art for that goal. Equally, it is legitimate to oppose a geo-cultural planetary structure that includes all art, and in doing so to destroy all art.

Why not? Art is being destroyed all the time. So long as there has been art, it has been destroyed. In reality, the sacrality of art applies mainly to "our art", not to "their art". If pan-Africanism, in 10 years time, is regarded as a form of imperialism oppressing the regional identities of the continent, then perhaps people will burn portraits of Nkrumah. 20 years ago, statues of Lenin were art in part of Berlin. Now they are considered "propaganda of the unjust SED state". 60 years ago, statues of Hitler were art in Berlin: now public display of any Nazi symbol is illegal. Today, art in Germany means for instance statues of Konrad Adenauer, the pro-western post-war Chancellor.

The only constant seems to be, that art serves privilege, the nation state, the powerful, the established, the unjust. In general, art serves the existing, which is exactly what is consistent with a self-perpetuating social structure.

It is acceptable to oppose art in general, and specific national, regional, world-cultural, or civilisational art. However, there is no wide support for the break-up of the geo-cultural structure. The values of that structure itself are incompatible with its reform or abolition. It can however be limited in its effects.

I therefore propose territorial separation of art. Formally, the best course would be to destroy existing art, then choose if the planet was to be art-provided or art-free. However, there is no prospect of any global agreement on this. Art will be in opposition to non-art, inherently.

Specifically, I propose that the United States of America should become a zone of art. The existing cultural preference in the USA for collecting art, (especially from Europe) should be expanded into a prime function of state.

Art should be transferred from Europe to the USA, beginning with the art listed in national heritage lists, and with recognised European heritage. I propose as an initial step, the transfer of the Mona Lisa, the best known European artwork, to the USA. The Mona Lisa is old, and heritage. It is better, that the past should burden the USA, than burden Europe. All artists, and those who wish to continue employment in the art sector, should be transferred to the USA.

Any attempt at such a transfer would probably result in military intervention in support of art, perhaps by the USA. However, the nature of such a military intervention is outside the scope of this article. In any case, it is probably true that, given the fundamental opposition between art and its destruction, military conflict is inevitable in the long term.

Taylor, R. Art an Enemy of the People. Hassocks: Harvester 1978.
Kroeber, A. L. Configurations of Culture Growth. Berkeley: University of California Press 1944.
Coulborn, R. The Origin of Civilized Societie

If you look hard enough, and know where to look, one can find an amazing set of "toys" that could be easily modified and/or mass-produced into something useful.

One such page I visited described research in the field of gesture capture, interfaces, and applications to sound synthesis and performance. Yes, it's for music & peformance now, but could be used for communications either by handicapped, or by individuals and situations where the human and/or NON-human voice is muted.

Vocoders are another set of techologies I personally find interesting. Here is a page that offers schematics on how to roll-your-own speach synths, text-to-speech and other goodies ... including do-it-yourself for some rather old computers.

Here's something for you young sprites trying to fake out mom so she thinks your practicing your paino. But remember, you're only cheating yourself !

Of course, you hardwire geeks already know about this one ... PAiA Electronics ... offering user assembled kits for all sorts of electronic products for hobbyists, musicians, education.

Of course, having cut my teeth in electronic music back in the late 70's, in an old analog studio, we saw all sorts of home brewed devices our mad PhD professor put together. From a rubber-band articulator (a record tone arm nailed to a board with a rubber-band and nails to change pitch) to using two tape recorders to get true double-deck dealay (the more nails, the bigger the delay !-). Here is a site that lists similar do it yourself projects.

Toys ... yup ... but I suspect there is also utility for it all.

If you combine this with necoro , a realdoll and a voice synthesiser you'll have the ideal geek-toy... ;-)

And on another "tack" - I leeched my nick shamessly from Gary Clail's "Tackhead Sound System".

For those who haven't heard of Tackhead, they were a late-80s industrial group - their musical style is almost impossible to describe - imagine a really weird blend of heavy bass and dub-like riffs, heavily processed, and then overlaid with multiple layers of samples from military/religious/political figures. Probably responsible for the start of the whole "sampling music" genre.

Their influence as individuals was far greater than their influence as a band per se - the names of the four main members (Keith LeBlanc, Skip McDonald, Adrian Sherwood, and Doug Wimbish) seem to crop up just about everywhere in music from about 1980 through 1990 in a range of styles from old-school rap (e.g. Grandmaster Flash), to funk/dub (George Clinton), to jazz (BB King, Miles Davis), to pop/retro/industrial (Annie Lennox, Depeche Mode, NIN).

The mix of solid beats and heavy sampling, plus some seriously geeky artwork served as inspiration for many a late-night assembly-coding run.

I recently paid a bit of homage by doing the obligatory boot logo thing and "rebranded" my hacked I-Opener in the same vein. After all - what would be a more appropriate name than "Tackhead Sound System" for a project that involves hacking a 6.4G MP3 boombox out of spare parts? (As long as I don't have to power up my I-Opener at an airport. My boot logo might be a little more imposing than it should be ;-)

Recommended tracks: Mind at the End of the Tether, and What's My Mission Now?. Y'all know where to find MP3s.

Finally, if you liked those two tracks, the "Power, Inc." series (3 CDs released in the late '90s) is highly recommended. (Feel free to buy the original CDs - I believe Keith LeBlanc released these on his own label, so he might be getting more than the usual $1/CD when you buy 'em. ;-)

For the past few months a group of FreeBSD/JAVA volunteers have been working on a native FreeBSD java implementation based on the Sun source. It's alpha, you must build it yourself, but the port is stable and you can use it now. Interested in testing/helping? More Info can be found here

ObTack:
This Tackhead site has pretty up-to-date info. And some really interesting links. Nuff said :)

This is indicative of a general trend of governments bowing to corporations--good ol' neo-liberalism. Corporations have more and more control over governments these days, so it's only natural that the government would be afraid of punishing such a large company.