Maps illustrating this post

The 20th century saw the republic move from being a near-anomaly to the de facto norm. Today, it's a rare country that doesn't hold regular elections, albeit sometimes dubious ones. One could argue that the old notion of the Standenstadt (state dominated by a single class) is an anachronism; since the other classes can always outvote the putative ruling class. I can see how this would be a useful thing to have widely believed, since I set great store by voting and do so myself. However, this surmise is false. Instead, the epoch of republics has been accompanied by the epoch of the powerful state and industrial bureaucracies, which sharply curtail the powers of the electorate.

Instead, the state/industrial bureaucracies play a game of "keep-away" with the electorate; if the electorate demands something, the state bureacrats can relegate it to the private sector; if the private sector faces market pressure, it depends on the state bureaucracy to support an oligopoly, thwarting market pressure also. "Idealistic" student activists assume a worthy elected official can mold national policy like a mighty scultor in clay; it's "cynics" who think the diffusion of interests makes this impossible (suggesting, perhaps, that the autocratic ideal has not yet died out). In reality, the combined efforts of state and industrial bureaucracies are highly effective at preventing both; both are focused on self-perpetuation and mutual loyalty. So the concept of a "class dictatorship" is very much relevant to the present era of universal suffrage.

The other important corollary to this is that the concept of the sovereignty and national self-determination do not really interfere with the concept of the TEP. The fact that US nationals can vote for the government of the USA, and not Canadians or Austrians, does not really affect this, since the scope of voter sovereignty is sharply constricted.

An objection will be raised, that the efforts of EU administrators to adopt a constitution (which failed), or the refusal of the US government to adopt the Kyoto Convention demonstrated the limitations of the TEP's administrative cohesion. This proves no such thing; it only proves that multilateral efforts to assert control over the TEP failed. The EU was not created with a revolution, nor was it the result of a crisis that debilitated the erstwhile authorities. The EU was created to be an instrument of the member governments, and stumbles whenever it makes a convincing effort to replace them. Multilateral organizations exist to serve the national governments that created them, and the national governments agree to their bidding only under duress; that duress has to be applied through the same elites that already control the government.

I've tried to explain what the Trans-European Project is. I've referred to its territorial boundaries, how I came to believe in the TEP, and (elsewhere) how it colluded to establish global mastery of the earth. I've discussed the vocational aspects of TEP imperialism, the racist aspects, and its sibling relationship to totalitarianism. Now I must add some things the TEP is not.

The TEP is not a conspiracy. It might be controlled by the Trilateral Commission (I should be surprised to learn it was); it might not be. I have no use for that hypothesis. The TEP does involve networks of networks, but not the tight hierarchy of control of a conspiracy. One can readily draw a parallel between the White House, in which rival groupings of vested political interests actually conspire to thwart each other, while remaining ferociously loyal to the associations that bring them so close to power. Likewise, there are sharp and at times acrimonious differences among the rival conceptions of capitalism of, say, Italy, Germany, and the USA. These differences are prominent and often thwart closer collaboration. However, too much can be made of these differences: often they are resolved through division of labor.

The TEP is not the sole explanation for political activity among its constituent states, much less in the world. It is one force among many.

The TEP membership is not fixed. It has gradually assimilated Japan and South Korea, and more recently, some nations of Central Europe. Argentina might have been a TEP member in good order, but was lost in the revolutionary tumult of the 1930's. The Union of South Africa was shed in 1961; Israel was created to serve the TEP, rather like the legendary Golem. It's interesting to speculate if the TEP may survive the nationstate entirely, surviving through leagues of rich neighborhoods.

Moreover, TEP membership is not like membership in a committee. In fact, part of the reason why the official TEP entities like the OECD, the G-7, the United Nations Security Council, the EU, and so on, are so weak is that they attempt to impose this artificial, "fair" balance of power on a TEP whose membership has entirely idiosyncratic distribution of powers. The TEP has no system of voting; it has no formal government representatives. It is not analogous to a multilateral organization of states, since it blends nations, national governments, and corporate bureaucracies. The organizational structure of the EU and othe multilateral entities have become assimilated to the TEP, but so have provincial and urban governments, financial services, lobbying groups, political parties, and private individuals. The TEP is not a conspiracy, organization, or nation: it is all of these, and more. Just as individuals act in multiple roles (as consumer, taxpayer, worker, administrator, interest group...) so the TEP embrces those multiple roles.

THE MORALITY OF THE TEP

Readers may perhaps wonder if the TEP is good or bad. It is neither. It is like the internal combustion engine or the taming of fire. The world in which we live was created by TEP. If TEP had been thwarted at birth (say, by total French victory in the Napoleonic Wars), then the alternative might have taken longer and been more sweeping in its transformation of the world. Or the world might have drifted into a multipolar world of warring empires. At times the TEP has been a force for good; at times, clearly a force for bad. Looking at the matter from a longer view, a force for good (like, say, the ability of innoculations to save lives) became a force of extraordinary bad (since it enabled the massive death by diseases of the American Indian population) (the boom in the human population, which, from the point of view of most species of fish, is an unalloyed evil).

I tend to believe the TEP alone can undo the damage it has done. The TEP today is threatened by the fierce loathings of European and Usonian demagogues for each other. The USA is polarized by rival industrial systems, one of which is sympathetic to, but in competition with, the nations of Europe(think of the blue counties of the 2004 election in comparison to Northern Europe); the other of which is complementary to the European economy, but anathema to its prevailing world views. Should these two fall out into a Cold War, the result would be two "ultra-Bushist" regimes vying for dominance in the TEP, and a naked revival of imperialism. Should Bushism suffer a fall from US esteem so extreme that our country becomes the global vanguard against it, then TEP's informal structure could conceivably be formalized into something that acts "consciously."

Then the TEP could become a force for good.

(Part 4)