The Uses of the NetworkCommonwealth …

                 The Uses of the NetworkCommonwealth
                             James C. Bennett
           A Seminar at "The National Interest", Washington, D.C.
                               April 29, 2004

On Thursday, April 29th, a seminar entitled "Networking Nation-States" was held in Washington, DC
under the auspices of The National Interest. It centered around my article of the same title published in
the Winter 2004 issue of The National Interest. Participating in the seminar, in addition to me, were a
number of distinguished participants, including Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign
Relations, Prof. Charles Kupchan of Georgetown University, Gerard Baker of the Financial Times,
international law expert David Rivkin and Nikolas Gvosdev of The National Interest.

The seminar began with a presentation of the concepts of the "network civilization" and "Network
Commonwealth", which, for those not familiar with them, are laid out in my articles "An Anglosphere
Primer" and "Networking Nation-States". Very briefly, I have come to the conclusion that one of the
under-appreciated changes underway in the world today is that the plummeting of transaction costs in
international communications is impacting the world asymmetrically; or to put it another way, as oceans,
rivers, and mountains cease to be as big an obstacle they were in the past, the world will contour itself
around the next most significant set of obstacles, which are socio-cultural ones. One might very well
prefer to travel an extra three or four hours in flight to do business if the barriers to participation when
you get off the place are less.

Meanwhile, the flat cost of worldwide communications on the Internet is gradually linking all the posted
documentation in any given language into a seamless web, essentially one big and almost infinitely
complex artifact. This artifact forms the core of a new cultural form, which I have termed the "Network
Civilization". Just as the cultural commonalties of the pre-modern cultural-linguistic group became the
raw material from which the modern nation-state was formed, so I believe the network civilization can be
the raw material from which a new political form is evolving, which I have termed the Network
Commonwealth - a loose league of states cooperating on defense, trade, and other issues, serving to
extend civil society across national borders.

Many people are most (or only) familiar with the Anglosphere aspect of my work, and some seem to
have gotten the idea that it is about a vision of what might be dubbed Anglo-triumphalism. Yet the
Anglosphere network civilization as it is emerging into being, and the Anglosphere network
commonwealth that I believe could be a useful tool for organizing its internal relations, are only specific
cases of a more general phenomenon. Since much of what I have written over the past four years has
concentrated on the Anglosphere example (naturally enough, as I was writing for the English-speaking
audience), I and the people at National Interest felt that it was important to look at other emerging
network civilizations through the lens of this analysis; one of the purposes of the seminar was to permit
area experts to do exactly that. Another purpose was to invite critiques of the wider set of ideas by a
range of commentators with varying degrees of pre-existing agreement or disagreement with the
premises of the Network Commonwealth idea.

The seminar was a success in fulfilling both purposes. In regard to the first point, useful discussions were
given of the potential for emergent network civilizations in the Russian-, French-, and Arabic-speaking
areas of the world. Nikolas Gvosdev gave a particularly useful and informative discussion of the
emerging Russosphere and its implications. He described the ongoing transformation of the cultural and
political life of the Russian-speaking world due to the advance of information technology, and
particularly the flourishing of the Russian-language World Wide Web, now generally termed the "runet",
after the ".ru" suffix on Russian email addresses. He made the point that much of the emerging
independent civil society in Russia and other Russian-speaking areas is articulated around the Internet, to
a much greater degree than in older civil societies. For instance, although print and broadcast media in
the Russian Federation has become increasingly consolidated under state control, Internet media
continues to be diverse and uncensored, and has played a significant role in uncovering governmental
abuse. It is also significant that intra-Russosphere publication via Web has permitted such journalism to
be undertaken with less risk of reprisal. He also pointed out the extensive use of Web media by the
Russian Orthodox Church, which may have the effect of loosening its traditionally tight connection to
the Russian state.

Of particular interest was the discussion of the emergence of the "Euro-Russians" - the several million
persons whose first language is Russian and are residents of European Union states. This includes the
two million Russian citizens of the newly-acceded Baltic states, the several hundred thousand long-term
Russian residents of Cyprus, and the sizeable Russian diaspora in Western Europe, 70,000 of them in
London alone. It is largely thanks to the Russosphere that the Baltic Russians can remain connected to
Russian civilization without nursing a desire to return to control of the Russian state. Upon Baltic
independence, it was widely feared that these people would form a modern equivalent of the Sudeten
Germans in inter-war Czechoslovakia. Instead, it may be more likely that as the EuroRussians develop a
stronger civil society their influence will flow back to the rest of the Russosphere, with interesting long-
term consequences. East Germany and mainland China were strongly affected by the visible example of
freer, more prosperous societies with their own languages and cultures; perhaps the example of a strong
Russian-speaking civil society may have the same effect over time on the weaker sectors of the
Russosphere.

All in all, Gvosdev's presentation was exactly the sort of use of the network civilization concept as an
analytical tool that I had hoped would emerge.

The two other network civilization discussions, Claude Salhani's tour of the Francosphere, and Jeffrey
Kemp's discussion of the prospect of an Arabosphere, gave a useful tour d'horizon of these areas,
respectively. Salhani's review of the Francosphere made the useful point that the distribution of
population and financial clout within linguistic areas has an effect on the potential for cooperation within
those areas; in the French example, the preponderance of population, wealth and power within France
itself created an greater imbalance that that existing in other areas, and thus intra-Francosphere
structures (such as the Francophonie organization) tended to be primarily arenas for France to project its
influence to dependents.

The example of the Arabic-language satellite and Web news services, such as al-Arabiya and al-Jezeera,
indicate that the network civilization phenomenon is emerging in different linguistic-cultural areas
independently from what is happening in the English-speaking world, and that such developments are
not automatically pro-American.

Is the Anglosphere Converging or Diverging?

Gerard Baker (now of the Times of London) raised a point that is raised from time to time in
discussions of the Anglosphere: given the widespread unhappiness in parts of the British population,
and particularly the media and intellectual classes, to Tony Blair's support of the US in the Afghan and
Iraqi wars, is there not more of a division rather than a convergence between America and Britain? In
particular, given the rise of subcontinental Muslim immigrant populations in Britain, and of Hispanic
populations in the US, is not the old link becoming more diluted, perhaps to the point of irrelevance?

Regarding convergence/divergence of attitudes and perceptions between the UK, UK, and other
Anglosphere countries: I believe the "Anglosphere social model" I described, once further researched,
will confirm what anecdotal and partial evidence suggests; that rather than each Anglosphere nation
occupying a discrete position upon some spectrum of opinion, there are within each nation blocs and
classes of people each more aligned with other such blocs throughout the Anglosphere than with some
of their own countrymen. The differences between Anglosphere nations have more to do with the
different proportions of various blocs from nation to nation. For example, approximately a quarter of
all Americans have some British Isles ancestry tracing back to Ulster Protestants; Ulster-bred attitudes are
at the core of the Jacksonian mindset. I suspect that if Ulster's Protestant population formed 25% of
the UK today, its attitudes, values, and policies would be even more similar to those of the US.
Conversely, London and New York social-political attitudes are similar to each other and at odds with the
rest of the nation, but greater London is a tenth of the UK electorate while greater New York City is
perhaps three percent, and its influence even more diluted by the nature of the electoral college and the
Senate. If New York were a tenth of the US electorate, the US would look more like the UK politically.

One of the principal effects of the current information/network revolution is the disintermediation of
communications. One of the effects of the previously-existing intermediation of communications has
been the creation of classes of gatekeepers in the media who have tended to filter the views that get
presented. The UK media, because of the traditional social structure of that nation, has had a
particularly tight gatekeeper effect. The values and attitudes chosen to represent British opinion have
been somewhat different from those chosen by the looser but still effective US gatekeeper class to
represent their nation. This has heightened and sharpened the distinctions between perceptions of the
two nations. It has been my observation that "Middle Britain" -- middle class, Midland England, quite
often dissenter and (once) Liberal in background, is much closer to the Middle American mentality
(Midwestern, middle-class, politically moderate, non-fundamentalist Christian) than either are aware. Yet
the urban, London and New York-based media persist on portraying Americans as nouveau-riche
vulgarians, cowboys, and rednecks, while showing Brits as either aristocratic degenerates or soccer thugs.
Disintermediation, whatever else it does, will probably change this pattern.

What is needed is a values and attitudes analysis that breaks responses down to at least the county level
throughout the core Anglosphere -- the US, UK, Ireland, Anglophone Canada, Australia, New Zealand,
and the Anglo-Caribbean states. By extending the "red-state/blue-state" analysis that has become
popular in the US following the 200 election, and by further refining it to distinguish "blue" from
"purple" states (the latter sociologically more conservative, but tending to vote Democrat for class or
economic reasons), I believe we would see an Anglosphere model showing an archipelago of blue areas
in the great metropolitan centers -- New York, London, Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco, Sydney,
Auckland - embedded in a set of purple areas, consisting of Britain outside London, the Northeast US
outside the urban cores, eastern Canada, the West Coast outside the urban cores, and the Australian
Golden Crescent and New Zealand, also minus their urban cores. The Red Anglosphere would consist of
the "Republican L" -- the southern and Plains/Mountain states -- but extending north into the Canadian
Prairies, especially Alberta, and south through the Anglo-Caribbean states, which despite their economic
populism tend to be religious and socially conservative. Some other areas of the Anglosphere, such as
Northern Ireland and Queensland, would also likely show as red.

Various implicit or explicit mental models of the English-speaking nations have existed - the classic one
being a sort of post-Roman model, seeing the divergence of the various Anglosphere countries as a
modern parallel to the gradual devolution of the Western Roman Empire into various cognate but
distinct nation-states speaking Latin-derived languages. A variant of this sees them as falling out along a
right-left spectrum, an "American/European" spectrum, or sometimes a religious/nonreligious
spectrum, with the US (and Red America) occupying the rightmost position, and Britain the leftmost,
most European pole. Sometimes the US is granted exceptional status as an ideological, rather than
blood-and-soil nation.

One of the values of an Anglosphere social model is that it would permit us to ask, and answer a
number of interesting questions about the nature and character of the nationhood of the various
countries of the Anglosphere. One question should be, "Are the national labels of the Anglosphere
nations a more useful predictor of attitudes, values, or behaviors of random individuals from those
nations than some other set of indicators? Or is a red, blue, or purple label a more frequently or
consistently valid indicator?" On a wide variety of issues the latter would seem to be the case: knowing
that the individual in question is an American, Briton, or Canadian is less useful than knowing whether
they are from Plano, Texas or Madison, Wisconsin; from Islington or from York; from Toronto or from
Edmonton.

This suggests we must conclude that the independent states of the Anglosphere, although sovereign
nation-states for the purposes of international law, do none of them meet the sociological definitions of
nation-states. Rather, we must see the Anglosphere as a diverse but related common cultural area,
divided by history and happenstance into what are better thought of as state-nations: human
communities that see themselves as nations because they are states, as opposed to nations that have
gradually acquired state forms.

Few of the inner-Anglosphere demarcation lines make sense on purely economic terms -- North
America divides through the middle of its historical industrial heart and lungs, the Great Lakes zone,
because it formed a convenient border for the negotiators of the Treaty of Paris. If the British Isles
were divided into nations on economic grounds, surely lowland Scotland, Ulster, and northern/midlands
England would be one state, and southern England another. Eastern Australia and New Zealand together
make a more natural unit than do Eastern and Western Australia, linked across a wide desert only by an
economically insignificant railway line. Auckland is as close to Canberra as Kalgoorlie, and substantially
closer than Perth or Darwin.

This economic incongruity in sometimes recognized, but it is then argued that cultural commonalties
make the lines significant. Yet the Anglosphere social model also argues against this. If the proverbial
creature from Mars were to be given the sociological data from such an Anglosphere social model in a
blind form, and were told to divide this area into several independent entities, it is very unlikely that it
would run a border along the 49th parallel, while leaving the Mason-Dixon Line unmarked.

What is left is the stuff of state-nations: those artifacts that emerge from actions of governments.
Frenchmen and Germans know what distinguishes their nations: different languages, foods, architectures,
values, behaviors, ways of thinking. Each nation has experienced several radically different styles of
government and political institutions over the past two centuries, but throughout that time, the
underlying national characteristics have remained remarkably similar.

Americans, Canadians, Australians, and Britons have the opposite experiences: their political institutions
have evolved steadily along parallel lines of continuity, while their material cultures have had substantial
(and increasingly converging) commonalties. When asked what distinguishes them from the other
Anglosphere nations, usually the answer points to a state institution or politically-sponsored custom: the
Crown, the Flag, the Constitution, the US Marines or the RCMP, established Church or First
Amendment, the NHS or the public school district. What holds each Anglosphere country together is,
ultimately, their willingness to believe that, for example, a Maine-stater has something in common with a
Texan that he do not have in common with a Nova Scotian. Because they believe this, they do, and
therefore over time the people of Maine have acquired one set of associations, memories, and identities
while the people of Nova Scotia have another. Rather than having national characters, we have national
narratives: the stories we tell each other about why we're like each other and unlike the others. In many
cases, these stories are themselves the principal difference between us.

Thus the perception that the various English-speaking nations are diverging or converging at any
particular time has been more a case of media self-selection and the vagaries of the political process. The
current estrangement between the White House and substantial portions of the British media and public
is paralleled by the estrangement of "blue state" America and its institutions. Much of this is due to
President Bush's red-state roots, and his difficulties in reaching across that cultural divide. The next time
he does an overseas tour, he should visit Belfast, Calgary, or Brisbane, where he might find a more
congenial reception.

But such a gap should not be understood as part of a "national" divergence between America and
Britain. In the coming years, the accelerating institutional disintermediation is likely to further the
convergence of these two (and other English-speaking) nations, particularly with the new emerging
Britain of high-tech and service entrepreneurs, often including substantial numbers of Commonwealth
and Continental immigrants, in the exurban clusters along the M4 corridor, out of sight of tourists and
visiting journalists, and far distant politically from both the old Tory country set and the old Labour
mine-and-mill union machines.

Finally, it is likely that the old reliance upon the "special relationship" -- an informal network of elites
sharing similar attitudes and interests and collaborating on an ad-hoc basis -- will have come to the end
of its road. Just at the time that disintermediation will be breaking down the political alignments that
have kept Britain and America politically apart and increasing the prospects for integration, its more
general effect in loosening the reins of power in both countries will make the old collaborative
mechanism of the Special relationship less and less workable.

The Blair-Bush relationships illustrates the limits of the current system: although it delivered British help
at a critical time for America, it did so at the price of mediating all serious policy relations between the
two nations through the lens of Tony Blair's perceptions. Thus, American policy toward the European
Union continues to buy into Blair's confidence in Britain's ability to manipulate European politics toward
favorable ends, just as the accelerating structural and demographic problems of continental Europe
require a more skeptical US attitude.

Ironically, although Blair is commonly labeled "Bush's poodle" in the anti-war segment of British politics
and media, it is Bush who has become Blair's poodle in all policy areas having to do with European
integration. Meanwhile, the most telling domestic criticism of Blair is one that is conspicuous by its
absence: that Blair, having gained Bush's favor, is squandering the goodwill he has thus gained through
blind pursuit of a self-defeating European policy. (Had Blair been more successful earlier in his
European agenda, his hands would have been tied after September 11th on his Atlantic agenda.) Rather
than relying any further on the Special Relationship, it is time to replace the assumed goodwill and
chummy personal relationships with a set of collaborative structures that are negotiated, permanent,
accountable, and serviceable in good times and bad.
There has also been speculation (and has been for a hundred years, in fact) that the increasingly non-
English and now non-European character of American immigration will destroy the Special Relationship,
and replace the current white "Anglo-Saxon" Protestant elite that still disproportionately administers
American foreign policy. That is not an argument for ending a special Anglo-American (or Australian-
American) relationship, but it is an argument for institutionalizing it.

In fact, so long as the Anglosphere engine of assimilation continues to work, the new character of
immigration will make intra-Anglosphere relations easier, not harder. The time of maximum difficulty
lay in the years before World War One, when the immigration contained many first- and second-
generation Irish and Germans, neither of whom were anxious to se America allied to England. Today's
Mexican or Filipino immigrant may have no inherent warm feelings for England, but he has no historical
grudge against her either. Meanwhile American generals like Sanchez and Takuba have come to respect
cooperation with Britain because they have seen it work in the field. And in many cases, the new
immigrants are likely to have human ties elsewhere in the Anglosphere: Colin Powell is not the last, but
the first American Secretary of State to have close blood relatives in London.

In the final analysis, the endurance of the Anglo-American relationship, and other intra-Anglosphere
relationships, will depend not upon the DNA of the populations of the nations, but on the values and
ideals they hold. This, in turn, is dependent upon the success of assimilation of these immigrants.
America, Canada, and Australia experienced substantial Italian immigration in the past, but the political
ideals of Mazzini or Mussolini have no purchase on our public life. The challenge of the Anglosphere is
to see that the South Asians and Latin Americans who come to us come to learn and respect the values
that made these countries their destinations of choice.


Community, Entrepreneurship, and Political Coherence.

Some of the most interesting critical points were raised by Charles Kupchan of Georgetown University,
author of the recent End of the American Era. These points were plausible and deserved a response.

As the Network Commonwealth concept is among other things driven by the effects of the Information
Revolution, it is fair to ask, as Kupchan did, whether that revolution is not simultaneously destroying the
fabric of civil society that engendered it in the first place. Are the new media narrowing rather than
widening the scope of public discourse? When one's civic debate occurred primarily within the bounds
of one's physical community, it could only be expected that a handful of people who felt exactly alike
could be found. To achieve anything, a coalition had to be formed, and compromises made. Even the
opposed side had to be argued with face-to-face in the neighborhood, the church, and the workplace
One's political opponents could also be one's employers, employees, customers, service providers,
bowling-team members, or fellow communicants, and all of these ties encouraged a modicum of civility
and restraint. Occasionally, repeated exposure to contrary argument could produce a change of opinion.

Today, the trend is to associate virtually with the like-minded and avoid political debate with the opposing
side. People log on to moveon.org or freerepublic.com, where the mutual reinforcement of the like-
minded validates the most extreme forms of expression and penalizes the voices of moderation. Soon
one finds people who appear to believe that Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno plotted the Oklahoma City
bombing, or that Bush and Cheney flew airliners into the World Trade Center by remote control. These
same people might even work beside each other and never mention their political beliefs -- they are so
extreme that no dialogue between them would be possible, and mostly they don't bother. Meanwhile
bowling leagues decline while the sort of people who once participated in them now cocoon in far-
exurban homes with no city centers at all, and are probably in bed by 9:30 in order to arise in time for
their 90-minute commute to work.

There is of course some validity to this argument. All of the trends presented above have some reality to
them. However, two points bear mentioning. One is that political polarization and isolation are nothing
new to America. Our perceptions may be biased by the fact that the unusual unanimity and sense of
shared purposed caused by World War Two are still fresh in generational memory. Yet it is likely that the
social cohesion of that era was a transitory phenomenon, and that political and social fragmentation is
the natural state of such a diverse and heterogenous state-nation as the USA by a single ethnic group and
a single religious denomination.

Historically, most states and regions have been dominated by a single political party. The partisan press
from the founding of the Republic onward has been frequently extreme, vicious, slanderous, and highly
lacking in objectivity. The lurid details of Clinton' sexual escapades on right-wing websites is not much
more salacious than the pamphlets detailing Jefferson's alleged trysts with Sally Hemmings. The
accusations of tyranny, deceit, and simian backwardness directed to George W. Bush, the "chimp", are
hardly more vicious in tone than the Copperhead press's denunciations of Lincoln as "Old Ape". Plus ça
change...

The other point is that the same trends that feed division can also serve community. Public access to
records via Internet has raised the effective level of transparency of government operations, which has
been an encouragement of citizen activism, and ultimately should strengthen civil society. Internet and
other new media have similarly made the mobilization of community groups and the education of
citizens on civic issues easier and has raised the breadth of participation in such groups. Of course this
has caused discomfort to some, as the comfort of dealing with a smaller range of people and opinions
has been replaced by the need to deal with a wider set. However, there has been an ongoing process of
widening and opening participation in civic life throughout American history; this may become merely an
acceleration of that process.

In truth, we do not know what the effect of the next stages of the Information Revolution will be on
our civic life and civil society. If past technological developments have any value in prediction, we will
experience some benefits and some detriments, and intelligent adaptation will probably help maximize
the benefits and mitigate the detriments thereof. In the long run, the disintermediation of public
opinion is more likely to strengthen civil society, because it will minimize the marginalization of opinions
of outlying social groups. It is tempting to ignore the people who do not fit neatly into the mainstream
social consensus, but also dangerous. As unpleasant as some may find it to have to include such views in
the calculus of social consensus, it is more unhealthy to allow such people to become entirely alienated
from peaceful political participation.

The other point of Kupchan's to which I had wished for more time to address was the question of the
relative scope for entrepreneurship in Anglosphere versus Continental European societies. Kupchan
questioned the equation of civil society as one with a strong entrepreneurial nature. His argument was
that the strong social-solidarity institutions of continental European social democracies could also be an
expression of civil society, and showed a civic solidarity in dimensions other than the economic.

On the former aspect -- that social solidarity can be a value of civil society -- there is obviously some
evidence. Scandinavian societies are by any standard strong civil societies, and have most of the
characteristics -- social cohesion, broad radius of trust, social peace -- associated with such.
However, the latter aspect deserves clarification. Some discussions of entrepreneurship concentrate
primarily on the business aspect of the phenomenon, and some people seem to equate entrepreneurship
entirely with profit-seeking activity. My understanding of entrepreneurship, and the underlying
assumptions of my writing, use a broader definition. Entrepreneurship in the broader sense is the
process by which one person, or a small group of people, generate and share a vision of an enterprise --
and it can be an enterprise in any field of human endeavor -- and themselves mobilize the people and
resources to bring the vision to reality. It is not impossible that the process can function within
government, but due to the nature of intragovernmental processes it is not the easiest environment in
which to operate.

Profit-seeking business is the most usual home for entrepreneurship. This is because in order to mobilize
resources, it is necessary to motive resource-holders, and hope of gain is both widely present in people
and fairly easy to demonstrate a potential to satisfy. The widely-understood conventions for showing
cashflow projections give entrepreneurs a readily-available language in which to make the case for
resources. However, the same entrepreneurial process can also be observed in nonprofit organizations,
religious communities, and even the military, with the substitution of charitable and humanitarian
motivations, religious motivations, or patriotism and duty as equally strong or stronger drivers. It is
further the case that even in the world of business entrepreneurism, visionary entrepreneurs are more
often than is generally appreciated driven by transcendent values as well as economic motives.

Most people are familiar with Columbus's mixture of religious and economic motivations for his project
of a western route to the Indies; his very name Christopher -- Christ-bearer -- he interpreted as a sign of
his destiny to bear the word of God. Yet after him a surprising number of the visionary entrepreneurs
who remade the world between his day and ours were driven by a mixture of motivations.

The fluid conmingling of economic and transcendent motives that has marked the Anglosphere's
particular version of civil society can be seen in every era. The story of the "Lunar Men" (as Jenny
Uglow dubbed them in her book of that name) -- the Lunar Society of Birmingham, which included
such people as Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgewood, Joseph Small (Jefferson's teacher), and occasionally
Benjamin Franklin shows this confluence at one particular time in history, where technological
entrepreneurship, scholarship, political and religious reform, and the humanities were shared among a
circle of extraordinary people; the era of the founding of the Royal Society was another.

For better or worse, this sort of wide-ranging entrepreneurship has made our world, and if it is to be
remade again, it will likely be by more such entrepreneurship by more such people. The English-
speaking nations have in their culture and institutions been more open than most to such activity, and I
believe that is why so much has happened here. My next book project will allow me to expand in depth
on this theme.


                                                   .oOo.