“First They Ignore You — Then They Ridicule You — Then They Fight You — Then You Win”
Mahandas Gandhi

Will technology fundamentally change the relationship between the nation state and citizens? Are hyper-connected citizens a threat to or opportunity for government? These are the kinds of questions that the political ruling class across the globe should be asking. However, I fear that most governments are failing to recognize how their own wired societies will increasingly demand profound changes in how the governing communicates with the governed. From local politics to foreign policy, citizens view points are no longer being shaped principally by national institutions, but are being molded instead by very independent internet citizens or “netizens”.

Source: social media lab

Has the way in which citizens perceive and understand the world around them been forever transformed? Technology visionaries like Google Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt seem to think so. Schmidt is super-optimistic  about how transformational  new  technologies will prove to be in coming years.  He recently stated,

“My view is that we should be very optimistic about all of this. The world isn’t perfect but
it is going to a much safer and more informed place. The things that [the US] can bring to
the world really will change a lot of these countries and lift people out of financial
poverty, and information poverty.”

Though Mr. Schmidt might be cunningly laying the PR groundwork for some soon to be released Google app, I do believe he is onto something. His thoughts, as well as a few lessons from the era of the Holy Roman empire, provide us useful insights into how disruptive “making the world a more informed place” can be.

Consider the printing press — the first weapon of mass reproduction that dramatically changed the relationship between one of the most politically powerful institutions of all time, the Catholic Church, and its millions of  followers. The change was so profound that in 1620, English statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon was compelled to state that this invention has “changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world.”

Prior to this technological innovation, Catholic priests interpreted the Holy Scriptures for the church faithful — information is power, and the clergy held onto this power with a samsonian grip. A Christian in that era who was found with an unauthorized copy of the bible could be denounced as a heretic, and likely condemned by the church to burning at the stake. Such was the church’s respect (or fear) for the power of knowledge. The church acted as a sort of information gatekeeper certain that knowledge sharing was not in their best interest.  Thankfully, over  time, the church accepted the new reality (albeit reluctantly) and even learned to harness the printing press to achieve core institutional goals; like worldwide evangelizing.

Now, back to the future. Are our governing institutions and their respective clergy acting in a similar manner to the old world church? Certainly Middle Eastern autocrats like Egypt’s Mubarack behaved in true old world fashion during Act 1 of  ’Revolution 2.0′.  But I am not convinced that  government officials, even in industrialized countries, are cognizant of how technological innovations like social media have forever robbed them of their positions as trusted sources of  timely and legitimate information. Citizen journalists, and other online old world anti-bodies are weakening the reach and health of  traditional information sources. I dare say that netizens have started to short-circuit the politico-corporate communications wiring; raising the political and social justice consciousness of the hyper-connected citizen in a way that might not be in the interest of the governing classes.

I look forward to witnessing how Act 2 of Revolution 2.0 will unfold. Will the officials that govern the modern nation state engage their respective societies in meaningful ways, or will they continue to hide their heads in the sand? From what I’ve learned from history and the very erudite Mahandas Gandhi — I think I know the answer.

Last week, Newt Gingrich said the following about Palestinian nationalism:

Remember, there was no Palestine as a state — (it was) part of the Ottoman Empire. I think we have an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and historically part of the Arab community and they had the chance to go many places.

For this, Gingrich has been roundly criticized from a variety of angles. The thing to note, however, is that strictly speaking, he is right — if by “invented” we mean “socially and politically constructed”. The fact of the matter is that all “nations” are invented. It’s just a question of when and how.

The point to be made is that nationalism, as a general political force, arose out of discrete events and processes in the post-medieval age. The invention of the printing press, the spread of vernaculars, the rise of commercial capitalism, the imposition of administrative boundaries by colonial states, the rise of centralizing state — each of these meant that national identities congealed in ways that were simply absent before.

That last word is crucial: before. Whichever national identity you care to choose — French or Filipino, whatever — I can find a point in time when that national identity did not exist, either at all or in particularly stark terms. Creating nations takes effort. Some of it is by accident. Some of it is deliberate — by changing school textbooks, by changing what students read, by changing which languages of instruction are employed,  by changing which language is deemed to be “official” or the court’s language, by imposing conscription, by creating flags and national anthems, by ethnically cleansing certain territories to purify them, and so on.

The problem with Gingrich’s statement was not his assertion of the contingency of Palestinian national identity. Hell, even Rashid Khalidi would agree with him on that. No, the problem with his statement was the implicit supposition that there exist other national identities that are more primordial in nature. That is, while the Palestinians were invented, the French or the Americans or the Arabs were not. I’m afraid that belief is simply incorrect. They were just “invented” at different times in different ways.

As Eugen Weber says in reference to nationalism in late nineteenth-century France, “A lot of Frenchmen did not know they belonged together until the long didactic campaigns of the later nineteenth century told them they did, and their own experience as conditions changed told them that this made sense…France is a deliberate political construction for whose creation the central power has never ceased to fight.” Indeed, we see manifestations of that very same process ongoing today; to wit, the fact that the census in France, unlike most Western democracies, has no provision for marking one’s race or ethnicity. Is the French nation any less “invented” than the Palestinians?

Moreover, when one sees that Gingrich’s “defense” of his original statement is “Somebody ought to have the courage to tell the truth. These people are terrorists. It’s fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts to stand up and say, ‘Enough lying about the Middle East,’” it becomes clear that discovering the antecedent institutional conditions that gave rise to Palestinian group identity is probably not the object of his grand historicizing.

This guy has a PhD in history?