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- The quasi-nation state ...


TPSIPOL FORUM: NETWORK DEMOCRATIC

April 2004

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Endeavors Magazine

Quasi
Nation States Oswaldo de Rivero *


Since the emergence of the Nation State modern Europe and the United States, have proliferated in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa about 140 new states. A kind of historical law of diminishing returns to national viability opportunities has accompanied this growth. In fact, most of the States born in the nineteenth century, as Latin Americans, and almost all the new States that emerged in the twentieth century, such as Asians and Africans, are, after over a century and many decades of independence, incomplete national projects, which have not been developed. Are quasi Nation States.

Beginning

century, the quasi-Latin American nation-states, despite being in the nineteenth century founders of a new U.S. Republican community originated under the influence of American and French revolutions, have failed to join the exclusive club of developed capitalist states. It is said that Latin American countries lost a decade with the debt crisis: the truth is that they have lost more than fifteen decades without being able to become modern and prosperous capitalist democracies. Today these would-be nation-states have been overcome in living standards and technological modernization of Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, who were in the nineteenth century, when Latin America burst in history as a republican institution rich in natural resources, semi-feudal countries too poor or not very flourishing British colony.

Throughout the twentieth century, the political classes of quasi undeveloped nation-states wished to replicate the modern nation state European or American, and in some cases even tried to replicate the dysfunctional Soviet state model. All these attempts ended in failure thunderous imitation. In the socialist version was paid and lack freedom, and today the neoliberal variant is paid unemployment and social exclusion.

Following the failure of national development the international community is now integrated in the most part, achieved by national projects, stabilized by quasi nation-states in the non-development. This global reality devalues \u200b\u200bthe many theories of development that were very popular during the second half of the twentieth century, and also shows that replicate the democratic nation state, capitalist and industrialized it is extremely difficult.

The appearance of these leviathans truncated also raises a novelty for the international relations theory. Indeed, since the emergence of the modern state have always been powerful and weak countries, large and small. However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the small and powerless as Belgium, Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, Japan, Norway, Finland, Ireland, Spain, South Korea and Taiwan reached an effort to develop science and technology. In contrast, quasi-nation states of Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia are still trapped in a huge scientific and technological backwardness. Without research, without invention and innovation, these countries are increasingly marginalized in the global economy by producing the same thing. Its exports of minerals, sugar, coffee, cotton, grains, meat, wool, textiles, beverages, canned goods, transport equipment and other technology-intensive manufactures low and unstable prices have little demand.

The quasi-nation states of Latin America, Africa, Middle East and parts of Asia are as unfit species in a Darwinian global economy that increasingly discarded commodities and some processed products and increasing demand day with greater intensity goods and services with high technological content that they do not produce. The fact that countries unable to investigate, invent and innovate and change their production is a more cultural than economic, which shows the decisive impact on the development not the lack of national vocation in science natural, physical, biological, chemical and math.

During the Cold War, the United Nations quasi acquired undeveloped strategic value by leveraging one way or another East-West conflict, making room for maneuver that allowed them to produce substantial economic aid and credits from a or both blocks to finance its economic infeasibility. After the Cold War, the United Nations quasi cast no strategic value or influence in any major international event. The central activity of its foreign policy now is to ask for help, each time to restructure its external debt not to fall into insolvency, and suffer constant adjustment programs of IMF and World Bank. Ironically, today all that is taking a strategic rent to the quasi-nation state is the danger of national decomposition, many rich countries are forced to financially stabilize quasi nation-states in Africa and Latin America to avoid collapse and violent entities ungovernable and prevent waves of illegal immigrants and refugees.

quasi How to viable nation-states with unscientific companies that do not innovate or invent anything, whose urban populations are growing explosively and exports of primary products and some processed have little global demand? How to play a market economy in Latin American, Asian and African countries that have more than 40% of its population in poverty, living on less than two dollars a day? How to integrate the global capitalist consumption to almost 5 billion people living in these quasi-nation states without seriously damaging the planet's ecology?

Bridging the gap between the quasi misnamed nation-states in developing and developed nation-states is how to find "El Dorado" means an unattainable myth. More than half a century theories and development policies have resulted in a real global socio-economic apartheid: a world where there is a small archipelago of 1 800 million people with global consumption capacity, surrounded by a sea of \u200b\u200b4 200 million people living with just two dollars a day and are dedicated to looking cabinets.

In 2020 the population of quasi nation-states will reach 6 600 million will be urban. Currently emerging in the developing world, births and migration from rural, poor scores of major cities that easily exceed six and ten million people, including Kinshasa, Cairo, Lagos, Calcutta, Bombay, Karachi, Manila, Dhaka, Jakarta , Mexico, Sao Paulo, Rio Buenos Aires, Bogota, Lima, among others. Parallel to these mega-cities are also emerging a hundred cities in excess of 2 million inhabitants. All these settlements are spread chaotically over farmland, pollute air, rivers, lakes and seas. Many of these cities suffer water shortages and energy and are full of people making two dollars a day. Cities are poor, pregnant unemployment, informality, crime and in many cases of fundamentalism. What is the situation when in 2020 the population of these cities has almost doubled and the planet's weather aggravates the shortage of water, energy and food?

Recently, a Pentagon report on global security concluded that the more formidable global challenge of humanity is organic. The report coincides with what I noticed in the last English edition of my book The Myth of development, in the sense that the great challenge for most of humanity, ie for the 6 billion inhabitants of the quasi-states Nations in 2020, will be fighting for survival because the availability of the three determinants of life on Earth, water, food and energy, are becoming scarce and expensive as a result of urban expansion and the heating of the atmosphere.

Because of global urbanization and global warming, global water scarcity is already a certainty, and its price is increasing. Food also will become more expensive because of the increased cost of water diversion and use of this from agriculture to urban sprawl. Also, the energy is more expensive by increasing global demand due to the greed of global urbanization, particularly China and India, and also by the use of expensive pollution control technologies in the fuel to avoid increased warming of the atmosphere.

regard to Peru, I argue again that our country is among the 40 quasi nation-states with the lowest per capita water consumption, food and energy and one of the highest urban growth in the world . If you do not have a national strategic plan long term to stabilize the urban population while achieving water security, food and energy, the quasi-Peruvian nation-state, today more than half of its population in poverty and inserted with bias of infeasibility in the global economy for its technological backwardness and its production slightly transformed, may become unmanageable as a result of lack of access to its large urban population amounts of water, food and energy necessary to lead healthy and productive life.

The great challenge for nation-states near the beginning of the XXI century will not achieve national development, as it was in the twentieth century, but rather national survival. That is, avoid the quasi-nation state becomes a viable national economy or in an ungovernable chaotic entity.

New York, April 2004 QH 147/mar-abr.2004



* Ambassador of Peru to the UN. This is the first of three articles that discuss the major challenges facing developing countries in the XXI century.