Geopolitical Science
Entropy is seen as a law in the sciences, but 2014 shows it should also be in modern political theory.
Entropy is primarily seen as a law in the quantifiable realm of the sciences, but 2014 brings strong evidence that it should also be enshrined in modern political theory. Simultaneously across the world, nations are racked with an unrest, a dissolving of a hitherto implicitly shared identities. In disparate regions and in myriad ways, states are being consumed with internecine conflict.
The Year In Review
In Syria, a bloody civil war, now near its two hundred thousandth death, has continued to rage between a dizzying array of factions. One of those myriad actors is the ascendent ISIS, who wield maximalist brutality like a scalpel to carve up Syria and Iraq into a new order consistent with their exceedingly myopic reading of the Koran. They have torn both states asunder in the process and pressured a renewed interest in the formation of a new Kurdish state, which would rend the borders of several more adjacent countries. One of those, Turkey, is also going through a new round of purging alleged dissidents, all followers of a transnational social and religious movement centered around an exiled preacher now based in the United States.
This is merely one region of one continent on the whole planet which appears to be fully under the sway of this cosmological constant. In China, the discontent of the native Uighur minority in the autonomous region of Xinjiang continues to grow and spawn rising levels of violence toward their socially, culturally, ethnically, religiously, and spatially distant leaders. On the southern edge of China, a student led protest movement has just been summarily crushed by the forces loyal to mainland leadership, leaving behind little more than a boot print on the face of the people of Hong Kong. This is all in addition to the civil unrest the country has enjoyed from Tibet to Wuhan for years.
Not alone on the continent, strife between Buddhists and Muslims in Burma/Myanmar continues despite the lifting of sanctions last year. India’s varied multitudes recently elected a new president, long alleged to have condoned the slaughter of Gujarat’s Muslim community in the riots of 2002 while Maoist separatists ambush police. Pakistan’s opposition Azadi march led to violent clashes with police, only ending after extant members of the Taliban assaulted a military school in the last few days, killing over hundred, mostly children.
The world’s newest country, South Sudan, itself birthed from years of armed struggle against its northern neighbor, has recently ended its inaugural year-long ethnically-tied civil war with negotiations and continued violence. The jihadist movement, Al-Shabaab, remains violently active in both Somalia and Kenya, which the Kenyan president uses to silence detractors supra-legally. Boko Haram ravages Nigeria, desperately attempting to match the cruelty and popularity of it’s big brother in arms, ISIS. Libya has utterly dissolved into microfiefdoms and sent the the fractious Tuareg rebels left over from it’s initial dissolution into a rebellion in northern Mali that has sucked up government forces, Islamist militants, and even French peacekeepers into a churning quagmire. Egyptian reform efforts to replace the last two autocratic rulers have led to yet another autocratic ruler, ready to use his military on any hint of dissent. Twin separatist insurgencies battle a new regime in Yemen that is seemingly no more capable of unifying the nation than the one it replaced just a couple years ago.
Ukraine has enjoyed the bloodiest truce in history, as its civil war remained anything but, with ‘volunteer’ Russian fighters crossing over their shared border and the downing of civilian aircraft. Both side’s backers are in just as much turmoil. Russia’s leader has fully returned to Soviet-era solutions to try and extirpate both the significant opposition to his rule and NGO’s and other groups he accuses of collusion with outside forces. On the other side and no better a footing, the rest of Europe is awash in a variety of interpenetrating dissenting positions ranging from a disdain for the European Union to a fear of impending Islamization of the continent.
Cocaine production has shifted from Colombia to Peru with the imagined level of suffering that such a cottage industry usually brings with it and Venezuela continues to fight rather than address it’s Chauvismo hangover, to the malcontent of the many people who suffered mightily under that regime. Mexico is effectively a menagerie of cartels loosely policed though often supported by government, leading to a toll so horrific it isn’t unreasonable to think of it as an undeclared war of the country on itself. Increased cartel and government violence throughout Central America caused thousands of refugee children to flee to the United States, where they are greeted by the barrel of a gun.
Speaking of the United States, the long simmering lack of trust between minority citizens and the police nominally charged with their protection erupted in protests across the country which has led to repeatedly violent crackdowns, causing further protesting. The polls taken in response to two high profile grand jury results show a deeply divided population. The previous two Congresses continue to mirror America more effectively than any other branch of government, as they continue to slide farther away from any meaningful parlay with their heterodox colleagues. Even tranquil Canada has recently sustained an attack by a radicalized citizen, as did Australia just days ago, that left innocent civilians dead and the public equally confused and horrified.
Everywhere, it seems, national unity is dissolving. This is not some mere illusion cast by an increasingly internationally focused journalism only now showing the world as it has always been. This is a worldwide epidemic of unrest and dissolution. The forces and factors at work are obviously different in each of these cases, but on the aggregate, entropy appears to be just as potent a force in the geopolitical realm as it ever was in the hallowed sciences.
Fission and Fusion
But if we are to crib this entropic principle, we should also be mindful to bring over the critical eye for data they inherited from philosophy. Seen another way, this data is equally explained by an alternate theory. Perhaps this isn’t a case of mass dissolution, but the opposite: a new scale of fusion among the world, our gaze too myopic to see the order of magnitude this change is happening on.
When we adjust our lense, we see the world’s nation-states are ceding ground to a higher level of organization as the people realign their identities beyond the staid borders of old. The jihadis in Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, and elsewhere are actually part of a movement, whose claims, goals, and membership is explicitly global. Those that argue for democratic reform in Russia, Hong Kong, Europe, and the United States are part of a global movement too, as are those that emphasize particularist anti-capitalist nationalism a la the governments of Russia, China, and elsewhere. These movements are molded in part by local issues: Russian calls for democratic reform carry a different tone, character, and set of tactics to those being made by the citizens of Hong Kong. But importantly the people making up the uniquely Russian instantiation have a great deal more in common with those in Hong Kong than they do with the Vladimir Putin and his cohort.
It is false to call this an entirely new phenomena: nationalism itself was in many ways the very first of these supra-movements. By the 18th century, the effects of increased international trade and wider economic orders brought together more people into cohesive groups. No longer were people primarily Aquitanians or Alsacians. They became French first, and any other designation second. A person’s identity was no longer chiefly from their region, be it Essex or Northumbria, but England. The politics too became national, as clubs, factions, and eventually parties sprang up and addressed national issues. The ensuing years, especially the French revolution, proved this maxim to have widespread cache and formed a popular notion that managed to permeate the populations of vastly different areas across Europe. Waves of revolution, recrimination, and violence spread across Europe as people began to realign themselves along new cultural, linguistic, and social lines, inconsistent with previous modes. The crowning achievement came in 1871 with the creation of a new nation-state, Germany, from the varied and disparate leftovers of the Holy Roman Empire and Prussia. This model was further exported from Europe through trade and colonization, and has served as the basic unit of the international order since.
It appears plausible we are experiencing another such convergence. Economic ties between countries have become so inextricably linked that lax regulatory policy in a small Mediterranean economy can cause a cascading effect unleashing the worst financial meltdown in nearly one hundred years in America, Europe, and a host of other areas. It is swiftly becoming all one system. The complete eradication of tariffs and other trade barriers would just be icing on the cake for a global economic order that already functions largely as a whole.
As before with the birth of nationalism, the globalized factions have begun to develop. Militant Salafism, Enlightened Rights, and Statism are a few of the early contenders garnering a world wide following. A strong argument could be made for the environmental movement as another such supra-movement. Each is a loose coalition now, but we can expect them to calcify in response to increased economic integration, along with the evolution of new groups and movements that will spawn even more new international factions.
In short, what is happening is not a devolution as people across the world simultaneously grow estranged from their countrymen. It is the incipient coalescing of myriad people across the planet around sets of principles, loose world-views that are cognizant, even if implicitly, of a bigger field we all now find ourselves playing on.
But, this is merely an alternative explanation for the same data. There isn’t yet enough to lead us conclusively to one theory over the other (or others I haven’t mentioned). That said, it won’t be long until we get more clues. If the unrest continues unabated, and the new normal settles in with drastically reduced national mandates and weakened states, if not destroyed states, than we can surmise that the course of history is moving decisively along the path of entropy. If instead we see greater international cooperation, on the political and social levels, and the continued upheaval is explicitly directed toward goals that go beyond national boundaries, then perhaps we’re going somewhere else entirely.
