Dr Nicolas Laos
(Political Analyst, RIEAS Member in the International Advisory Board)
Copyright: www.rieas.gr
Since
2008, humanity in general and the Western world in particular have
become deeply aware that a peculiar crisis threatens the very
foundations of the established civilization and contests old
world-conceptions.
In December 2012, the U.S. National
Intelligence Council’s draft “Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds”
recognized that, even though, for much of the last fifty years, the
international system remained stable, the first decade of the 21st
century made it amply clear that the international system –as we know it
today and as it is represented by such organizations as the IMF, World
Bank, WTO, WHO, OECD, United Nations and NATO– must be reformed or,
otherwise, the power of its core institutions will be substantially
decreased and these institutions may even become obsolete. According to
the same global trends publication by the NIC, new institutions should
be expected to emerge that will contribute to the reshaping of the
international system with significant implications for the U.S.A. and
the Western world in geopolitical, security and economic terms.
Analyzing the historical West from Moscow, Russian President Vladimir
Putin, in 2012, in a biennial speech to Russian ambassadors, stated
that “domestic socio-economic problems that have become worse in
industrialized countries as a result of the crisis are weakening the
dominant role of the so-called historical West”.
In 2012, the
Financial Stability Board (FSB) –which was created at the G20 summit in
April 2009– issued its “Global Shadow Banking Monitoring Report”, which
shows that the global financial system is the realm of institutionalized
and generalized corruption and crime. According to this report, in
2011, the global shadow banking system grew to $67 trillion, and the
world shadow dealings were 86% of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in
2011. The shadow banking relative to GDP was 520% of GDP in Hong Kong,
490% in the Netherlands, 370% in the UK and 150% in the U.S.A. The major
cause of this tragic phenomenon is the speculative orientation and
greediness of the Western banking system, which developed catastrophic
practices and innovations in financial engineering after the US
President Bill Clinton decided to repeal the Glass–Steagall Act and
establish a system of “casino capitalism”.
Furthermore, the 21st
century has amply demonstrated that global dominion by any single power
is no longer a realistic international prospect and that the world is
more vulnerable to growing global chaos. Hence, responsible
international players have to create cooperative international
structures. The world will be led to global cooperation either through
intellectual and moral progress or through the experience of chaos and
aggressive politico-economic nationalism.
However, cooperation
and especially international cooperation presuppose common values,
common rules and common norms, i.e. cooperation presupposes
participation in common principles of civilization. Therefore, the
management of the international system is simultaneously a geopolitical,
an economic and a cultural issue.
In the second decade of the
21st century, it became amply clear that the West in particular and the
world in general suffer by a systemic crisis that necessitates
international cooperation, and simultaneously this crisis undermines the
intellectual and moral presuppositions of international cooperation.
Hence, humanity is trapped in a vicious cycle, where systemic crisis
undermines humanity’s capabilities for cooperation, and the lack of
cooperation –as a consequence of the lack of a universal cultural
vision– deepens the crisis.
In her enlightening and
thought-provoking book “La Crise sans fin” (2012), the distinguished
French philosopher Myriam Revault d’Allonnes of the École des hautes
études en sciences sociales argues that the crisis that broke out in
2008 is not simply a phase of a historical evolutionary process about
which one can tell where it comes from and where it goes to. Nor is it
simply one of the known crises of the economic cycle, which will be
succeeded by similar crises. Almost five years after the onset of this
crisis, the world talks about “the crisis” (“la crise”) –as Professor
Myriam Revault d’Allonnes has pointed out– which is not like other
crises, but it is a global crisis of finance, education, culture,
interpersonal relations, family (including the institution of marriage)
and the natural environment.
After analyzing the notion of crisis
according to ancient, medieval and modern philosophers, Professor
Myriam Revault d’Allonnes concludes that ‘crisis’, more than a concept,
is a metaphor that refers not only to an objective reality but also to a
life experience. Hence, crisis narrates and demonstrates the difficulty
of contemporary humans to envisage the orientation of their itinerary
towards the future.
Furthermore, according to Professor Myriam
Revault d’Allonnes, at the dawn of the 21st century, it became clear
that crisis as a concept and as an experience has been mutated: in its
original meaning, crisis signifies the ‘decisive moment’ in the course
of an uncertain process, which, nonetheless, can be diagnosed and,
therefore, it can be managed towards the ‘conclusion of the drama’;
instead, due to the crisis that broke out in the first decade of the
21st century, humanity experiences the moment, or the challenge, of
structural uncertainty about the causes, the consequences and the
general dynamics of the issue. Thus, humanity cannot see the ‘conclusion
of the drama’ in the historical horizon.
At the dawn of 21st
century, the Western world in particular arrived at a situation of deep
identity crisis, which has been skillfully and eloquently analyzed by Dr
Zbigniew Brzezinski –National Security Adviser under former US
President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981)– in his book
“Out of Control” (1993) and by the distinguished French author Pascal Bruckner in his book
“Le sanglot de l’homme blanc” (2002).
Dr Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his book
“Out of Control”,
argues as follows: “We are all racing into the future but it is
increasingly the pace of change, and not our wills, which is shaping
that future. The world is rather like a plane on automatic pilot, with
its speed continuously accelerating but with no defined
destination…History teaches that a superpower cannot long remain
dominant unless it projects –with a measure of self-righteous
confidence– a message of worldwide relevance…But unless that message is
derived from an inner moral code of its own, defining a shared standard
of conduct as an example for others, national self-righteousness can
degenerate into national vanity, devoid of wider appeal. It will be
eventually rejected by others –as was very much the case with the fall
of the Soviet empire”.
The trends of globalization and
multiculturalism that were established in the 20th century and in the
first decade of the 21st century –apart from reflecting the ethos and
serving the interests of capitalist elites and particularly of financial
speculators– are alien to the Western humanist tradition, which was
developed during the Renaissance and the European Enlightenment, and
they show indifference towards the essence of Western culture. Hence,
this type of globalization and this type of multiculturalism undermine
both the cohesion of the Western world and its capacity to articulate a
globally appealing and historically relevant Western cultural proposal.
Even
though several members of the Western capitalist elite think, with
stunning self-complacency, that the West alienates and swallows up other
nations through its own corporate ethos, through the whip of
technocratic financial institutions, through technological gadgets and
through consumption patterns, the West itself becomes alienated by
non-Western communities, too.
As the notion of ‘Westerness’
becomes increasingly dependent on capitalist principles and norms and
increasingly disengaged from the classical Greco-Roman, Renaissance and
Enlightenment values and institutions, the Western world undergoes a
deep cultural alienation by non-Western cultural systems. In the context
of many Western academic institutions that conform to the
capitalist-driven models of globalization and multiculturalism, the
founding fathers of the Western culture are displaced from their
‘academic thrones’ in order to be squeezed –next to representatives of
non-Western cultures– in the inconvenient pews of a commercialized and
spiritually disoriented temple of the capitalist globalization.
At
the dawn of the 21st century, the West is unable to articulate the
cultural underpinnings of a model of viable globalization, and it
becomes increasingly fragmented into what the brilliant French
sociologist Michel Maffesoli calls “tribes” in his book
“Le temps des tribus”
(1991), explaining the disintegration of great cultural powers and
arguing that, in the context of postmodernity, social existence is
conducted through fragmented tribal groupings, organized around the
catchwords, brand-names and sound-bites of consumer culture.
Rick
Roderick (1949-2002), Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Duke
University, liked to refer to an old TV show in the US –namely, “Laverne
and Shirley” ran from 1976 to 1983– to highlight how society encourages
ridicule, trivialization and acceptance of how things are (but should
not be). Hand in hand with this cultural crisis of the West goes the
onslaught of oriental metaphysical systems, which undermine the
foundations of Western individualism and the ontology of particularity
and promote oriental world-conceptions inspired by oriental notions of
determinism and obedience to rigid and metaphysically grounded
hierarchies.
In addition, the cultural disorientation and
alienation of the Western world instigates certain Western social groups
–especially those which feel spiritually or financially threatened by
the overwhelming and nihilistic onslaught of global capitalist forces
and postmodernism– to exhibit reactionary behaviour in the forms of
nationalism, racism, fascism, neo-Nazism and socio-political violence.
These reactionary types of behaviour are often a consequence of cultural
insecurity and identity crisis, as the West encounters the overwhelming
desert of nihilism.
What does ‘nihilism’ mean? The word nihilism
comes from the Latin terms ‘ne’ (= ‘not’) + ‘hilum’ (= ‘a hilum’), i.e.
it signifies ‘unknown origin’, or spiritually hovering and disconnected
people.
There is a huge difference between a world order that is
founded on universal humanistic values –which underpin and legitimize
institutions of global governance– and a world order that is built upon a
chaotic cultural hopper, as it is described by the well-known metaphor
of the “Tower of Babel” in the Book of Genesis of the Bible.
Through my book “
The Kairological Qabalah”
(published in Northampton, UK, in 2012, by White Crane Publishing Ltd),
I propose a strategy of spiritual self-awareness, elucidation and
progress for the Western man and a philosophical system for the creation
of an anthropocentric world order.
Building a healthy civil society
The
21st century great crisis has brought to the fore of political debate
the idea of civil society. But this debate is unaware of and unable to
explain the historical transformation of the concept of civil society.
Originally, ‘civil society’ was conceptually equivalent to ‘political
society’, but the dominant modern conception of civil society emphasizes
the autonomy of society (and especially of market society) vis-à-vis
the state. Hence, to talk meaningfully about civil society, one must
analyze the historical development of the notion of civil society and to
understand that the essential constituent elements of the modern
concept of civil society are the following: its autonomy from the state,
its interdependence with the state, and the pluralism of values, ideals
and ways of life that are embedded in its institutions.
There are
two major schools of thought that are concerned with the methodic study
and promotion of civil society. The first school of thought belongs to
the broader socialist political family, and it is a post-Marxist attempt
to find new foundations for socialist ideals in order for the latter to
be elucidated within a broader theoretical framework. In this group,
scholars like John Keane –author of the book
“Democracy and Civil Society”
(1988)– move towards a liberal viewpoint, which emphasizes the
distinction between the concepts of state and society, while other
scholars of this post-Marxist socialist school of civil society, like
Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato – co-authors of the book
“Civil Society and Political Theory”
(1992)–, are primarily concerned with the regulation of civil society
while avoiding the dangers of statism and bureaucracy. Furthermore,
within this school of thought, Paul Hirst –author of the book
“Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social Governance” (1994)–
has put forward innovative arguments, proposing a plurality of
voluntary socialist organizations within civil society, as an
alternative to the model of compulsory socialism, which is founded on
the state and is realized through the state.
A second group of
civil-society theorists is more firmly embedded in the framework of
traditional liberalism. Scholars like Seymour Martin Lipset –author of
the highly influential research paper
“The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited”,
published in the “American Sociological Review”, February 1994–
emphasize the importance of the pluralistic institutions of civil
society to the viability of liberal democracy itself. This thesis has
been strongly defended by Robert D. Putnam –author of the book
“Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy”
(1993)– who demonstrates an empirical connection between autonomous
pluralistic associations and successful democratic governance. As Alexis
de Tocqueville originally argued in the 19th century, these
institutions, i.e. autonomous pluralistic associations (of physical or
legal entities) being voluntarily formed and reformed within civil
society, are the arena in which people learn to trust others with whom
they have no blood or feudal ties.
The notion of trust, as a fundamental element of civil structures, has been emphasized by Adam B. Seligman in his book
“The Idea of Civil Society” (1992), where he treats the religious supposition of universalism as a precondition to John Locke’s idea of civil society.
In addition, Edward Shils –author of the highly influential research paper
“The Virtue of Civil Society”,
published in the journal “Government and Opposition”, Winter 1991–
demonstrates that an ethic of civility is a necessary underpinning of
civil society, and also it is the common spiritual horizon of the
adherents of the variety of ways of life within civil society. This
civil ethic –since it is endorsed by each and every member of civil
society (independently of his/her particular way of life)– constitutes
the basis and the essence of social consensus in a civil-society system.
Moreover, this very ethic underpinning of civil society is often used
by liberal scholars as an answer to communitarian critics of liberal
cosmopolitanism who charge that liberalism has led to the atomism and
moral poverty of modern societies.
The original idea of civil
society, as equivalent in meaning to political society, can be traced
from antiquity to the Enlightenment. But after the Enlightenment, as
part of the reaction against it, the meaning of civil society underwent a
significant change. The shift away from the conception of ‘civil’ and
‘political’ society as conceptual equivalents, towards the modern
conception of civil society as distinct from the state originated with
various scholars in the 18th century, each of whom argued against the
rationalistic universalism associated with the Enlightenment.
Aristotle is credited with the first usage of the term civil society. The Greek phrase used by Aristotle, at the outset of his
“Politics”,
is “koinonia politikē” (which literally means political society). The
Aristotelian term “koinonia politikē” was translated by the first Latin
translators of Aristotle’s works as “societas civilis” and thus in
English became civil society. The Greek noun koinonia has been
translated by Liddell and Scott as “communion, association,
partnership”. The Greek adjective politikē is a derivative of the Greek
noun polis, which is in general a Greek civic republic, and, more
precisely, it means the city as a political community.
The
original ideology of civil society, as a creation of classical Athens
and later on as the major political project of the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment, was founded on the awareness that man himself is the
creator of the institutions that regulate his life. This is the essence
of ‘social autonomy’. The word autonomy is of Greek origin, with auto-
meaning ‘for or by itself’ and nomos meaning law, defining the condition
of creating one’s own laws. In other words, autonomous societies
explicitly self-institute, and, therefore, they believe that no law is
beyond criticism or change, since every law is a human creation. Hence,
as I argue in my book
“The Kairological Qabalah” (2012), history is the fullest expression of human creativity in general and of political life in particular.
But,
in the 18th century, a serious change took place in the West’s
political thought. In particular, a series of scholars, who were members
of the schools of romanticism and of German idealism, attacked against
the rationalistic universalism of the Enlightenment, and they argued
that particular cultural communities and especially particular national
entities are closed systems, which can externally interact among
themselves but can be known only ‘from the inside’, and that there is no
universal value system.
The romantics’ reaction against the
Enlightenment gave rise to the idea of each nation as the home of a
particular people, in the ethnographic or sociological sense –namely, a
cultural community with its own organizing traditions, values and norms.
This idea of a society as a ‘people’ has given rise to the modern
conception of civil society as a unique entity apart from the state.
Whereas in the context of Western Humanism and the European
Enlightenment, the state is accountable to civil society, with its
universal values and requests, the romantics argue that the state must
primarily serve the nation and must be primarily accountable to the
nation, and, therefore, in the context of romanticism and Hegelian
idealism, the state is the supreme institutional form of the
super-individual that is called the ‘nation’ and takes primacy over the
human individual, simply because the first is a bigger individual than
the latter. Thus, nationalism transforms a quantitative argument (the
quantitative superiority of the nation over the human individual) into a
qualitative one (the moral superiority of the nation over the human
individual).
Since states, as a result of nationalism, were
gradually placed under the control of national elites, civil society,
maintaining its universal ideals, separated itself from the state, and,
therefore, Georg Hegel, in his
“Philosophy of Right”,
argued that civil society is a peculiar sphere of life, distinct from
the nation state and the family. In particular, Hegel understood civil
society as a form of market society. Thus, in the 19th and the 20th
centuries, the Western civilization was divided between two powerful
social forces: the nation state and a civil society that had been
degraded to the realm of economic relationships as they exist in the
modern industrial capitalist society; the first subjugates humanity to
communitarian/nationalist agendas, and the latter, as a degenerate form
of civil society, subjugates humanity to the logic of capitalism.
Whereas
the original form of civil society, as it was understood in the context
of classical Athenian democracy and the Enlightenment, emphasizes
autonomy and humanism, the romantics’ nation state and Hegel’s
conception of civil society are totemic societies. The national interest
is the nation state’s totem, and the logic of capitalism is the totem
of Hegel’s conception of civil society.
The major enemies of civil society are the following:
- First,
statism: statism consists in the expansion of state authority at the
expense of society, in the context of (and for the sake of)
oligopolistic/monopolistic capitalism, or monetarism, or state-imposed
austerity programmes, or state-imposed economic ‘bailout’ programmes, or
compulsory state-funded social-security systems (and compulsory
welfare-state schemes), or bureaucratic socialism, or fascism. On the
other hand, civil-society theorists –independently of whether they
follow a form of meta-Marxist socialism or they work strictly within the
framework of classical liberalism– argue for a political economy based
on voluntary agreements among physical/legal persons, with the state
playing the role of the ultimate guarantor of those agreements and of
the human rights.
- Second, nationalism and generally
communitarianism as the antithesis to cosmopolitanism: these theories
and attitudes refuse to accept that the human being has a value that is
prior to and independent of one’s incorporation into a particular
national/religious community. On the contrary, according to the
classical civil-society theory of human rights, the human person enters
history, or rather it produces history, as a bearer of intrinsic value,
which is derived from the very fact that one is a human being, and the
value of humanity is prior to any historical community.
- Third, the
capitalist conception of globalization: in the context of classical
liberal ideology, globalization is primarily a political prerequisite
and a safeguard for the maintenance of the belief in the a priori
character of the rights of man and the citizen, but, on the other hand,
the capitalist version of globalization has distorted the classical
liberal request for globalization and has transformed it into a project
for the world-wide domination of a globalized capitalist elite and
especially of the global financial capital.
A humanist globalization agenda
In
the beginning of the 20th century, the old world order died during the
First World War, which began on 28 June 1914, when the Austrian heir to
the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by a Serb
nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, in Sarajevo. This political crime sent
nations that previously were not intending to go to war into the most
catastrophic war Europe had yet experienced.
In the beginning of
1914, the European international order consisted of six major powers and
an assortment of minor states that the major powers did not care much
about. Those six major powers –namely, the British Empire, the French
Empire, the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman
Empire and the Russian Empire– were ensnared in military alliances whose
purpose was to maintain the established international order. The
political ‘orthodoxy’ among the diplomats of that era was the theory of
the balance of power, or Realpolitik. Thus, they believed that, when
confronted by a significant external threat, states may employ alliance
tactics, such as balancing, bandwagoning, buck passing, and chain
ganging. In the beginning of 1914, there were two major alliances: the
one was the Central Powers (Mittelmächte), composed of the German
Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom
of Bulgaria, and the other was the Triple Entente, composed of the
British Empire, the French Empire and the Russian Empire. Even though
the diplomats of that era thought that international order was assured
due to the established system of balance of power, their expectations
and plans were shattered. Why?
After the assassination of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, confident in its military
prowess, decided to retaliate against Serbia, which was attacked on 28
July 1914. But the Serbs ambushed the Austro-Hungarian forces at the
battle of Cer (August 1914) and at a battle on the banks of Kolubara
River (December 1914). Thus, finally, the Austro-Hungarian armies were
thrown back with heavy losses. However, Russia became involved in the
war in order to assist its ethnically related Serbs, and Germany invaded
France through Belgium and Luxembourg. Moreover, Great Britain became
involved in World War I to the defence of France, whereas the Ottoman
Empire joined the war in the Balkans on the side of the German and the
Austro-Hungarian Empires. When World War I was over, the
Austro-Hungarian, the German, the Ottoman, and the Russian Empires had
lost their imperial status and were at a ruin, whereas the United States
of America, which joined the war late on the side of the Triple
Entente, had emerged as key world player. The old world order had
arrived at its end.
The U.S. President Woodrow Wilson sought to
create a new world order on the basis of his Fourteen Points, which
stressed multilateral diplomacy. Wilson’s project for a new world order
consisted in an attempt to create separate nation states out of former
colonies and ensure international order by creating a League of Nations.
Germany and Austria lost significant parts of their territories, a
group of new and revived nations was created in Eastern Europe, and the
Ottoman Empire was carved up by France and Great Britain according
Paris’ and London’s interests. However, the new world order was still
based on nationalism, which had been dominating the spiritual and
political life of Europe since the 18th century, and, therefore, this
world order was not as new as Woodrow Wilson had hoped.
Germany’s
power was significantly increased under Adolf Hitler’s government.
Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. He, too, sought to create a new world
order, one dominated by the Third Reich (in essence a new German Empire)
and founded on crime. To that end, his policy was focused on seizing
“vital space” (Lebensraum) for the German people by extending Germany’s
borders. Thus, Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia were annexed by Nazi
Germany in 1938, and, in 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. But, since
Poland had a mutual defense treaty (i.e. another balance-of-power
instrument) with Great Britain and France, the invasion of Poland
started World War II.
When World War II was over, Germany again
was at a ruin, and Great Britain and France had lost significant parts
of their imperial territories. On the other hand, the U.S.A. and the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) ascended to the top of
the post-war world order.
The aftermath of World War II is often
considered a new world order. In fact, the victorious powers –namely,
the U.S.A., the U.S.S.R., China, Great Britain, and France– sought to
create a stable world order by creating the United Nations, which,
however, they attempted to keep firmly in their control by making
themselves permanent and, in essence, ruling members of the Security
Council, which had a veto on all UN activities that were not unanimously
approved by these five nations. Hence, since its creation, the UN, far
from enjoying the status of a global government, fell prey to
nationalisms and national-interest calculations.
The lack of
unity among the “United Nations” became amply clear since the beginning
of this institution’s life. From 1945 to 1971, China was not represented
by mainland China, which had become communist, but by “Nationalist”
China, whose government withdrew from mainland China to the island of
Taiwan in 1949. But, ultimately, in 1971, Communist China managed to
occupy China’s seat in the United Nations and membership of the United
Nations Security Council, and, thus, the UN Security Council was divided
into two blocs: the one bloc was composed of the U.S.S.R. and the
People’s Republic of China (Communist China), and the other bloc was
composed of the U.S.A., Great Britain, and France. The new world order
was stillborn.
However, in the 1950s, several Western scholars,
policy-makers and think-tanks, such as the Bilderberg Club, the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, the Council on Foreign Relations,
etc., realized that all these unstable and fragile “new world orders”
were founded on nation states that were short-sighted and committed to
national-interest calculations, and, therefore, they could not give
priority to global issues and global governance. Hence, the ideas of
globalization and global governance emerged as an alternative to
nationalism and old balance-of-power politics. Furthermore, since the
1950s, an increasing number of scholars, opinion-makers and
policy-makers started realizing that global issues call for global
governance.
Thus, in the 1950s, a number of people and
institutions began an attempt to create a truly new world order, one
that is founded on the notion of globalization. David Rockefeller –an
influential and leading member of the Bilderberg Club, the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, and the Council on Foreign Relations–
has articulated a globalization and global-governance doctrine, about
which he wrote, in his
“Memoirs” (2002), the
following: “For more than a century ideological extremists at either end
of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents
such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for
the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and
economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal
working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing
my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others
around the world to build a more integrated global political and
economic structure –one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I
stand guilty, and I am proud of it”. Additionally, David Rockefeller has
been quoted as arguing that a supranational sovereignty of an
intellectual elite and world bankers is preferable to nationalism and
the legacy of national self-determination.
David Rockefeller has
offered precious services to the project of globalization and
international cooperation. The starting point of David Rockefeller’s
globalization doctrine has been historically confirmed, and it is
correct. Indeed, nation states and nationalism have been major sources
of international turmoil and crisis. The history of the nation state is
intimately related to war. But an important point that is missing from
David Rockefeller’s perspective on globalization is that –as we
mentioned earlier in this essay– the philosophical schools of
romanticism and German idealism as well as nationalism caused a serious
transformation of the notion of civil society in 18th century Europe.
According
to Georg Hegel, the major paradigmatic representative of German
idealism, the state is primarily accountable to the nation, and not to
the universal (and hence supranational) values that were represented and
historically objectified by the institution of civil society in the
context of the European Enlightenment and especially in the context of
Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. In the context of Hegelianism, civil society
ceases to be identified with political society, since Hegel defines
civil society as market society, i.e. as the realm of economic
relationships that characterize the modern industrial capitalist
society. In other words, the Hegelian way of understanding civil society
leads to a degenerate form of civil society.
If one’s political
horizon is restricted by Hegelianism and romanticism, the Western world
is trapped between two options: the one option is the nation state’s
nationalist logic, and the other option is the internationalist logic of
a degenerate civil-society’s elite that is identified with the
supranational capital and especially with the global financial capital.
In the 20th century, the Western world did not follow the
anthropocentric cosmopolitan agenda of Kant’s civil-society ideal, and,
therefore, in the first half of the 20th century, the world suffered by
the consequences of nationalist mentalities and of old balance-of-power
policies, and, in the second half of the 20th century, the world
gradually lapsed into the world bankers’ internationalism, which cannot
create a viable international order, because the world bankers’ approach
to globalization is founded on economic terms, along the lines of
Hegel’s conception of civil society, and not on Aristotle’s and Kant’s
theses about the moral underpinnings of civil society.
From the
perspective of humanism, the “new world orders” that were founded on
global capitalism and on the world bankers’ architectural plans about
the world have not been much better than the “new world orders” that
were founded on nation states. After the assumed triumph of a form of
market society during the 1990s and the emergence of “casino
capitalism”, Francis Fukuyama, probably under the influence of Hegel’s
propheticism, dared to declare the end of history (as Hegel had declared
the end of philosophy), i.e. the end of the creativity of human spirit
in the spheres of politics and economics. Both Hegel’s and Fukuyama’s
eschatological prophesies have been proven stunningly wrong. Even though
the contemporary world has departed from the nationalist
world-conception and is moving towards internationalist principles, it
remains warlike and lacks a globalist spiritual vision. Free trade and
international business are only a starting point for the creation of a
really new world order. However, the keystone of a viable globalization
programme is the reformation of people’s consciousness through a
globalist spiritual vision. My book
“The Kairological Qabalah” is, among other things, an attempt to propose an anthropocentric spiritual approach to globalization.
The
world needs a really new world order founded on universal humanistic
values in the spirit of Aristotle’s and Kant’s conceptions of civil
society.
Note: 1)This essay has been
originally announced and published by Dr Nicolas Laos at the
Kairological Society (a philosophical and political club created by him
in 2012) as part of this organization’s manifesto, and also parts of
this essay were published by the author in a series of articles he wrote
for the Greek newspaper “Hellada” in February 2013.
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http://www.whitecranepublishing.com/authors/nicolas-laos/)
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-National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, 2012
-Putnam, R.D., Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994
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In other meetings, members of the AHC in Southern California met with 
area.
Discussions also included the proposed grant of two US Navy Frigates to
Turkey, a move that the AHC members expressed opposition to. 
Economides,
and Angelo & Anna Sakkis. In addition, the AHC Executive Director
also met with representatives from the office of 
