For a while I've played around with how to theorize the form of social organization which maxes out the particularity of its diverse parts and also maxes out the character of its unity at the highest level of abstraction. This form of organization, at its fullest, would travel comprehensively within and across all its units: so the individual self would be, like the 'state' or the 'market' -- or whatever it is that we would call the even more abstract unity that combines the state and the market into a single organ -- maximally 'thin' as an identity encompassing a maximum number of interacting and interchanging particularities ('me in 1992,' 'my feminine side,' 'my professional face,' 'on the weekend I'm a freak,' etc.). I keep going back to describe this accounts of the abyss in post-Enlightenment writing. Nietzsche gets some of this but the best is probably captured in the words of Bulwer Lytton -- otherwise known as the guy who coined the phrase 'It was a dark and stormy night'. B L referred to a sea of qualities 'all blended, yet all distinct.' The 'sea' is the maximally 'thin' descriptor of the unity; the all blended/all distinct particulate units, fleeting, contingent, interchanging, yet distinct in their co-diversity, are the contents. I decided to call this very fungible and weird and curious and monstrous form of social organization Smithereens.
I'm reminding you and myself of all this because it looks like those kooky kids in the Labour government actually like this monstrosity and want to make the EU into the world's first political Smithereens. Foreign Secretary and Utter Ding-Dong David Miliband apparently desires the following:
* To work toward expanding the EU as a political entity into Russia, the Mahgreb, and beyond;
* To "gradually bring the countries of the Mahgreb, the Middle
East and Eastern Europe in line with the single market, not as an
alternative to membership, but potentially as a step towards it;"
* To equip the EU militarily to fight for human rights and the rule of law within and outside of Europe; and
* To develop shared institutions to overcome religious and cultural divides.
I should say up front that I (still) like continuing EU negotiations with Turkey at a slow and indefinite pace, and that anyone who wants to invade Sudan to stop the universally acknowledged genocide there is both morally and legally honest, an admirable combination. But it's clear to me that Milibandians want to actually fuse European politics and economics so as to transcend both -- so 'the single market' and 'the single union' will be two phrases for the same thing -- and then to expand that Smithereens-like unit across the globe as far as they might wind up liking.
This is bad enough as it is in my opinion, but one of the main reasons why is a serious worsening factor of its own. Namely, Milibandians I think are happily denying the continuing breakup of European national identities into smaller, not bigger, pieces. Belgium, Britain, central Europe, Italy -- where will this movement push next, especially when Muslim immigration hits a critical mass? With the nation-state increasingly incoherent as a descriptor of unity, and with the EU a sea of particulars, identity drives downward toward the local, the tribal, the ethnolinguistic. This merely enforces the Smithereens effect. I suspect that when pressed the Milibandians will actually admit, accept, and finally celebrate this transformation, recognizing after all that they are one of the main pressures bringing it about. Eventually the sub-states that will appear in Europe will be as contingent as anything else, mostly decorative arrangements without any real power.
Oh, except extralegal gangs of enforcers will prowl around stabbing filmmakers and kicking in heads, as 'marginalized' youths of every stripe from suicide bomber to skinhead will band together in small but extremely annoying clumpets to enforce the 'law' of their cliques on those who presume to transcend them. Politics as we once knew it will thus in effect be criminalized. Everyday life will be unprecedentedly commodious and choice-glutted but also at an unprecedented level of crisis, anxiety, and gnawing nihilism. The need for security -- personal, physical, communitarian, psychological, economic -- will become an obsession. Cameras will be everywhere. Gendarmes, almost entirely undercover, will silently prowl every street and restaurant, secretly bristling with networked technological surveillance and protection enhancements. Bombing will be the new mugging, but bombing will also be as rare as mugging in secure areas. Politics, fracturing along with everything else into ever tinier, tighter, and more fleeting affiliations, will become as violent as war but entirely outside of the everywhere/nowhere political/economic order emanating spectrally from Brussels; politics will be crime. And then on that basis it will organize again, streaming into the underground from its deep and equally spectral roots in Russia and its periphery. And finally this counter-Smithereens will interpenetrate the ruling management system of EU Smithereens, and the insanity will consummate itself.
I bet Miliband would hate this life, if he ever fell into scandal and disfavor and got hurled out from the comfortable glass pyramid into the craziness of being a citizen with neither patronage or protection. Some smart bastard should write this novel: JG Ballard, this means you. Miliband ought therefore to fear and despise what he and his ilk want to do with the EU, but his imagination seems fatally crippled by optimism, and so instead he loves the strangeness to come and enthuses over it.
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