Determining the new boundaries of political community bids fair to be a central issue for international affairs in the 21st century. This century has been supremely the century of the nation-state. Nationalism, democracy, sovereignty and social welfare have combined to define it; even society itself has been defined by a methodological nationalism which took the nation-state unit as a natural and normal condition of social life.
The idea of international society is still considered strange. So are multinational states, world citizenship or cosmopolitan democracy.
Liberal internationalism is predicated on a liberal nationalism; socialist internationalism was a casualty of the first World War, the failure of the revolutionary surge after it spread beyond the young Soviet Union and then of the consolidation of Stalin's socialism in one country.
Thus the nation-state has largely set the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion that define political community in this century. Aliens or foreigners do not partake fully of those rights to participate in decision-making; citizenship and nationality are normally conflated. And we must remember that even in the most developed democratic societies the universal adult franchise was established for women and the property-less only well into the century.
War, welfare and economic regulation reinforced the strengths and legitimacy of nation-states in the developed world. Even in recent years where a number of them have pooled sovereignty in the European Union it has been argued convincingly that this process is an essential part of their survival as legitimate providers of security and prosperity to their citizens.
Developments at the end of the century have been described by one prominent writer as a crisis in the hyphen joining the two words nation and state together which have so defined political community. Pressures are coming from above and below. Globalisation has become the accepted word to describe the radical internationalisation of economic life, communications and political networks characteristic of our time. It is accompanied in many countries by a reaffirmation of local, sub-national identities and movements together with a fragmentation of the political communities established through the nation-state system.
Debate rages in political life and in many social science disciplines as to whether these new forces represent the eclipse of the nation-state system, displacing it by the gradual emergence of regional super-states and the triumph of globalised market-places which leave national political leaders with little option but to bend to their will. Or has this been exaggerated, partly to convince electorates that it is pointless to attempt to regulate such forces?
It is possible to steer a way between what the most comprehensive study of these phenomena describes as the hyper-globalist and sceptical cases*. It is a misconception, it argues, to look at them in a zero-sum fashion, based on the assumption that the nation-state is automatically the loser to regional integration or global trends.
That tends to be the way the question is posed by Euro-sceptics in the UK, as that state tries to come to terms with its post-imperial role. It does not fit the Irish experience, nor, indeed, that of most other EU member-states. Rather should state sovereignty and national identities be seen as increasingly enmeshed in complex structures of overlapping international forces, relations and movements which have diverse impacts on them.
In the most developed states we are witnessing the emergence of multi-layered governance and multiple political identities above and below the nation-state. Several central features of today's world - interdependence, economic globalisation, human rights universalism, international migration and regional integration - are creating these conditions. These changes are eroding the received foundations of political order, their territorial boundaries and moral imperatives, opening up space for multiple affiliations and allegiances above and beneath the nation-state.
But there is nothing automatic here; it is highly contested ground both politically and theoretically. It will require political struggle and comparative analysis to establish the new boundaries of political community and internationalised politics that are opened up by these prospects.
It is quite possible to envisage ways of civilising and democratising contemporary globalisation by asserting the capacity to regulate and control such forces. Thus the issue need not be seen as pitting national sovereignty against regional or global integration, but rather of alternative models of multi-layered government, whether liberal, republican, cosmopolitan or socialist. The passionate debates surrounding humanitarian intervention after Kosovo or of regulating global trade after Seattle are concerned with mapping out this future.
In both cases we are seeing the emergence of a genuine international civil society alongside the national ones that have so held sway for most of the 20th century. The international non-governmental organisations are an important part of this complex picture, just as are multinational companies and the power they yield.
David Held and his colleagues use the term "overlapping communities of fate" to describe this new phenomenon. The idea of government or of the state can no longer be simply defended as suitable only for a particular closed political community or nation-state. In the future we will need to be citizens of our own communities, and of the region where we live and the wider global order.
Multiple political identities and citizen-ships will be necessary to render such a world democratically accountable.
Inventing the means of doing so will require as great a leap of the political imagination in the 21st century as it took in the 18th century to extend democracy from the level of the town meeting to the nation-state.
The term "democratic deficit" has become established in the European Union to describe the loss of political accountability involved in sovereignty-pooling. Another recent study refers to circumstances in which legal sovereignty has been transferred to the EU in many domains, political sovereignty is increasingly pooled, while popular sovereignty remains firmly rooted in the nation- or member-states**. European integration has in these circumstances flourished as an intra-bureaucratic system, insufficiently scrutinised by the European or national parliaments but bearing increasingly intrusively on all the member-states and now beyond them to the 13 accession states accepted at the European Council in Helsinki this month.
IT IS surely an urgent task to find ways of rendering this new system of internationalised government more democratically accountable. The opportunity to do so through the forthcoming EU Inter-Governmental Conference has apparently been passed over in their decision to limit its agenda predominantly to issues left over from the Amsterdam Treaty. That may not be politically realistic at this time; but if postponed it will only be to reopen the question in coming years, partly through formulating a constitutional document capable of developing the affection and loyalty of 500 million people.
It is not Euro-centric to make this point, but rather to look at the EU experiment as the primary and pioneering example of how to grapple with these overlapping political communities, for the rest of the world.
From the Irish perspective such political experimentation should not be perplexing or feared. The Northern Ireland peace process has involved a deep re-examination of the nation-state forms and ideologies fashioned by Irish nationalism and imperial unionism this century. New definitions of citizenship, nationality and political identities, and the inter-connection between constitutional change in Ireland and Britain have been inspired by international experience and have much to contribute to them. So also has Ireland's experience with European integration, in which sovereignty pooling has bolstered political identity. The new relationship with the Irish Diaspora, is, finally, an extraordinary resource with which to approach a globalising century.
* David Held & Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt & Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformation, Politics, Economics and Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999.
** Brigid Laffan, Rory O'Donnell and Michael Smith, Europe's Experimental Union: Rethinking Integration, London: Routledge, 1999.
Paul Gillespie, Foreign Editor, can be contacted at pgillespie@irish-times.ie