THE CRACK-UP OF THE NATION
National governments, by contrast, find it difficult to customize their policies. Locked into Second Wave political and bureaucratic structures, they find it impossible to treat each region or city, each contending racial, religious, social, sexual, or ethnic group differently, let alone to treat each citizen as an individual. As conditions diversify, national decision-makers remain ignorant of fast-changing local requirements. If they try to identify these highly localized or specialized needs, they wind up deluged with overdetailed, indigestible data.
Pierre Trudeau, caught in the struggle against Canadian se-cessionism, put it clearly as early as 1967 when he argued: “You can’t have an operative, operating system of federal government if one part of it, province or state, is in a very important special status, if it has a different set of relationships toward the central government than the other provinces.”
In consequence, national governments in Washington, London, Paris, or Moscow continue, by and large, to impose uniform, standardized policies designed for a mass society on increasingly divergent and segmented publics. Local and individual needs are forgotten or ignored, causing the flames of resentment to reach white heat As de-massification progresses, we can expect separatist or centrifugal forces to intensify dramatically and threaten the unity of many nation-states.
The Third Wave places enormous pressures on the nation-state from below.
FROM THE TOP DOWN
At the same time, we see equally powerful fingers clawing at the nation-state from above. The Third Wave brings new problems, a newstructure of communications, and new actors on the world stage—all of which drastically shrink the power of the individual nation-state.
Just as many problems are too small or localized for national governments to handle effectively, new ones are fast arising that are too large for any nation to cope with alone. “The nation state, which regards itself as absolutely sovereign, is obviously too small to play a real role at the global level,” writes the French political thinker, Denis de Rouge-n icnt. “No one of our 28 European states can any longer by iisclf assure its military defense and its prosperity, its technological resources, . . . the prevention of nuclear wars and of ecological catastrophes.” Nor can the United States, the Soviet Union, or Japan.
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