That piece later became my dystopian novel, Splinterlands, which spelled out in more detail how I imagined those fracture lines would widen over time until geopolitics became micro-politics and only the very smallest units of community were able to weather the global storm (including, of course, the literal storm of climate change). Dystopian novels are supposed to be warnings, but let me assure you of this: dystopian novelists rarely want their predictions to come true. I've watched, horrified, as the words of Splinterlands seemed to leap off my pages and into the world in 2017.
I'm no Cassandra. I don't believe that this fourth great shattering is inevitable. Empires, colonialism, and the Cold War are largely things of the past. But the fracturing of that hitherto indivisible unit of the world community -- the nation-state -- could still be arrested.
It's not particularly popular to defend the state these days in the United States. Even before Trump came to power, the American state was radically expanding its surveillance capabilities, its war-making capacities, and -- among other grim developments -- its punitive policies toward the poor. No surprise then that Trump's promise to deconstruct the federal government struck such a chord among voters, even some on the left.
But the alternative to the current state should not be the non-state. The real alternative is a different state, one that is more democratic, more economically just and sustainable, and less aggressive. For all of its institutional violence and bureaucratic flaws, the state is still the best bet we have for protecting the environment, stretching out a safety net for all, and providing equitable education opportunities to everyone, not to mention its ability to band together with other states to tackle global problems like climate change and pandemics.
French king Louis XIV famously said, "L'etat, c'est moi." Today, thanks to the first three shatterings, across much of the globe the state is no longer Louis XIV or a colonial administration or a superpower overlord. The state is -- or at least should be -- us. If we lose the state in a fourth great shattering, we will lose an important part of ourselves as well: our very humanity.
John Feffer is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands (a Dispatch Books original with Haymarket Books), which Publishers Weekly hails as "a chilling, thoughtful, and intuitive warning." He is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and a TomDispatch regular.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse's Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2017 John Feffer
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
