Relocated Authority in a Reorganized Politics

As indicated by the futile debate over the "new world order" proclaimed nearly a decade ago or by the more recent spate of remedies proposed to prevent another Asian financial crisis, the search for new and effective institutional contexts has been intense and largely unsuccessful. More than that, while practitioners may unknowingly stumble upon and evolve fledgling institutions, scholars are likely to continue the search for contexts until such time that they take fully into account the profound transformations at work in the world. Neither the potential for new institutional arrangements nor the extent of their emergence are likely to be appreciated unless the stark implications of these transformations are recognized and accepted. For, in my judgment, both the assumptions on which practitioners presently rely and the questions academics presently investigate are no longer suitable to address the forces at work in the world. To many research agendas, it seems to me, are still rooted deeply in the premise that the world is criss-crossed by boundaries that divide the international from the domestic and that accord to nation-states the role of presiding over these boundaries. Such a conception of world affairs is, I am convinced, profoundly flawed. The transformations of the institutions, structures, and processes that sustain economic, political, and social life today are so extensive as to render the international-domestic dichotomy obsolete and, even worse, to intrude severe distortions into our grasp of how the world works.

Elsewhere I have treated these transformations as so substantial as to be expressive of the emergence of a new epoch. Here, therefore, they need only be briefly summarized by way of undertaking an effort to explore whether the emergent epoch is rooted in dialectical or cyclical dynamics and, if the former, what kinds of new social contracts are likely to evolve under epochal conditions that can no longer sustain those that developed out of the Treaty of Westphalia and the American and French Revolutions centuries ago. As will be seen, the expectation that new social contracts will accompany the emergent epoch stems not from a commitment to values that espouse civil society, but rather from an empirical formulation that points to the evolution of such contracts. The conclusion that new social contracts are in the offing derives from the many dynamic transformations that are altering the authority structures which have long undergirded the expiring epoch and our understanding of it.

Perhaps the most significant transformation underlying the emergent epoch concerns the diminished role of the state and territoriality. For more than a few analysts this diminution is a misreading of the role states play in the course of events, a vast underestimate of their power and influence. But in my view the diminution is a clear-cut central tendency, an accurate portrayal of a major trendline unfolding in the current era. Yes, state institutions still have a modicum of authority, but their capacity to exercise it has lessened considerably. States cannot prevent ideas from moving across their borders. They cannot control the flow of money, jobs, and production facilities in and out of their country. They have only minimal control over the flow of people and virtually no control over the flow of drugs. Their capacity to promote and maintain cohesion among the groups that comprise their society is at an all-time low as crime, corruption, and ethnic sensitivities undermine any larger sense of national community they may have had. Cynicism toward politicians and major institutions is widespread and people increasingly perceive no connection between their own welfare and that of their communities. Selfishness and greed have replaced more encompassing loyalties. Thus many states are unable to enforce laws, prevent widespread corruption, or mobilize their armed forces for battle. They cannot collectively bring order to wartorn societies. In short, landscapes have been supplemented and---in many instances---replaced by ethnoscapes, financescapes, ideoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, and identiscapes.

This listing of the weaknesses of states could be enumerated at length, but it is sufficient for the purpose of emphasizing that the central institution of modern society is no longer suitable as the organizing focus of our research agendas. Rather than divide up the world in terms of clear-cut boundaries that separate the domestic from the international, it needs to be seen as consisting of indeterminate and shifting boundaries that differentiate the local from the global. Put in terms of our research agendas, we need to cease thinking of ourselves as students of international relations and begin to view our inquiries as devoted to the study of global affairs, a reorientation that makes it easier to remove the state from the center of our concerns and that allows for unfettered probings of the relations that link the local and the global, the regional and the provincial, the social and the political, the private and the public, the multinational corporation and the nongovernmental organization (NGO), the U.S.'s cultural artifacts and their adaptation into non-American settings, the social movement and its disparate supporters, and a host of other connections that tend to be obscured by the imposition of state-based conceptions. Stated in an even more general way, the discipline of political science needs to approach political contestation as unfolding in decentralized, often nebulous institutional contexts.

Such an orientation might not be difficult: other disciplines have accomplished it. Anthropologists, for example, "have now acquired the habit of contrasting the local and the global, and tend to take for granted that the local is to the global more or less as continuity is to change." Yet, it is a measure of the degree to which specialists in world affairs are entrapped in state-based models that I immediately need to intrude a caveat and emphasize that I am not anticipating the demise of the state as a political entity. It ought to be unnecessary to make this disclaimer, but states are so deeply ensconced in our paradigms that I feel compelled to stress what I am not saying. The state will surely be around for the foreseeable future and I am not saying otherwise. Rather, I think it is probable, as will be seen, that other spheres of authority (SOAs) designed to cope with the links and overlaps between localizing and globalizing dynamics will evolve and render the global stage ever more dense. Some SOAs will prove to be rivals of states, while others will become their partners, but in either event SOAs---or whatever they come to be labeled---seem likely to move to the center of our research agendas.

Let me sum up this point about the state with a broad generalization that I offer in the hope of giving us a reason to pause and reconsider our organizing premises. I think we have, understandably, become so accustomed to assuming states are THE terminal political collectivity of social systems that we lack any inclination to view the dynamics and transformations presently at work in the world as the first traces of new terminal entities that may emerge in the future. More than that, we are so accustomed to the state as a provider of stability and order that we presume any other terminal entity will perforce be marked by instability and disorder. In short, we do not treat terminal entities as problematic, as susceptible to change and evolution, all of which stifles our imaginations and curbs our talents. So I would say we need to dare to be counter-intuitive or, to use a phrase I prefer, to treat constants as variables and then to let our variables vary.

One person who has dared to be counter-intuitive is Vásclav Havel. He recently observed that, "In the next century I believe most states will begin to change from cultlike entities charged with emotion into far simpler and more civilized entities, into less powerful and more rational administrative units that will represent only one of the many complex and multileveled ways in which our planetary society is organized."

Free of the shackles of state-based models, it seems clear that the emergent epoch is defined by the interaction between globalization and localization, between those dynamics that promote an expansion of activities and attitudes beyond their existing confines and those that impel a contraction of activities and attitudes from their prior limits. In other words, I conceive of globalization not as referring to developments and orientations that are global in scope, but rather as denoting expansivity which may or may not eventuate in global phenomena, as "processes whereby social relations acquire relatively placeless, distanceless and borderless qualities." Similarly, localization does not refer to events that culminate in what is conventionally known as the local community; rather, it depicts processes of devolution that may or may not converge on local communities. Thus, for example, a state can be viewed as a local entity when nationalistic forces take it over and press for a cancellation of treaty obligations, just as a city can be treated as globalizing when it paves the way for investors from abroad.

As the world shrinks, as the Internet and other communications technologies render the distant ever more proximate and vice versa, as more and more people from the tourist to the terrorist move around the world, as money in the trillions is transferred in milliseconds from and to accounts everywhere, as goods and services are increasingly produced far from where they are consumed, as drugs, diseases, and weapons move readily from continent to continent, so do the interactions between globalization and localization intensify. And the more they intensify, the more do the loci of authority undergo both decentralization and centralization, movements downward to subnational collectivities and upward to supranational entities that narrow the range of controls available to the national state.

Indeed, I have long contended that an alternative---and the best---way to grasp the nature of world affairs is to focus on the contradictions that pervade the course of events. Each day brings word of a world inching slowly toward sanity even as it moves toward breakdown. And not only do these integrative and disintegrative events occur simultaneously, but more often than not they are causally related. More than that, the causal links tend to cumulate and generate a momentum such that integrative increments tend to give rise to disintegrative increments, and vice versa. The simultaneity of the good and the bad, the global and the local, the coherent and the incoherent, the centralizing and the decentralizing, the integrating and the fragmenting---to mention only a few of the interactive polarities that dominate world affairs---underlies the emergence of the new epoch in human affairs and the differences in kind that distinguish it. These polarities amount to an endless series of tensions in which the forces pressing for greater globalization and those inducing greater localization interactively play themselves out. It is important to stress the interactive foundations of these tensions. To disaggregate them for analytic purposes, to confine inquiry only to globalizing dynamics or only to localizing dynamics, is to risk overlooking what makes events unfold as they do. As one observer puts it, " . . . the distinction between the global and the local is becoming very complex and problematic."

In order to facilitate a continual focus on this interactive perspective, I use a label that some find awkward but that serves to capture the tensions and polarities that mark the emergent epoch. The label is fragmegration, a concept that juxtaposes the processes of fragmentation and integration occurring within and among organizations, communities, countries, and transnational systems such that it is virtually impossible not to treat them as interactive and causally linked. To be sure, the label is probably too grating ever to catch on as the prime descriptor of the epoch---to speak of the Westphalian system as having given way to the fragmegrative system runs counter to the need for historic landmarks as a basis for thinking about global structures---but it is nonetheless the case that fragmegrative processes are so pervasive and generic that the emergent epoch seems likely to acquire a label reflective of them. In the absence of a widely accepted label, however, for the present I argue that we live, not in an age of globalization, but in a fragmegrative age.

THE EMERGENT EPOCH

At the root of the epochal transformation is the premise that the order which sustains families, communities, countries, and the world through time rests on contradictions and uncertainties. Where earlier epochs had their central tendencies and orderly patterns, the emergent epoch derives its order from contrary trends and episodic patterns. People now understand, emotionally as well as intellectually, that unexpected events are commonplace, that anomalies are normal occurrences, that minor incidents can mushroom into major outcomes, and that fundamental processes trigger opposing forces even as they expand their scope.

Being complex, the new conditions that have evolved in recent decades cannot be explained by a single source. Technological dynamics are major stimulants, but so is the breakdown of trust, the shrinking of distances, the globalization of economies, the explosive proliferation of organizations, the information revolution, the vast movement of people, the fragmentation of groups and the integration of regions, the surge of democratic practices and the spread of fundamentalism, the cessation of intense enmities and the revival of historic animosities---all of which in turn provoke further reactions that add to the complexity.

Cast in terms of its underlying contradictions, the emergent epoch encompasses tensions between core and periphery, between national and transnational systems, between communitarianism and cosmopolitanism, between cultures and subcultures, between states and markets, between patriots and urbanites, between decentralization and centralization, between universalism and particularism, between pace and space, between the distant and the proximate---to note only the more conspicuous links between opposites that presently underlie the course of events and the development or decline of institutions. And each of these tensions is marked by numerous variants; they take different forms in different parts of the world, in different countries, in different markets, in different communities, in different professions, and in different cyberspaces, with the result that there is enormous diversity in the way people experience the tensions that beset their lives.

Given its many causal factors, each of which reinforces the others, the fragmegrative epoch defies reduction to an overarching theory. There is no easy explanation to what drives the course of events, no overriding answer to the who's-in-charge-here question. Power is too disaggregated, and feedback loops are too pervasive, to assert that global affairs are now driven by the United States, or by globalization, or by capitalism, or by whatever grand scheme may seem most compelling. No, what drives the emergent epoch consists of complex dynamics which spring, in turn, from numerous sources and cannot be traced to a singular origin.

NEW SOCIAL CONTRACTS?

The prevalence of fragmegrative tensions on the world's agendas raises a number of crucial questions: How are both individuals and societies going to adapt to the transformations? How can they manage the simultaneous pull toward the local and the global? How well, that is, will societies, groups, and individuals be able to keep their essential structures intact and move toward their goals in the face of dynamic changes that are giving birth to a new epoch? In a decentralizing global system undergoing continual processes wherein authority is undermined and relocated, how can publics be mobilized and problems addressed? If territorial landscapes are giving way to ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, ideoscapes, and identiscapes, what is likely to happen to the loyalties, commitments, and orientations of individuals and groups? Is it possible, as some contend, that global markets "increase the incentives and wherewithal for organizing" new social contracts because they liberate "social, political, and cultural intentions from spatial constraints, and from economic domination"? If the ability of states to control the flow of ideas, money, goods, and people across their boundaries has been substantially diminished, are new political structures likely to evolve, or is the world headed for ever greater disarray? In short, given that the pressures toward the global and the local are deeply embedded in both macro systems and micro individuals, how are the tensions between them likely to play out in the future? Are they likely to interact as a dialectical process, or will their evolution be more characterized by cyclical patterns?

A logical case can be made for a cyclical future. One can reasonably speculate that prolonged periods in which globalizing forces are predominant foster localizing reactions that predominate until the pendulum swings back again to the ascendancy of globalizing dynamics. Conceivably, for example, the fallout of the Asian financial crisis, cascading as it subsequently did through Russia and Brazil, provides the foundation for a reversion back in localizing directions, with states resurrecting barriers to trade and investment to ward off the negative consequences of globalization. But such an explanation has always seemed too simple. The cascading Asian crisis did lead Malaysia in a localizing direction and others may yet follow, but on balance the dynamics underlying fragmegrative tendencies seem much too numerous and diverse to result in unchanging and repetitive cycles. It seems unlikely---to carry the empirical example one step further---that a post-crisis Malaysia will closely resemble its pre-crisis predecessor. One can imagine a number of ways in which Malaysia will emerge from its financial woes with different rules and practices than it had prior to the onset of the 1997 financial collapse. So it seems equally logical to presume that the complexity of fragmegrative dynamics will foster new transformations, that new syntheses will be generated as globalizing theses foster localizing antitheses. The problem is, however, of what might the new syntheses consist? Where, in other words, is the dialectical process heading? For a long time the answer to these questions proved elusive and led me reluctantly to concede that history may be repetitive---a conclusion with which I have never been comfortable---and that thus fragmegration is essentially a cyclical process.

But this reluctant conclusion did not override a nagging sense that history is not so elegant as to be cyclical, that a new synthesis reflective of a dialectic process may well unfold. To make a long story short, eventually the nagging sense won out when further reflection began to focus on the question of why most states, communities, governments, NGOs, and a host of other socio-political systems have managed to adapt to the challenges posed by fragmegrative dynamics. At this point the outlines of a plausible answer evolved: namely, that the disruptive power of fragmegration highlights the large degree to which the glue that holds collectivities together is also undergoing transformation---changes so profound as to encourage the framing of new social contracts that can generate more effective forms of systemic coherence.

And it is here, in the framing and promotion of new social contracts, that a new global order appropriate to the emergent epoch will be shaped and solidified. In the absence of contracts founded on values that enable collectivities to remain intact and move toward their goals, it is reasonable to anticipate that the world is headed for ever greater disarray---for circumstances in which, in effect, there is no social contract or, put even more negatively, social contracts do evolve but they are founded on the principle that every individual is beholden only to himself or herself.

But what might be the bases of new social contracts? Leaving aside self-beholden contracts and the fact that contracts involving aggregates of people cannot be simply imposed from the top, or at least that they must resonate broadly with the affected publics, on what values might the new contracts rest such that localizing and globalizing forces can be reconciled and the tensions between them ameliorated? Whatever contractual variations may derive from local circumstances, are there a core set of values on which all the contracts can be founded? What, then, might be the essential terms of the new contracts? And, no less important, who shall be the parties to the new contracts?

Clearly full answers to these questions require a lengthy treatise that would far exceed the time and space available here. But an outline of tentative answers sufficient for present purposes can be proposed on the basis of the following assumptions:

Contracting Parties

The question of those who are likely to be the major parties to any new social contract is perhaps the easiest to handle. In the past several centuries the parties have been traditional SOAs, the national state, on the one hand and its individuals and publics on the other. But the viability of these contracts have eroded as the territorial state has weakened and the publics have become more skillful, their organizations more numerous, their boundary-spanning activities more extensive, and their coalescence in cyberspace more secure. Clearly, then, the new social contracts must be among more than two parties---that is, clearly the state can no longer be the only collective agent who strikes a bargain with individuals. Clearly, other SOAs can frame contracts with states, with still other SOAs, or with individuals. Clearly, the many collective agents cannot be exclusively founded on territoriality. And no less clear, since the concept of a citizen has long been associated with membership in a state, the individuals who are parties to the new social contracts can no longer be regarded simply as citizens---that is, clearly fragmegration has given rise to a normative change in the meaning of citizenship such that we need to conceive of the individuals who are parties to the new social contracts in terms that reflect the widening or narrowing allegiances and identities fostered by fragmegrative processes.

Let us examine briefly the nature of the three types of parties to the new social contracts. In the case of individuals, the tensions they experience between the tugs of globalizing and localizing dynamics have led either to a multiplicity of new allegiances for those caught up in globalizing processes or to a consolidation of old allegiances and identities for those inclined to retreat to more localized boundaries. Since in both cases the individuals redraw the boundaries within which their affiliations are sustained, it seems appropriate to designate them as "transborder citizens," a term that maintains the relevance of states but allows for the legitimation of new, nonterritorial allegiances and identities. Indeed, fragmegration has so fully highlighted the salience of identiscapes---those horizons that individuals have come to value as a composite of the ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes through which they have reconfigured their identities in a fragmegrative world---that states and the other collectivities which constitute SOAs have increasingly sanctioned and thereby legitimated the transborder citizen. Stated differently, with states no longer capable of providing transborder citizens with protection from a liberal, globalized marketplace, they have agreed, implicitly or otherwise, to recognize their members' need, even their right, to affiliate with other SOAs. The result is a new compromise between states and individuals in which transborder citizens accept globalization and/or its localizing alternatives in exchange for the state's willingness to allow their transborder citizens to seek protection and assistance from other authorities. In effect, traditional citizenship no longer precludes allegiance to other authorities that supersedes those to the state. The new social contracts embody the value that transborder affiliations are legitimate for every individual, a conclusion that points to new SOAs as evolving out of shared but dynamic constructions of transnational and subnational identities.

The same line of reasoning leads to a recasting of the notion of embedded liberalism. As the scholar who identified this social contract put it, "What is needed--for the sake of America and the world--is a new embedded liberalism compromise, a new formula for combining the twin desires of international and domestic stability, one that is appropriate for an international context in which the organization of production and exchange have become globalized, and a domestic context in which past modalities of state intervention lack efficacy or legitimacy."

Turning to the new collective agents with whom transborder citizens may strike new social contracts and who will legitimate and sustain the contracts, they are to be found wherever authority has been and continues to be relocated in the emergent epoch. That is, instead of viewing the world as organized in terms of sovereign states, the new epoch calls for viewing it as consisting of SOAs. Some of these may be partially founded on territoriality, but none are fully grounded in the same kind of geographic space that has marked the nation-state era. Rather, the boundaries of the bargaining agents, the SOAs, are defined by those entities to whom people accord salience and thereby attach their loyalties. Thus an SOA can be an issue regime, a professional organization, a neighborhood, a network of the like-minded, a social movement, a local or provincial government, a disaspora, a regional association, and so on across all the diverse collectivities that have become major sources of relocated authority in an ever more complex and reorganized politics. To be sure, the array of SOAs will include those states that manage to cling to sufficient authority to be the focus of the legitimacy sentiments of individuals, but the advent of diverse SOAs capable of drawing up meaningful social contracts with their adherents has reduced the number of states with the kind of unqualified authority that marked their counterparts in the past.

Put differently, if the nation-state is viewed as having always been an imagined community, a political entity that exists by virtue of the fact that its citizens believe it to exist and thus abide by its institutions, regulations, and policies, the emergent epoch is one in which communities are being re-imagined. The multiple dynamics of our fragmegrative epoch combine to allow people to envision themselves as transborder citizens, as tied to others whose connective tissues constitute an authority structure to which they are responsive. Such structures may be short-lived, as when a social movement achieves its goals and its SOA ceases to exist, but effective authority is embedded in their activities as long as the reasons for their existence endure. The population of collectivities that comprise the multi-centric world, in other words, undergoes continual shifts in its composition.

The organizational decentralization on which many SOAs are founded stems from at least two important sources. First, in order to generate and command allegiance, SOAs have an incentive to develop decentralized authority that permits more proximate links to their members as well as opportunities to evoke their participation. Such close-at-hand contact with existing and prospective members can heighten their loyalties and strengthen the "moral" authority of an SOA. Second, the decentralized structures of many SOAs can serve their need to avoid confrontations with states. In the case of multinational corporations, for example, locating managers in one state and production facilities in another (such as the Maquilladores factories in Mexico) not only serves to increase profits due to lower wage rates, but it also denies striking laborers an office building in front of which to strike and, in addition, the workers and their government have little recourse against an authority (the corporation) protected by another government. Similarly, in the case of voluntary NGOs that are global in scope, their decentralization enables them to better resist and circumvent the authority of states (Greenpeace is illustrative in this regard). That is, by establishing a decentralized niche, SOAs are better able to survive in a world where territorial authorities still retain some capacity to enforce compliance.

Given a skill revolution that is enabling individuals to become increasingly adept at managing multiple identities and loyalties, in the early stages of the evolution of SOAs there is likely to be considerable overlap among them, with the result that initially their boundaries are likely to be obscure and the scope of their authority is likely to be ambiguous. Nor is there any certainty that eventually the boundaries of SOAs will evolve such that the overlaps are eliminated and SOAs become the focus of ultimate loyalties, much as the nation-state has long been the terminal community insofar as loyalties are concerned. Just because states have enjoyed such a status, it would be erroneous to view them as evidence that their successors will become terminal entities. On the contrary, given the large extent to which SOAs are founded on nonterritorial sources of legitimacy, the greater likelihood is that some overlaps will endure, that people will be responsive to one of their SOAs under certain conditions and to others of them under different circumstances, so that what evolves through time is clarity as to where the legitimacy of one SOA ends and where that of another begins.

Is this to say that global structures are likely to resemble those of the medieval era? In important respects such a conclusion is warranted, but along one crucial dimension it is erroneous. Observers who anticipate a return to neo-medieval arrangements perceive close similarities between the decentralized structures of authority and the vast array of political entities that mark the fragmegrative epoch on the one hand and those that prevailed prior to the onset of the interstate system in the 17th century. In the sense that individuals in the former period did not have ultimate loyalties, but rather shared their fealties between the overlapping authority of monarchical and ecclesiastical structures, the comparison holds up inasmuch as the fragmegrative epoch also requires individuals to replace their ultimate loyalty to their state with multiple allegiances to numerous SOAs. Once again, in other words, people will have to learn to balance diverse and sometimes conflicting commitments in the absence of a terminal state. But the structures of the two eras differ in one significant way: in the medieval period the overlapping patterns of authority were top-down structures, whereas in the emergent epoch many of the SOAs are likely to evolve out of bottom-up processes. It is the difference, in effect, between institutions that shared "subjects" and SOAs sustained by the affiliation of transborder citizens.

Nor are the new social contracts necessarily confined to individuals on the one hand and SOAs on the other. The dynamics of fragmegration also encourage contracts between states and other SOAs. The 1997 Kyoto Conference on the environment is illustrative in this respect. On that occasion, as in other U.N.-sponsored meetings, states implicitly acknowledged both the legitimacy and expertise of environmental SOAs.

The Kyoto example poses a difficult question. Are social contracts conceived to be drawn only between collectivities that engage in socially approved activities? What about other SOAs that engage in illicit behavior? Are organizations such as the Cali Cartel or the Mafia likely to be parties to contracts that form SOAs? While states may recognize the right of transborder citizens to engage in contractual arrangements with other SOAs, would a Colombian drug boss countenance a member's multiple affiliations and loyalties? The core of an answer to questions such as these lies in the notion that SOAs are essentially neutral from an analytic point of view. Whether they operate to improve or undermine the human condition is immaterial from the perspective of fragmegrative tensions. What counts is the existence and location of collective authority and not whether it is exercised under desirable or undesirable auspices.

Core Values

Assuming a multiplicity of new social contracts between diverse SOAs and the individuals responsive to them, is there a core set of values on which all the contracts might be founded? While each SOA will doubtless have clauses in its contract that are unique to its circumstances, there are at least two clusters of values that come to mind as plausible core values. One follows from the foregoing discussion and involves an appreciation that no SOA has exclusive authority with respect to those individuals within its purview. In a fragmegrated world people have too many identities and affiliations to accord any SOA the sole legitimacy to make decisions on their behalf. Rather, recognizing that they cannot be responsive to the directives of all the SOAs to which they owe allegiance, their contracts are likely to require them to accept that their various SOAs might issue contradictory directives and that they are obliged to frame a set of priorities for responding to them. Second, faced with contradictory directions, people will be obliged by their contracts to be open to dialogue across---as well as within---the various SOAs relevant to their circumstances. The agenda for such dialogues is likely to consist precisely of those contradictory issues which span their SOAs---issues such as when it is appropriate to accept or resist compromises on such matters, or under what conditions it is acceptable to move out of the purview of one SOA in favor of another.

These core values give rise to two obvious questions. One concerns the readiness of states to embrace the value that does not posit them as holders of exclusive authority and the other focuses on the readiness of individuals to take on the responsibilities inherent in this value. Neither question can be easily answered. In the case of states, they have to begin to abandon, or at least ignore, the long-standing precepts of sovereignty which assert, in effect, that legitimate states can compel obedience with their authority while other legitimate SOAs have no such right to compel compliance. Indeed, the essence of the other SOAs is that they derive their legitimacy from the voluntary and conditional participation of individuals who can revoke their consent at any time. On the other hand, while other SOAs cannot compel obedience, under fragmegrative conditions states are less and less capable of generating compliance than in the past. Even though states can imprison individuals while other SOAs cannot, their authority in the emergent epoch has become more circumscribed. With civil disobedience having lost its social stigma as publics have become unwilling to accept battlefield deaths, few states today can successfully compel individuals to serve in the military. In short, the legitimate exercise of state power has become so delimited by the changing values inherent in fragmegrative tensions that the differences between the authority of states and other SOAs has become increasingly blurred. It might even be argued that other SOAs have proliferated precisely for this reason, that the emergent epoch enables transborder citizens to subscribe to the social contracts of several SOAs voluntarily and to revoke their consent to authority at any time. Put in still another way, the changing values attached to legitimacy have facilitated new SOAs, some of which may expand their membership rolls because skilled transborder citizens increasingly seek protection from the adverse effects of globalization.

As for the question of whether individuals will be amenable to adopting and living by the new contracts, conceivably the long-standing impulse to have a highest loyalty will prevent many people from abiding by a contract in which no SOA is accorded exclusive claims on those within its purview. And if this is the case, it can be argued, surely there will be no basis for accepting an obligation to engage in dialogues that continuously redefine where the boundaries of SOAs are drawn. If the need for a terminal entity to which to attach the highest loyalty is strong, how can it be expected that the new contracts will attract sufficient signatories to be meaningful?

While this pessimistic line of reasoning can hardly be discounted, it may be exaggerated. It fails to allow for the power and urgency of the underlying currents sustaining the emergent epoch. The disarray that is likely to attend the dispersion of authority under pervasive fragmegrative conditions may well serve to encourage an appreciation of the core values (noted above) on which the new social contracts are founded. To be sure, compliance with authority is rooted in habit-driven behavior and people are thus likely to be slow in acknowledging the need for new social contracts and then agreeing to their terms; but at the same time most people are capable of learning and adapting when conditions change, so that in the long run it is possible to conceive of a readiness to negotiate new contracts that are not founded on an exclusive acquiescence to the authority of states. Already a dialogue and literature on the idea of a global civil society have evolved that are deep and broad enough to suggest movement in the direction of some kind of new contractual foundations. Moreover, if it is recalled that the age of fragmegration is pervaded with uncertainty, there are ample incentives to seek, or at least accept, new contracts which might do better in channeling, stabilizing, or even reducing the instabilities of life than do states.

Specific Terms

While it is clearly difficult to generalize about the essential terms that the new social contracts will contain, some seven can be derived from the core values set forth above. To some extent, these reflect the paradoxical nature of fragmegrative tensions in the sense that they stipulate the privatization of many state functions as well as new state obligations beyond their borders.

(1) Organizational Devolution

Partly to allow for the expression of localizing impulses and partly because of an assumption that greater efficiency may be achieved by reducing the sphere within which authority is exercised, a key term of new social contracts is likely to highlight the legitimacy of SOAs reducing the scope of their activities. The trend toward states privatizing many of the protections they once provided citizens is illustrative in this regard, as is the decentralization of multinational corporations, the trend toward autonomy for indigenous peoples, and the operation of the principle of subsidarity in the European Union. To some extent, of course, the inclusion of this term in the contract reflects an aversion to big government and the dynamics of globalization, but in some cases it may also stem from efforts to reduce the distance between organizations and their memberships.

(2) Open Membership

Inasmuch as SOAs can be founded on any number of different issues and aspirations, a crucial term in their contracts is likely to specify that membership in them is open to all persons who are concerned about the issues or qualified to share in the aspirations. Signs of the evolution of norms along this line can be discerned in the increased protection---and, in some cases, citizenship---now being offered by some states to resident aliens. Needless to say, the development of this norm has also been stimulated by the globalizing processes whereby states, corporations, and NGOs seek to enlarge the expertise of their memberships by admitting or recruiting persons from all regions of the world. At the same time, this term of the contract is likely to be highly controversial in the sense that it runs counter to localizing impulses.

(3) Humanitarian Protections

Although surely not yet a term in many present social contracts, there are clear indications that one is evolving that calls for the inclusion of basic human rights in the SOAs of the emergent epoch. The commitment of, say, feminist, handicapped, and ethnic groups to enlarging their sphere of authority so as to protect the well-being of people who qualify for membership in their ranks points to the potential of these values for codification in the new social contracts. Much the same can be said about the ways in which the international community has circumscribed the prerogatives of state sovereignty and framed new rules for foreign intervention to protect individuals in "rogue" states. Norms that uphold the rights of people everywhere to protection can also be seen as stemming from the globalization of personhood as a value to be promoted. Just as the label "citizen" designated new rights and protections that "subjects" did not enjoy in medieval times, so does the emergence of such labels as "transnational citizens," "netizens," "global villagers," and "cybernations" in the age of fragmegration highlight the evolution of new conceptions of individuals and their relationship to authorities.

(4) Shared Expertise

Perhaps more relevant to virtual SOAs in cyberspace than tangible ones in the state- or multi-centric worlds, new social contracts may well include a term that specifies the obligation to share knowledge and expertise. A virtual community that originated in the San Francisco area, for example, has a social contract governing the relationships among its members which includes a rule that nobody is anonymous, and another that expresses an expectation in which members will share the expertise and information they possess with other individuals in the community. Indeed, this commitment to dialogue is widespread among the SOAs in cyberspace and to a large extent similar contractual terms can be found in more than a few transborder groups. To be sure, the issue of intellectual property rights confounds this dimension of the new social contracts, but it is nonetheless the case that many NGOs, such as Médecins Sans Frontières, Greenpeace, and Amnesty International, conjoin political lobbying activities with informational and educational campaigns and, in so doing, reflect an obligation to share socially beneficial knowledge.

(5) Self-reflexivity

Although it is still far from global in scope, it seems likely that increasingly another important term of new social contracts will revolve around the value SOAs accord to the need for self-reflexivity---that is, for a keen awareness on the part of members and SOAs of their place in the more encompassing worlds to which they are responsive---as a quality shared by their members. As one observer sees it, SOAs add to their legitimacy by engaging in political practices that stress self-reflexivity, by which is meant "they must be subjected to continuing critical examination through unmanipulated debate." Given the ways in which the skill revolution has heightened the awareness of transborder citizens of the complexities of their affiliations and the world, self-reflexivity is accelerating as an empirical process and as a norm. Even corporations have participated in this acceleration, as indicated by the example of their behavior in South Africa toward the end of the apartheid era. This example also suggests that the normative content of self-reflexivity is as likely to arise in nongovernmental SOAs as in those sustained by governments, a suggestion that is consistent with the organizational devolution term of the emerging social contracts.

(6) Egalitarianism

This is one term in new social contracts that may never become full-blown and pervasive. The growing disparities exacerbated by globalization between the financially rich and poor, not to mention between the informationally rich and poor, indicate it may be a term that will not be incorporated in social contracts for a long time, if ever. On the other hand, since the new contracts are conceived to be in the nature of syntheses generated by localizing antitheses responding to globalizing theses, conceivably a greater degree of egalitarianism will eventually be embedded in the syntheses and become a major clause of the new contracts. Conceivably, the collapse of time and space makes it increasingly possible to form SOAs that sustain, even presuppose, an equality of rights heretofore unimaginable. How? By new electronic and transportation technologies not only having greatly increased social and geographical mobility, but also by having the consequence of undermining prior social contracts---as one observer puts it, the old "social norms lose their hold on people because people spend a larger proportion of their life with strangers who are not enforcing the norms with the same efficacy."

(7) Territoriality

Since the fragmegrative epoch is marked by the diminution of spatial constraints and the salience of long-standing geographic boundaries, it becomes feasible for a term in social contracts to evolve that allows for the formation and maintenance of large voluntary communities, from social movements to issue regimes, that are founded on metaconventions of cooperation and that specifically exclude territoriality as a basis for organizational structures. In effect, it becomes plausible "to think of space-free social contracting."

(8) Accountability

A central problem for most SOAs is that of rendering the exercise of authority accountable to their members. While there is a discernible trend toward the transparency of their procedures, many SOAs lack formal mechanisms through which their memberships can hold their leaders accountable for their conduct and it may very well be that, like the foregoing clause on egalitarianism, this term of the contract may never evolve into one that specifies formal structures. On the other hand, all of the previous seven terms may contribute, in one way or another, into informal mechanisms of accountability for nonprofit SOAs. Stated most succinctly, the necessity of such an SOA maintaining its authority among a fluid, voluntarist membership of transborder citizens requires its leaders to act so as not to incline its members to give up their commitment and affiliation. In terms of the exit, voice, and loyalty conception of organizational affiliations, the ease of a transborder citizen's exit places a premium on an SOA's ability to facilitate voice. The accountability of many SOAs and their ability to command loyalties and achieve compliance arises precisely because they are voluntary organizations: such an SOA that is not accountable is likely to falter and possibly cease to exist under the dense competitive conditions that mark the multi-centric world.

CONCLUSIONS

From the perspective of the turn of the century, the foregoing outline of the new social contracts generated by fragmegrative dynamics may seem idealistic and unrealistic. After all, it can readily be argued, the new contracts have no clauses which hint at how new institutional contexts will evolve to reconcile fragmegrative tensions or otherwise assure the effectiveness of SOAs in wielding their authority and achieving compliance. Nor are there any clauses which allow for the handling of the even more troubled spots in the world where localizing dynamics are such as to have fostered violence and resistance to new sources of authority. On the contrary, there is no basis for believing that the emergent epoch will not be as marred by difficult and intractable trouble spots as the expiring epoch has been; indeed, such situations may never achieve a synthesis between globalizing theses and localizing antitheses. And surely it is also the case that any new contracts will be slow to develop and the habits necessary to support them may require generations to become fully implanted.

But such a line of reasoning ignores the transformative dynamics at work in the world and presumes that the future is bound to emulate the past. Thus it is equally reasonable to presume that the uncertainties inherent in the multiplicity of fragmegrative tensions are so pervasive that any number of plausible futures may unfold. Viewed in this way, it may not be idealistic to conclude that the acceleration of the organizational explosion, the skill revolution, and the mobility upheaval render the probability of new institutional contexts expressive of new social contracts evolving no less than the likelihood of the old contracts perpetuating a state-dominated world. The answer to the who's-in-charge-here question may well prove to be that, given a continual disaggregation of authority, many collectivities will be in charge. Or perhaps the question should be rephrased: who is not in charge here?