Nation-state, power and identity (original) (raw)

In 1989, a date that has a symbolic worldwide and trans-cultural relevance, the political history of the world suddenly ceased to be dominated by the planetary contrast between the liberal-democratic West under US control and the communist bloc under Soviet control. Indeed, in that year the fall of the Berlin wall came to be considered the symbol of the slow implosion of the worldwide communist system and definitely marked its end as an economic, political and cultural system representing an alternative to the Western one. The communist political hypothesis proved to be substantially unfeasible, from a structural viewpoint as a social and economic organizational system as well as an ideal place where identity could be built up on the level of collective and individual imagery. The sworn enemy of the United States and Western Europe had surrendered, swept away by himself and by his failure to hold up the mediatic, cultural and industrial comparison with the liberal and consumerist societies, those sustaining a high rate of technological innovation. The end of the merciless, disciplinary and organizational communist logic brought about any consequences, since it caused the clear emergence of the still ongoing crisis of the liberal-democratic modern State 2 , which contrasted with it. As if it had come out of a micro fifty-year-long ice age, human civilization found itself in the presence of powerful telluric and titanic forces 3 , which were re-set in motion by the end of the chilly balance, which was expressed by the concept of cold war, as a metaphor for a permanent conflict. Since it could not realize in an out-and-out nuclear war, which would have threatened human species survival, the conflict had moved on to another level, turning into a bitter struggle on the political, technological, mediatic and economic planes, having an impact 1 Paolo Bellini holds a fellowship from la Région Rhône-Alpes