![]() The plot of the novel couples the political fragmentation of the world with the dissolution of West’s family. In the Splinterlands, this process repeats itself over and over. As we know, these political communities splintered under the pressure of globalization from above and nationalism from below. In both of these states, communist modernization integrated different ethnic groups – many of whom had conceived of themselves as nations – into nation states that transformed, at least for a time, the many into the one. Reflecting on events of the late 20 th century, West sees the breakup of the Soviet Union the civil war that tore apart Yugoslavia as “…the first hints of the new spirit of nationalism that would dominate our future” (15-16). Contrary to Eric Hobsbawm’s post-cold war assessment (1990), nationalism remains a crucially important vector of historical development. Nation states were torn asunder, explains the Julian West of 2050, by forces from above and below. Splinterlands envisions what happens when this foundation is shaken to pieces. The nation state, in other words, serves as a foundation of globalization. ![]() The novel can be read as the elaboration of Ellen Meiskin Wood’s observation that “…in this globalized world where the nation state is supposed to be dying, the irony is that, because the new imperialism depends more than ever on a system of multiple states to maintain global order, it matters more than ever who governs them and how” (2003: 155). By contrast, Splinterlands focuses on the demise of the nation state as the lynchpin of the contemporary global order. Other speculative histories, such Warren Wagar’s A Short History of the Future (1989) or the science fiction genre of cyberpunk (Rosenthal, 1991) conceive of the future by means of extrapolating the trends of the present – more concentrated corporate power, more inequality, more environmental disruption, more virtual reality so that the future winds up being a harsher, seedier and more surreal version of the present. Splinterlands offers us an analytically plausible account of the systemic change. We still care, presumably, about the fate of our globalized world. “Now that everyone has become accustomed to the world as it is,” avers West (in the year 2050), “they are less interested in how it came to be” (14).īut Feffer’s readers are still connected to the world that globalization wrought. ![]() But by 2050, all of this would become a forgotten world. “Pundits,” he remarks, “had already proclaimed the advent of a flat world, a borderless world, a McWorld” (13). Looking back on the world from 2050, West comments that prior to the publication of Splinterlands, most observers held a progressive vision of history in which the world was becoming more integrated, economically, politically and culturally. What happens when forms of global integration disintegrate? What pathways might these processes of the disintegration follow? John Feffer’s novel, Splinterlands, chronicles this passage from integration and fragmentation through the perspective of its narrator, Julian West, an historian-or, as he refers to himself, a geo-paleontologist-who wrote the Splinterlands to great critical acclaim in 2020. They are also questions about the developmental possibilities that inhere within the present, even if these possibilities seem to be mostly entropic in character. These are questions about change rather than stability. What if states lack the willingness and capacity to manage interdependence? What if the challenges of interdependence rise while the capacity and/or willingness of states to manage it declines? But current events-among them Brexit and the election of Donald Trump-pose vexing questions. This makes them stakeholders in the international system and it lends the system stability (Ikenberry, 2014). The substrate of IR, I would say, is not anarchy but different forms of interdependence, which states must manage. I used to be able to talk with my students about liberal internationalism with a fair amount of assurance.
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