I am not writing this article to belie the social calamity of income inequality in Britain, nor to argue for more urgency in remedial foreign policies such as development assistance.  This is purely an analysis of the long-term crisis represented by global disparities of wealth, and the historical choices it will force on many actors in the world-system, from states to activists.

In a talk I heard in my studies at Lancaster University in 2012, former Home Secretary Charles Clarke gave his predictions on the greatest threats to global security in the short-term and long-term future.  One of his predictions struck me as the most important: the ease with which modern media allows different strata of the world to see one another’s vastly different lifestyles, thus threatening to turn global inequality into an ever greater spectacle.  This spectacle has the potential to inspire global rage, perhaps justifiable in the same sense as encountered in the years preceding the French Revolution.  Indeed, the present world order resembles France’s Ancien Régime in many ways.

Immanuel Wallerstein sees world inequality not as something proceeding from countries lagging behind others as a result of historic oppression and debt, but as something proceeding from the existence of “countries” altogether.  In his assessment, the division of the world into distinct nation-states is founded on arbitrary distinctions among the human race, and this gives rise to world inequality.  Taking up such logic, it is hard for one to deny that the dissolution of the nation-state model itself would be a core part of any long-term political designs for remedying world inequality.

We can already see antagonisms that are directly tied to the transnational wealth inequalities on which this article is focused.  Often misleadingly framed as issues between two states, they are actually issues between opposing strata of the world-system itself.  Such issues include crises on the land, like migration to the United States through its brutally enforced border with Mexico, and the inhumane occupation of Palestinian land by the Israeli State.  They include crises on the water, such as migration from North Africa to Spain and Italy.

The crises tied to the enforcement of borders are part of the larger crisis gripping what Wallerstein calls the “interstate system”.  This interstate system is the “political superstructure” of a global division of labor predicated on the historic industrial inequality persisting between entire continents and so-called nations.  Strong states possess advanced factories and skills, while weak states are left to mine arduously.  Wallerstein describes this exploitative situation in terms of a “core-periphery” relationship, in which the industrialized powers represent the “core”.

In my view, Wallerstein’s analysis is compelling.  However, it lacks emphasis on the dawn of digital life, which has added a whole new dimension to the crisis of the world-system by literally turning the world into a community of individuals interacting on an unprecedented supranational level.  This is historically important and bound to change global politics for very profound and complex reasons.

Where does this lead us?  Shall we reject popular sovereignty as obsolete?  Impossible.  It is the sacrosanct foundation of all modern democracy and civil rights, and the only reliable metric of social progress.  Self-determination of nations has been part of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, as is the idea that regimes must be legitimately elected to power by their constituent nations.  However, if the nation is to become obsolete, as predicted in Wallerstein’s analysis of the crisis of the world-system, self-determination still stands because human rights are sacrosanct.  The self-recognition of transnational humanity as sovereign must follow, and global lines of transport and communication make that feasible.  The hard part is educating people that their dear “nation” no longer exists, and that is why speech and writing to sustain a global social narrative are so vital.

Perhaps the end result of the self-determination of humanity is not necessarily “global citizenship” as predicted by some (redundant, since citizenship is designed to exclude others and serves no purpose if it lacks this proscriptive power).  Nor is it necessarily “world government”.  However, we can know that human rights like self-determination will outlive the existence of the nation-state, and the alternative regime will then be designed and elected by the whole of transnational humanity rather than a particular group.

A new form of network-centric governance, authoritative but not authoritarian, based on scientific methods of evaluation, and tolerating no disparities in wealth or information, is a model that could supersede all the nations and make world inequality obsolete.  Such a revised politics would be intellectually consistent with and assist to usher in a Global Resource-Based Economy.