Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Is the world too big to be someone's "village"?

The global village concept seems to be proving not so easily applicable. Eg how many people, for example, wake up every morning "in the world"?

What does each person perceive as "home" and a his/her "space"? It is a question of personal choice and factors.

For some their "agora"/"market" is their neighbourhood, for some their city, for some their district, for some their region (e.g. Alsace, Surrey) or land (e.g. Bavaria) or state (e.g. California), for some their country, for some their region (e.g. South America, Southest Europe (aka the Balkans)), for some their continent (Europe, Africa, Asia, America). How many people can perceive the world as their oyster?

The interplay between all these levels of "space" does bring confusion. So do all these regional agreements on Free Trade Areas, Unions (European, African), and the large numbers of bilateral agreements. Which, in effect, do compete with the WTO, UN and other multilateral formats. How much more confusion can the man in the streets of London, Leeds, Lille, Amsterdam, Rome, Warsaw, Budapest, Seattle, Hong Kong, etc. handle?

Is so much choice of frameworks too much choice? Are nations and countries a depasse notion or not? Can they really be replaced by regional (EU, NAFTA, African Union, Mercosur, ASEAN) or global (WTO, UN, etc.) "notions"/"frameworks of mind"? And how can they deal with the transition?

The faltering WTO talks and the EU's Constitution problems are mere indications of the difficulty. Is the transition too fast, too slow or too fuzzy (not clear enough)?

We seem to be living in times which are so transitional that they are too confusing.

People need some stability and some liquidity, some fixed and some variable parameters in their lives. Are they getting that?

Can people live with total liquidity or everything fixed? It seems that most cannot. Most need a balance of the two.

Written: November 11, 2006
Updated: Sept. 29, 2009

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