Church, MNC, Multi-National Corporation, Religion

The Competitors for State Legitimacy

In many ways, the question of whether State Legitimacy is being eroded is a question about the future of the Nation State.  This is not a new question, and many writers have had various points of view (like Bobbitt and his Market State, for example).  Many writers go back, instead of going forward – I’ve recently been reading Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel; Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail; and Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order in some way all address the history of civilisation, and the state and its attendant social order.  There’s usually an epilogue or final chapter on future vision, or what this means, but generally speaking these books and their writers offer a historical framework for thinking through how States, and civilisations, evolve.   Continue reading “The Competitors for State Legitimacy” →

Uncategorized

Feeling, Emotion, Attachment, and Twitter

Sebastian Faulks in the Guardian helps pull together a global visualisation (well, Global to the extent that the Globe is represented by Twitter) of sentiment.  Call me an old cynic, but I suspect someone in his publisher’s publicity team was probably more responsible than the grand old man himself.  Nevertheless, it stirs some interesting dirt from the bottom of our social media puddle.

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bunreacht na heireann, constitution, law, Rule of Law, Uncategorized

Reaction: The Constitution Project @ UCC

I attended the inaugural meeting of The Constitution Project last night, a new academic research unit at UCC, whose meetings are open to the public.  Groups and projects on The Irish Constitution and Irish Constitutional Law seem to be springing up in many places, some by the lunatic fringe, some deep in sheltered academia, and others – like this, it seems – trying to find a balance between the two.  It was a well organised, well chaired event, with a good range of subjects within a reasonably tight framework.  Kicking things off was the subject of the Referendum Process, with Mr Justice Gerard Hogan speaking on the history of referendums, or more accurately the amendment structure under the 1922 constitution and why it was bad. He was followed by Mr Justice Bryan McMahon (who taught me Tort in Galway 22 years ago) who had been chairman of the Referendum Commission in the two most recent referendums, speaking of how the commission works – a rare and insightful discussion.  Dr Theresa Reidy then outlined some opinion poll based research into why people voted as they did in the Oireachtas Inquiries referendum, which was very interesting, particularly in the context of Mr Justice McMahon’s comments.   And finally Dr Maria Cahill revisited the Crotty decision, one that began to get at why we have so many referendums (not just in EU cases).

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Karl Popper, Philosophy, social media

Karl Popper, and Social Probability

I’ve not read much of Popper, a failing I’m looking to rectify soon.  However, one snippit has intrigued me – his assertion that if we can predict a solar eclipse, then we should be able to predict revolutions.  Saying that, I’m not entirely sure if it was an assertion (“…we should be…”) or a question (“…should we be…”).  Nevertheless, our excess of instrumentation today through the integrated digital tooling of everything means that we can measure more than ever before.  With social media, an appropriate big data infrastructure with cutting edge sentiment analytics should be able to measure the pulse of a people.  That’s an experiment I’d like to set up some day, and hopefully I’ll get the time to do it.

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Uncategorized

Assange: Secrecy and Sovereignty
Assange / Correa: Can this be a win-win for both of them?

Ecuador is tonight alleging that the UK authorities have threatened to arrest Julian Assange inside its embassy in London.  Mr Assange, Wikileaks founder and darling of the far left (and some moderates too) has essentially skipped bail following the rejection of his appeal against extradition to Sweden to stand trial for sexual assault.  It is of course part of a bizarre super-story that has been running for two years now, starting with the publication of diplomatic cables between and about governments, the imprisonment and alleged torture of US Marine Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking the cables in the first place.  There is no small irony in the threat from British authorities to cast aside one pillar of diplomacy – the sanctity and sovereignty of the embassy – in order to prosecute the casting aside of another – the leaking of diplomatic cables.

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PhD, Scope, Sports

Sport as State Legitimator in Cuba
Cuban hero Teofilo Stevenson boxing at the 1976 Olympics

State Legitimacy is a big topic.  Yesterday, the good people at the University acceded to my request for external reader status, giving me access to the University subscriptions to online journals.  I didn’t have a ready made list of journals to download (remote access is unfortunately not available to “external readers”) so I sat down and began searching on some of the keywords.  “State Legitimacy” was first; then “Nation State”.  Lots of results, lots of articles, including one particularly interesting piece on Cuba’s efforts to bolster State Legitimacy based on sports.  As the abstract explains,

A crucial element of the legitimating discourse of the Cuban state, domestically and internationally, has been the relative success of its sports teams in international competition. As symbols of the strength of the state and one of the few remaining “successes” of the Revolution, Cuban sports performances remain vital symbolic capital for current and future administrations.

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Church, Fukuyama, Identity, Moral Authority, National Identity, Rule of Law

Church and State; Law and Legitimacy

Trundling along through Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, we have surged through the Chinese and Indian experiences, pushing past Islam and on to Christianity before moving into the Rule of Law in Part Three.  I had not really to this point considered the extent to which law and religion are part of my considerations; at least certainly not the law.  In thinking through the impact on state legitimacy of technology, it is most likely my view that the changing nature of identity is more important, and that that, by extension, undermines the state (insofar as identity is constructed substantially by associations with non-state or super-state groups).  To put it more simply, people associate less with community and nation, and more with brand and interest group, connected through globalised technology.  Identity is also being changed by the decline in religious tradition, at least outside of Muslim states.  However, I had a problem connecting that aspect of religion to my thesis, as it seems only peripherally attributed to the rise in technology.

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brand, measuring legitimacy

Other Methodologies: Failed States and Brand Value

Two indices we can refer to as we calculate State Legitimacy are the Foreign Policy Failed State Index, and the Interbrand Global Brand Index.  I’ve referred already to the Foreign Policy Index here, and I thought I’d mentioned the Interbrand Index here, but I can’t quite put my finger on the link.

The failed state index can be inverted, as we said, to indicate the extent to which states have succeeded,  which is interesting.  The categories too are interesting – demographic pressures, refugees / IDPs, group grievances, human flight, uneven development, economic decline, delegitimization of the state, public services, human rights, security apparatus, factionalized elites, and external intervention.  In truth it sounds like the table of contents for a rather interesting book!  The methodology for the index, which is run in conjunction with the Fund for Peace, outlines how each metric is calculated, though it is most certainly an inexact science.

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Coca Cola, Identity, internet, measuring legitimacy, National Identity, social media

Sentiment Analytics and Measuring Legitimacy
The Soda vs Pop debate – courtesy of http://www.popvssoda.com

A data scientist at Twitter, Edwin Chen, has used twitter to measure the prevalence of the term ‘soda’ versus ‘pop’ or ‘coke’ across the US, and the world.  He compares his work to work done ten years previously on a survey basis, which reveals slight changes over time, but essentially concurs with Chen’s conclusions.  In order to arrive at the data set, Chen had to clean the data by removing extraneous references.  For example, references to specific drinks – like Coca Cola – were eliminated; and only those references to drinks were included.  Then he was left with a pretty accurate picture as represented by Americans who use Twitter – and let’s presume for now that that’s a statistically accurate sample.

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Coca Cola, international community, measuring legitimacy, MNC, Multi-National Corporation, National Identity, Sports

The Illegitimate IOC?

Wednesday’s Op-Ed by Jules Boykoff in the New York Times criticises the IOC for its elitism and arrogance.  Sidestepping the conventional criticism of corruption, Boykoff attacks governance, the preponderance of royalty on the committee, and, essentially, its condescension.  It is in effect a commercial construct that denies accountability (such as the ethics committee who report to the IOC executive, populated no doubt by – as Sir Humphrey would refer to them – sound men) and retains, as he concludes, “the arrogance and aloofness” that make it very ordinary indeed.

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