The riddle of post-national power and the global protocol

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The Internet captured the world by a process of voluntary association and negotiation. No supreme national government forced people to adopt the new language of digital transmission or indeed to be part of the network of global communication. The global protocol is rapidly transforming the old power structure in a process which dispels the importance of geographical borders. The national democratic systems are losing control over their increasingly mobile, cosmopolitan, and free citizens.

Some people are extremely perturbed by this development. The departure from the welfare state and the crisis of democracy are seen as threats to the well-known and homely order which prevailed in the Western world during the last century. But from a global point of view those days were neither remarkably human nor fair.

Mauricio Rojas shows that a new order is growing up between the fragments of the past and the vigorous present, an order based on peaceful co-operation and mutual trust.

Mauricio Rojas is Vice President of Timbro and Senior Lecturer in Economic History