The End of the Nation-State (review)

Book Reviews be thrown for a loss by a line-up that runs from Krzysztof Pomian's "Franks and Gauls" to Nora's own combination of "Gaullists and Communists," while omitting such standard themes as class divisions (there are no index entries for "bourgeoisie" or "proletariat"). Similarly, "Divisions of Space and Time" ignores familiar oppositions such as pays d'oc/ pays d'oéilm favor of geographers' conventions like "the Saint-Malo-Geneva line," discussed by Roger Chartier. As might be expected, the articles themselves are of unequal value. Some are potted summaries of recent historical work on their subjects, while others, such as Marcel Gauchet's exploration of the dynamics underlying the political polarity of right and left, are genuinely original rethinkings of major problems. Although Realms of Memory is dedicated to proving the absence of any fixed definition of Frenchness, the various contributors to this determinedly innovative project tend to revert to one highly traditional conclusion: France remains unique, thanks not to any intrinsic qualities of Frenchness but to its "internal cleavages, which one does not find in other countries to the same degree or on the same scale" (Nora, "Generation," 519). This proposition is, to put it mildly, open to debate: more divided than Germany, precariously unified only in the nineteenth century? Than Spain, riven by repeated civil wars far bloodier than any French conflicts? Than the United States, with its multiple ethnic heritages ? Despite such lapses into the very ethnocentricity their project aims to deconstruct, however, Nora and his colleagues have offered insights that should stimulate rethinking, both of questions concerning France and those relating to other national traditions. Jeremy D. Popkin University of Kentucky Jean-Marie Guéhenno. The End of the Nation-State. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Pp. xiii + 145. $19.95 (cloth). According to former French diplomat Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the nation-state is in eclipse. This worries Guéhenno, not as a Frenchman or civil servant, but as a democrat: "We must ask today whether there can be a democracy without a nation" (xi). For Guéhenno, the answer appears to be no. As nation-states decline, we cease being citizens, we lose our capacity for self-conscious community: ' 'We are deprived not of liberty, but of the idea of liberty. . . . We have lost the foundation of our dignity as free men, the aspiration of forming a body politic" (122). Global anomie replaces la volonté générale. Guéhenno's thesis is that 1989 marked the end of the era of nation-states: Nation-states are "exhausted and sickly," losing public trust and the ability to control their own destinies in an increasingly global world (108). A new "empire" is arising in their place, an empire "without an emperor" in which sovereignty is fragmented into overlapping networks of power and "the spatial solidarity of territorial communities is . . . replaced by temporary interest groups" (17). This new world offers a superabundance of connections, but no community —a surfeit of signs, but no meaning. The answer? Unfortunately, "There is ... no political recipe for confronting the dangers of the postpolitical age" (127). What is required, instead, is a spiritual response, a new Stoicism that might restore our human integrity and thus serve as the "mainspring" for a new form of human community (139). Guéhenno goes about predicting the course of world history with aplomb, erudition, and a passionate coolness. Yet the whole here overreaches its mostly borrowed parts. This is a profoundly conservative, not to say cynical, analysis. To conclude that nothing much can be done is always to say: Let events take their course. And to say that is always to say: 94 SUMMER 1997 Book Reviews Let the strong have their way. Guéhenno's conservatism is not accidental; it is a direct result of the reductionism and determinism that taint virtually every aspect of his discussion . Guéhenno has a penchant for epochal periodization, grandiose generalization, and Manichean polarities that even rationalist philosophers (like this reviewer), will find excessive . Too often hypotheses are presented as if they were established facts. Are transactions displacing production as the sine qua non of economic life? If so, just where does foie...