The analysis and arguments you're about to hear were published in 1997.

You can judge for yourself the prescience or the myopia of these arguments.

The life and death of the nation state. of these arguments.

The life and death of the nation state, democracy and nationalism as resource strategies

in the age of violence.

Quote, most important of all, success in war depends on having enough money to provide whatever the enterprise needs.

Robert de Balzac, 1502

The Rubble of History

On November 9 and 10, 1989,

Television broadcast to the world scenes of exuberant East Berliners

dismantling the Berlin Wall with sledgehammers.

Flegeling entrepreneurs among the crowd picked up pieces of the wall that were later marketed to capitalists

far and wide as souvenir paperweights.

A brisk business in these relics was done for years thereafter.

Even as we write, one can still encounter occasional ads in small magazines, offering bits of

old East German concrete for sale at prices ordinarily commanded by high-grade silver ore.

We believe that those who bought the Berlin wallpaper weights should be in no rush to sell.

They hold momentos of something bigger than the collapse of communism.

We believe that the Berlin Wall became the most important pile of historical rubble since the walls of San Giovanni were blasted to smithereens almost five centuries earlier in February 1495.

The leveling of San Giovanni by the French King Charles the 8th was the first blast of the

gunpowder revolution.

It marked the end of the futile phase of history and the advent of industrialism, as we outlined earlier.

...