| In February 1997, James Dale
Davidson and William Rees-Mogg published a book that provided
a rigorous and sweeping analysis of the disruptive trends
that are remaking our world: the growth of global capitalism,
the decline of government and the rise of sovereign individuals
- citizens without nations, citizens of the world.
First
published as The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive
and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, the
book was reprinted in paperback last year, with the new
title The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition
to the Information Age. The change in title reflects
the shift in our attention from the fall of communism and
the end of the Cold War to the promise of a new information-based
economy where - for a growing global elite - opportunity
knows no bounds.
Since
Davidson and Rees-Mogg embrace the concept of personal choice,
and the right of the individual to escape excessive government,
it is not surprising that their book has become a manifesto
for libertarians. However, it deserves a much wider audience.
The authors’ reputation for forecasting political and social
change remains intact as they describe the turbulent forces
that are defining today’s political, social and economic
realities. The most significant development, they said back
in 1997, would be the dramatic growth in the number of global
nomads, who would offer their new-economy skills and business
smarts in the world market and choose their nationality
based on the highest bidder.
As
Davidson and Rees-Mogg predicted, the number of ‘sovereign
individuals’ has grown exponentially in recent years, breaking
personal ties to country and challenging borders. Escape
Artist – a web site that is unaffiliated with the authors
– was established several years ago to provide information
to this new mobile professional class and envious wannabes.
Its message is the same.
“Simply put, we believe
that governments and their borders and the concept of government
and borders are obsolete. We humans are only holding on
to these concepts because we have no clear precedent to
call forth to guide us. A hundred years from now this will
all be quite apparent - we will recognize that we live on
one planet and that the borders were meaningless constructs…
The nation-state has ended. Tomorrow
is on its way.”
The web site – administered
in Panama and hosted in Florida - provides resources for
moving and living overseas, including detailed country information,
contacts, immigration guides, job search tools and tips
from expatriates. For those who are not yet ready to move,
or who want to cover all the bases, there is advice on offshore
investing. A free-subscription monthly web magazine,
Escape From America, is emailed to more than 21,000
subscribers.
Robert Gallo, editor
of the web site, promotes the advantages of obtaining legal
second citizenship. “The world is going global and more
and more of us are discovering that we can make better livings
abroad and that the possession of a 2nd Passport increases
our degree of freedom, our latitude of movement and protects
the money we earn from unfair taxation… The new expatriates
are going to smaller economies, that are moving faster.
They are also going to peaceful pristine nations where real
estate is still a bargain. They are working globally as
telecommuters and they are using the internet to make a
living from cyberspace. There is a groundswell of momentum
pushing us towards a borderless world - and a borderless
world is a good place to be.”
The consequences of
the shift in loyalties may be literally earth shaking, as
privileged and knowledgeable elites forsake their countries
in the search for personal advantage and a better place.
But will the world be richer or poorer in the end, for this
new mobility?
Musing
on the increasing prevalence and influence of this new mobile
tribe, which he called the ‘Third Culture,’ U.S. physicist
Lee Smolin wrote, “One can meet young people whose parents
each speak a different language, who grew up in a third
country, did a university education in a fourth, and now
work in a fifth. What the political loyalties of such people
will be is impossible to predict, but it seems not impossible
that the growing concentrations of such people in the areas
of work that most influence public taste and economic growth
may catalyze the evolution of nation states into local governments
and the invention of a global political system.”
The
shape of the new world order will be decided in part based
on whether these global nomads just opt out or become a
voice for global community.
RESOURCES:
Escape Artist -
http://www.escapeartist.com
The Internationalization
of the Third Culture (Lee Smolin) –
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/story/8.html
|
