Conclusion: Social Change in the Network Society

Abstract

At the dawn of the information age, a crisis of legitimacy is voiding of meaning and function the institutions of the industrial era. Bypassed by global networks of wealth, power, and information, the modern nation-state has lost much of its sovereignty. By trying to intervene strategically in the global scene, the state loses the capacity to repre-sent its territorially rooted constituencies. In a world in which multi-lateralism is the rule, the separation between nations and states, between the politics of representation and the politics of intervention, disorganizes the political accounting unit on which liberal democracy was built and came to be exercised in the past two centuries. The privatization of public agencies and the attack on the welfare state, while relieving societies of some bureaucratic burden, worsen living conditions for the majority of citizens, break the historic social con-tract between capital, labor, and the state, and remove much of the social safety net, the nuts and bolts of legitimate government for the common people. Torn by the internationalization of finance and production, unable to adapt to the networking of firms and the individualization of work, and challenged by the degendering of employment, the labor move-ment is weakened as a major source of social cohesion and workers' representation. It does not disappear, but it becomes, primarily, a political agent integrated into the realm of public institutions. Main-stream churches, practicing a form of secularized religion dependent either on the state or on the market, lose much of their capacity to enforce behavior in exchange for providing solace, and selling heav-enly real estate. The challenge to patriarchalism, and the crisis of the The Power of Identity, Second edition With a new preface Manuel Castells © 2010 Manuel Castells. ISBN: 978-1-405-19687-1 patriarchal family, disturb the orderly sequence of transmitting cul-tural codes from generation to generation, and shake the foundations of personal security, thus forcing men, women, and children to find new ways of living. Political ideologies that emanate from industrial institutions and organizations, from nation-state-based democratic liberalism to labor-based socialism, find themselves deprived of actual meaning in the new social context. Therefore, they lose their appeal, and, trying to survive, they engage in a series of endless adaptations, running behind the new society, like dusty flags of forgotten wars. As a result of these convergent processes, the sources of what I call in chapter 1 legitimizing identities are drained away. The institutions and organizations of civil society that were constructed around the democratic state, and around the social contract between capital and labor, have become, by and large, empty shells, decreasingly able to relate to people's lives and values in most societies. It is indeed a tragic irony that when most countries in the world finally fought their way to access the institutions of liberal democracy (in my view, the foun-dation of all political democracy), these institutions are so distant from the structure and processes that really matter that they appear to most people as a sarcastic grimace on the new face of history. At the turn of the millennium, the king and the queen, the state and civil society, are both naked, and their children-citizens are wandering around a variety of foster homes. The dissolution of shared identities, which is tantamount to the dissolution of society as a meaningful social system, may well be the state of affairs in our time. Nothing says that new identities have to emerge, new social movements have to re-create society, and new institutions will be rebuilt toward the lendemains qui chantent. At first sight, we are witnessing the emergence of a world exclusively made of markets, networks, individuals, and strategic organizations, apparently governed by patterns of ''rational expectations'' (the new, influential economic theory), except when these ''rational individuals'' suddenly shoot their neighbor, rape a little girl, or spread nerve gas in the subway. No need for identities in this new world: basic instincts, power drives, self-centered strategic calculations, and, at the macro-social level, ''the clear features of a barbarian nomadic dynamic, of a Dionysian element threatening to inundate all borders and rendering international political-legal and civilizational norms problematic.'' 1 A world whose counterpoint could be, as we are seeing already in a number of countries, a nationalist reassertion by the remnants of state structures, abandoning any pretension to legitimacy, and clawing 1 Panarin (1994: 37).