Re: Dear Friends, No.2

----- Original Message -----
From: Seyed Javad     Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2001
Subject: Dear Friends, No.2
>
> So, in a state-oriented-sponsored academy there could not be any place for
> the theorists who denied the quintessentiality of state and instead spoke
of
> human society


You are partly right, but you exaggerate. There are:
(a) scholars associated with UNU (United Nations University) who do not
believe in the almighty nation-state
(b) World(-)System scholars who treat the world(-)system as the primary unit
of analysis, the state being secondary
(c) the scholars associated with the World Order Models Project (US and
multinational, Richard Falk, Mendlovitz, Sakamoto, Yosh Tandon, Mazrui,
numerous others ). Falk has been criticizing the "system of Westphalia" for
decades
(statist system, nation-state system - its legal foundations were formulated
in 1648 in the "Peace of Westphalia" which ended the 30-year European war of
that time).
(d) a few Canadian aboriginal scholars who have studied the sociology and
history of their aboriginal societies (here, of course, the modern
nation-state is the devil, but you could not say that they have made a pact
with the devil).

And then, of course, you have a whole lot of others, including many
economists, who deny the quintessentiality of the state. But in their
thinking the "state" is not replaced by "human society", but by "the
individual" ("libertarians" in American lingo) or by "enterprise" (anarchy
of the market).

gk