Read The European Dream for Free Online Page A

opportunity, twenty-three years ago, to visit with the late Ilya Prigogine, the Belgian physical chemist. His theory of “dissipative structures,” for which he won a Nobel Prize, offers some guidelines as to why our thinking about property relations and our notions of freedom are radically changing.
    Prigogine brings together assumptions from thermodynamics and cybernetics in his analysis. He observes that all living things as well as many nonliving things are dissipative structures. That is, they maintain their structure by the continuous flow of energy through their system. The flow of energy keeps the system in a constant state of flux. The fluctuations are generally small and can be adjusted to by negative feedback. However, occasionally, says Prigogine, the fluctuations may become so great that the system is unable to adjust, and positive feedback takes over. The fluctuations feed off themselves, and the amplification can easily overwhelm the whole system. When that happens, the system either collapses or reorganizes itself. If it is able to reorganize itself, the new dissipative structure will exhibit a higher order of complexity and integration and a greater flow-through than its predecessor. Each successive ordering, because it is more complex than the one preceding it, is even more vulnerable to fluctuations, collapse, or reordering. Prigogine believes that increased complexity creates the condition for evolutionary development.
    Our complex, high-energy flow-through global economy is a prime example of Prigogine’s dissipative structures. A dramatic change in energy flux anywhere in the system can traumatize the entire system and lead to either collapse or reorganization to a higher, more complex level of performance. In the modern era, when distances were still significant, time was more plentiful, and density of exchange less tight, energy fluctuations anywhere in the world were generally localized in their impact, rarely affecting the entire planet. That is no longer the case. In a globalized economy where space and time are increasingly dense, and everything is more interdependent, any event occurring anywhere in the system can make everything else in the system vulnerable. Networks are the only business models that can accommodate a vulnerable high-risk global economy. Networks bring together interested parties with the specific objective of pooling resources and risk to mitigate losses. Only by cooperating in extended business-to-business and business-to-consumer networks can firms enjoy the kind of just-in-time information, knowledge, and response capacity to adjust rapidly to fluctuations anywhere across the entire global economy.
    In the modern era, when there was still an expansive frontier of untapped resources, labor, and potential wealth to tap all over the world, the combative, autonomous individual—the cowboy mentality—was the ideal commercial prototype, and the market mechanism was the most effective arrangement to expropriate and exploit the many economic possibilities.
    In the new global commercial playing field of increasing complexity and interdependence, opportunities are increasingly modeled around shared vulnerabilities and pooled risks rather than around exclusive self-interest and individual entrepreneurial gambles. In a global risk economy, trust, reciprocity, and cooperation become more important survival values than go-it-alone rugged individualism and adversarial behavior.
     
     
    THE SAME GLOBAL CONDITIONS that are forcing a new cooperative economic model to the fore, based on network architecture, are affecting the political arena as well. Nation-states can no longer go it alone in a dense, interdependent world. Like transnational companies, they are slowly coming together in cooperative networks to better accommodate the realities of a high-risk globalized society. The European Union is the most advanced example of the new transnational governing model, and for that reason,