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its successes and failures are being closely watched in every region of the world as nation-state leaders rethink the art of governance in a global era.

10
    Government Without a Center
    D REAMS REFLECT HOPES, not achievements. To this extent, the European Constitution represents a future to be filled in. And, like the U.S. Constitution of more than two hundred years ago, one can point to the many hypocrisies and contradictions that belie the noble sentiments contained in the new European covenant. Nonetheless, the framers of the European Constitution have forthrightly set to paper a vision of the kind of world they aspire to and would like to live in and the rules to oversee the journey.
    For the past half century, Europe’s political elites have engaged in a running struggle to define the limits of power of the emerging European Community. While the federalists have argued for ceding more power to the Union, the confederalists have attempted to retain power in the hands of the member states and have thought of the European Union more as an intergovernmental forum to coordinate national objectives and strengthen each member’s own self-interests. Former French prime minister Lionel Jospin put the confederalist position this way: “I want Europe, but I remain attached to my nation. Making Europe without unmaking France, or any other European nation, that is my political choice.” 1 In other words, the Union is to be a “Europe of States.” All of the compromises along the way have reflected the tensions between these two divergent forces.
    While the powers that be continue to jostle back and forth between federalism and confederalism, the very technological, economic, and social realities that gave rise to the European Community and that continue to push it along its journey to union have created a political dynamic of a different sort. Rather than becoming a superstate or a mechanism to represent the enlightened national self-interests, the EU has metamorphosed into a third form. It has become a discursive forum whose function is to referee relationships and help coordinate activity among a range of players, of which the nation-state is only one. The EU’s primary role has become orchestral. It facilitates the coming together of networks of engagement that include nation-states but also extend outward to transnational organizations and inward to municipal and regional governments, as well as civil society organizations.
    The EU is a response to a peculiar kind of globalization—one that the visionaries of the post-World War II era never anticipated. Between 1945 and the late 1980s, the world was divided into two powerful political blocs, the United States and the Soviet Union. Each attempted to expand its sphere of influence by exercising a measure of centralized control over countries, regions, and global commercial forces. Likewise, the post-World War II era saw the rise of several hundred transnational corporations who sought to extend their reach and influence by transborder mergers and acquisitions and the establishment of vast global value chains. This was the era of centralized and hierarchical command-and-control operations, at both the political and economic levels.
    What neither the politicians nor business leaders foresaw was the advent of a new kind of technology revolution whose modus operandi is, at the same time, both highly connective and decentralized. The software revolution, the digitalization of media, personal computers, the World Wide Web, and wireless information flows transformed communications from a vertical to a horizontal plane and from centralized command-and-control to decentralized interactivity. Similarly, the shift in the global energy regime, which is just now getting under way, from elite energy sources such as oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear, which are centrally organized and vertically distributed, to more dispersed renewable energy sources such as the sun, wind, biomass,