Surprises are endless (and boundless), when it come to new information technologies and the Internet. After having permeated communications, offices, factories, homes, hospitals, weapons systems, and a lot more, they are now fostering an even more astonishing social and political evolution: the birth of virtual nations.
The word "nation" is open to misunderstandings. In the late 1800s, Ernest Renan uttered the famous aphorism according to which "the nation is a daily plebiscite". He had in mind what we would now call shared culture and values. In this sense, the nation does not coincide with the state. Austria-Hungary, the multinational Habsburg Empire of his times, was a state, but not a nation, he observed. In English, the word is more generic in its meaning. Adam Smith titled his masterpiece The Wealth of Nations, but he was actually taking about states. Even in our times, Michael Porter titled his management opus The Competitive Advantage of Nations, whereas a Continental author would have probably used "countries" instead. However, in its proper meaning, a nation is a self-aware ethnic unit having cultural autonomy and shared collective aims.
When the Web emerged as a new medium, many social scientists and commentators predicted it would threaten the cultural integrity of nations. The non-territorial nature of the Net, they argued, would bring unprecedented cultural fragmentation and make maintaining a sense of national identity impossible. However, recent experience is pointing in the opposite direction: the Net helps nations stick together, and makes creating new ones much easier.
A virtual nation is born out of the possibility offered to people spread all over the planet to become members of a distinctive community, and plan together for its future. A veritable virtual nation is constituted when a group sets collective aims that are similar to those of a traditional nation: protection of its members, physical and spiritual welfare, shared economic interests, and, most of all, collective power. Two are the basic conditions for a virtual nation to shift from potential to actual: reliable access to direct communication among its members, and a meaningful cause around which the members are ready to mobilize.
Many are the examples of the above. In the US, the publication on the Internet of the Index of Native American Nations is giving a new life to the affirmation of a Native-American Identity. Tamil migrants from Sri Lanka have used communication technology to build a Tamil nation and a sense of national identity. The rediscovery of neglected nations such as Occitania, Kurdistan, Timor East, Maluku, Southern Philippines, as well as the mobilization of Basques and Northern Irish who do not acknowledge existing political arrangements, is leading to the construction of virtual nations. The foundations of a virtual nation can thus be ethnic, as well as political, religious, or even economic.
by Antonio Martelli,
Associate Professor of corporate finance and
Professor of Business Policy and Strategy, Univesità Bocconi