ROSCOE, Paul (Maine)
THE PROBLEM WITH POLITIES: THEORETICAL ASPECTS OF UNITS AND UNIFICATION

Notwithstanding the importance of the project and the enormous anthropological literature on globalizing processes, attempts to forecast the future of planetary globalization are few, largely empirical, and focused primarily on polities - their number, their areas, or their periodicity. As important as these attempts are, their authors readily concede that they are also crude. This paper seeks to theorize and expand these discussions, focusing in particular on power rather than just polities, and on the natures and properties of different globalizing institutions. A polity is not simply a hierarchy under apical control; indeed, the apex may exert very limited control--witness the UN's control over its component nations. Rather, polities are a dynamic product of what Giddens has called the dialectic of control, a process that results in a hierarchy of clouds (or pools) of power, so to speak. Also, global unification proceeds simultaneously along several dimensions, which, though obviously linked in practice, are separable analytically: the politico-military, the economic, and the ideological (both religious and secular). Thus, it could be argued, flows of global capital furnish multinational corporations with a more efficient control over many aspects of international life than the politico-military activities of nation-states. To conclude, the paper discusses some of the implications of these complexities for our empirical attempts to project the global future.