The European Dream by Jeremy Rifkin Read Free Book Online

geothermal, and hydro stored in the form of hydrogen, and generated locally at end sites in a decentralized fashion, is changing the very nature of how energy is shared. Power, both literally and figuratively, will be increasingly decentralized in the coming century.
    The EU was born into the old world of vertical organization and centralized control. The community was an effort to pool nation-states’ economic, social, and political resources and create “economies of scale” that could compete with the larger political and commercial forces around it. While one of the two political superpowers still exists and transnational corporations continue to expand their reach to every corner of the globe, counterforces at the local and regional levels are emerging that are both challenging global, political, and commercial hegemony and, at the same time, attempting to assert their places in an increasingly connected world.
    The new decentralized technologies are being exploited in two opposite directions—toward greater concentration as well as greater dispersion of power. For example, while Microsoft has attempted to be the gatekeeper to cyberspace by imposing its operating system on most owners of personal computers, the scrappy upstart company Linux, a firm started by social activists dedicated to the free sharing and sourcing of code between computer users, is now threatening Microsoft’s dominance.
    Likewise, while global corporations are using the new decentralized forms of communication to create business-to-business partnerships and establish a tighter grip on their respective industries and the communities in which they do business, local activists around the world use the same connective communication technologies to organize global resistance movements to what they regard as unbridled corporate power.
    The point is, the rise of the new decentralized information and communication technologies in the late 1980s unleashed powerful new forces and countervailing forces and brought many new players onto the public stage. The new connective technologies helped corporations transcend national boundaries and disperse their production and distribution activities around the globe. The same connective technologies, however, helped cities and regions, cultural and ethnic groups, and social and environmental movements to leapfrog national boundaries and begin exercising influence on a broader global playing field.
    The EU suddenly found itself in the midst of a whirlwind of contending forces vying for power and recognition, each with its own resources to bring to bear and its own agenda, and none powerful enough to dominate the political process alone. This was a far more complicated political game.
    Previously, the EU merely had to negotiate its external relationships with the two superpowers, the U.S. and USSR, and its internal relationships among the contending member states. The member states, in turn, contained the myriad of subnational forces within their own territories. The global information and communication revolutions decimated nation-state boundaries just as the cannon once toppled the city-state walls of the feudal era. And, like the former era, new forces were let loose onto the political landscape, this time beyond the reach of the nation-state itself.

The Feedback Revolution
    The first inkling that politically centralized command-and-control mechanisms were too antiquated to accommodate the vast changes in spatial and temporal orientation brought on by the new information and communication technologies came with the sudden fall of the Soviet Empire. The new technologies ran havoc over the rigid bureaucratic style of governance in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The inability of Communist governance, at every level, to respond to the liberating power of decentralized global information and communication technologies helped seal its doom. The old walls of repression and censorship were too