The unravelling of the `peace process' in Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine, echoes of Rwanda's genocide in Burundi, escalating violence in South Africa, the grumbling aftermath of the Bosnian disaster. What these have in common is that they provoke universal despair: solutions are unimaginable within the framework of existing institutions. Editorialists wring their hands and bemoan the intransigent tribalisms which seem to fuel these conflicts. The standard recipe, in unconscious imitation of Versailles, is to carve up territory into ethnically separate enclaves, at the cost of massive dislocation and palpable injustice.

Where is that brave new world order ushered in by the collapse of Stalinism and apartheid? Where are the triumphalists who crowed over our side's victory in the Cold War? To be more parochial, where are the anthropologists with their in-depth analyses, if not constructive suggestions? Even to begin answering these questions is to confront the intellectual bankruptcy which afflicts political thinking in our day.

It is clear that the world is at the end of something. Whatever political enthusiasms animated our century are exhausted. It would be hard to find a popular government on the planet and, if one ever raised its head, it would be snuffed out by the rest. Mass disaffection from politics is normal, especially among the young. In order to understand our epoch as a transition from an old to a new form of society, we need a historical grasp of what is passing and some alternative ideas about what may be in store. Then we can decide what we think is worth struggling for, even if it is only to shore up the status quo.

The mental paralysis of most politicians, journalists and academics (anthropologists are not alone!) is rooted in their dependence as a class on the bureaucratic order which has come to dominate society in the twentieth century. This in turn is founded on a contradiction which has reached critical proportions in the 1990s. It is the contradiction between the growing interdependence of a world which has discovered the means of universal movement and connection and the division of that world into territorial nation-states, each claiming exclusive rights to control their captive populations.

The state is, first and foremost, an attempt to resist process. The logic of trying to build society around a central fixed point belongs to a civilization based on agriculture. For much of the last 200 years it was thought that such an archaic institution could not possibly organize the restless movement of industrial/commercial society. But the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century gave a new lease of life to their reactionary counterpart, nationalism, the longing to escape from modern reality into a mythical past of shared blood and soil. The 1860s saw the emergence of the definitive political forms capable of taking the world into an era of industrial capitalism. A decade which began with the American civil war, the Italian Risorgimento and the abolition of serfdom in Russia ended with Japan's Meiji Restoration, German unification and the Third French Republic. The holocaust of the first world war revealed the full gruesome power of the industrial state, and the next seventy years were spent fighting over which version would achieve global dominance. Ever since 1945, America, once it saw off the empires of Britain and France, has presided over the effort to preserve the world's states from subversion by popular forces, whether these be anti-colonial movements in Portuguese Africa or democratic opposition to dictatorships everywhere. Seen in this light, the 1990s are the outcome of a process begun in the extraordinary transformations of the 1860s; the decade beginning in 1989 may turn out to be no less extraordinary.

It is fairly commonplace to debate the end of the nation-state. But where are the big ideas contesting to replace it? Growing consciousness of the world's unity might provide an opening for anthropology, were we not addicted to celebrating human diversity alone. Short of embracing global ideas, one answer surely lies in federalism – not the bloated superstate of Tory propaganda nor the Washington reality, but the original idea of Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton. This was a decisive rejection of strong centralized power in favour of local self-government linked to a regional political association wide enough to meet the needs of an expanding continental society on the move. The fact that the United States subsequently became the world's most terrifying nation-state should not blind us to the possibilities inherent in the original concept. There are many contemporary examples of federalism in practice, usually contaminated by state organization. These notably include Western Europe, but also most of the lands of temperate zone new settlement. Among the latter, South Africa is critical. Mandela's `rainbow nation' offers a ready-made alternative to the racial divisions of apartheid. But the nationalism he encourages has already threatened to build walls of discrimination between South Africa and its neighbours. The ANC has long been committed to a strong centralized state; yet the country's provincial organization offers a decentralized model which might be more congruent with wider regional integration.

The defeat of the Panafrican ideal by postcolonial nationalisms has not killed off the agenda of greater regional co-ordination in Africa. The re-entry of South Africa to its own continent adds a new urgency to the issue. Africa is still normally seen as the epitome of disorder, just as it was by Joseph Conrad's generation. It is convenient to think of it as a wild, exotic place – over there, thank God, but not here. But Africa is just an extreme symbol of political problems which are universal in our century. That makes it our problem too.

Take Rwanda and Burundi. As in Ireland, Bosnia and Israel, the terrible violence wreaked by so-called ethnic groups against each other is usually portrayed as the result of a timeless, tribal antagonism. Yet everywhere we look, we find the bloody hand of the modern state. Any anthropologist could tell you that tribes don't - attempt genocide because military equality carries the risk of their being wiped out themselves. Where would the Serbs have been without the Yugoslav army, the Belfast Protestants without London, the Israelis without the Americans? Rwanda's Hutu government thought that their state monopoly gave them the chance to eliminate the other side, an idea which is clearly seductive to Burundi's Tutsi army. These latterday echoes of the `final solution' should remind us that this is not an African invention; Hitler and Stalin can take credit for that.

The region which includes Rwanda and Burundi (countries such as Zaire, Uganda and Tanzania) cries out for a federal pooling of sovereignty in response to its shared problems of security, refugees, food supply and much else. The idea (put forward recently for Burundi) of an ethnically partitioned nation-state on the Bosnian or Israel/Palestine model, to be policed by neocolonial UN troops, is obscene – proof if it were needed that the opinion-making class can only think backwards, not forwards. The twentieth century state has become a monstrous power whose unequal force makes genocide a practical possibility. Why then do we talk about atavistic tribes? Because criticism of the political order we all live by is unthinkable. But barbarism comes in a variety of shades. Are Britain's immigration policies today so far removed from the historical crimes perpetrated on the Irish or on African slaves? Saddam Hussain was not attacked in 1991 for committing genocide against his own people, but for endangering a territorial framework of Gulf oil extraction which includes Israel as well as Kuwait. The logic of the nation-state is inexorable and it removes all legitimacy from political argument.

So where does this leave the anthropologists who, with one or two honourable exceptions, are struck dumb by the catastrophe unfolding on our television sets? We have spent so long castigating our forebears for their involvement in colonialism that we have neglected altogether the greater fault, that we and they have colluded in representing the nation-state form as inevitable. For what else are the social units beloved of anthropologists – culturally homogeneous, territorially bounded, timeless wholes – than the nation-state in microcosm? Just like the nationalists, we sought escape from the modern world in the tribal village, while we busily entrenched ourselves in the national bureaucracies which feed us (or rather, used to feed us). No wonder we are paralysed by our moment of world history, staring speechless at the horrors enacted daily in the places we once claimed to know well.

KEITH HART

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