by Francis Fukuyama
The death of the nation-state has been announced by a series of false prophets over the past few years, and particularly during the heyday of the IT boom of the late 1990s when globalization was picking up steam.  Capital, labor, and especially information were said to be unprecedentedly mobile, empowered by new technologies like the Internet; efforts by nation-states to control what flowed over their borders were seen as incredibly retrograde and doomed to failure.  In place of traditional governance through the vertical stovepipes of democratic political systems, there would be a flat world of horizontally organized self-governing entities, that did away with the need for coercion and the kind of top-down control that we associate with national governments.

The nation-state, it turns out, was more durable than that.  Though it was true that technology greatly facilitated the flow of various things across international borders, nation-states were able to provide certain unique services.  They alone could wield the “monopoly of legitimate force” that was capable of enforcing rules on a given territory, and they alone had the resources to provide what economists call public goods, goods that private markets will not produce because their use cannot be restricted to a portion of the public.  The world, moreover, was not “flat”:  the country in whose jurisdiction you lived correlated very strongly with a host of relevant life outcomes, like income, health, opportunities for education and employment, and other important measures.  There were, moreover, public bads as well as public goods, menaces like global disease, terrorism, political struggles over resources whose effects went well beyond the borders of the countries immediately involved.  To cope with them, nation-states continued to be necessary.   And finally, not everything could flow across borders seamlessly:  countries could continue to impose tariffs, subsidize national champions, restrict the flow of immigrants, and even control access to information and ideas, though the latter was decidedly more difficult.  The theory was that the forces of globalization would punish those who violated its rules, so that the system became self-enforcing, but it did not take account of the countervailing political trends that globalization itself produced.

As Caroline Wagner shows in The New Invisible College, however, there are certain domains in which the international flows truly challenge the national state, and one of them is the development of modern natural science.  Unlike technology, a great deal of research in basic science has the character of a public good:  it is hard to exclude people from its benefits, and most importantly, it can develop only in an atmosphere of free and open exchange.  The New Invisible College demonstrates in a dramatic fashion the degree to which scientific collaboration has become internationalized.  While rich countries continue to be the largest sources of funding for scientific research, the character of that research today can only be understood as the byproduct of a horizontal process of social collaboration in which merit and results trump any consideration of national origin or jurisdiction.

It is for this reason that the theory of complex adaptive systems and network analysis becomes critical to the understanding of the evolution of science.  Modern science is an intensely social process, and like other social systems, it is not planned in a hierarchical manner by national governments.  As Wagner clearly shows, it is the emergent characteristic of “invisible colleges” of researchers who are attracted to one another based on the complementarity of their work.  Self-organized systems generate complexity in an unplanned way, through the interactions of individual agents; the final result, as in the case of an ecosystem, is much larger than the sum of its parts.  Distributions will not be normal but will be scale-free and follow power-law rules; it is extremely difficult to anticipate in advance where the nodes of scientific discovery will arise or how different researchers will connect with one another.  Weak links, small worlds, and nodes are the terms most useful in understanding the way that scientific discovery advances.

The central public policy problem that The New Invisible College points to is then the following.  The development of modern science is without doubt an emergent social process that is international in scope and something that cannot be effectively controlled by governments.  And yet it is the taxpayers of different nation-states who are asked to fund this process.  Governments continue to think about scientific research and scientific advance in national terms, as French or Japanese or American science designed to advance the purposes of these particular countries.  Indeed, much of the impetus for the funding of science came directly out of the perceived need to promote science as an input into national defense. 

But while the connection between scientific development and national well-being still clearly exists, science itself flourishes best in a world without national borders, where knowledge is not proprietary but flows to those who can push its limits the furthest.  Moreover, access to the networked world of modern science is of doubtless benefit to poor and developing countries, and yet they are often unable to take advantage of existing scientific resources for lack of funding and human capital.  How are these contradictory imperatives to be reconciled?

The first step, this book suggests, is to recognize the nature of the phenomenon of science itself, its networked character, and the degree to which it has been internationalized.  Governments and taxpayers in rich countries have to understand that this is a domain of extensive externalities, where benefits come but often not directly as a result of planned investments.  Realistically, there needs to be distinctions drawn between different areas of science.  Some, like high energy physics, require large, immobile, capital-intensive investments that require overt cooperation to avoid duplication of effort and to pool funding.  Others, like agricultural research, are dependent on locality and need to be dispersed.  Developing countries in particular need to avoid simply duplicating the twentieth century national science establishments of the developed world, since they have many alternatives for finding specialized niches that take advantage of the openness of the current system.

It is clear that governance mechanisms will have to evolve to keep pace with reality.  The old model of national regulation, in which governments established hierarchical regulatory institutions and in which international cooperation was undertaken through formal treaty organizations based on national regulators, is of necessity giving way to more flexible forms of governance and cross-border cooperation.  Some of it involves informal cooperation at middle levels of government organization, what Anne Marie Slaughter labels “intergovernmentalism,”; some occurs with the help and participation of non-governmental organzations and stakeholders directly in the regulatory process; some involves public-private partnerships between business, NGOs, and governments at various levels.  All of these new forms of governance and international cooperation are troubling because they sidestep formal democratic mechanisms of accountability in favor of less accountable and sometimes less transparent mechanisms, for the sake of effectiveness and speed of decision-making.  But they also seem to be necessary if governance is going to keep up with the speed of the evolution of the social processes being regulated.  These are the challenges we as a world community will need to face in the twenty-first century.

The internationalization of science will pose other kinds of problems of cooperation in the future, as well.  Scientific research produces not just public goods, but public bads as well:  nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction; dangerous biological agents that in the future may be engineered to become more virulent at relatively low cost; and various forms of environmental damage as side effects of good uses.  These necessitate control regimes like the one established by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; but here, the same international, networked character of science that makes it work for positive ends also makes it hard to guard against misuse. 

We cannot, however, even begin to deal with either the positive or negative impacts of scientific advance unless we understand the nature of the phenomenon we are analyzing.  The New Invisible College provides an invaluable service in helping to advance that understanding, and in shifting the terms of the discussion of science policy toward a new paradigm necessitated by the nature of the 21st century world. 

Summer 2007