Irish designs on new world order

A US sociologist sees the potential for a rapidly changing Ireland to be the template for a rapidly changing world, writes Kate Holmquist

Take a typical Irish entrepreneur: he spent his Easter holiday catching up with childhood friends and family in Co Clare in his grandfather's "local", where remarkably little has changed in 50 years, even though his pint was served by a Czech and the nearby hotels where the tourists stay are staffed by eastern Europeans. Today he's off to China to network with business contacts there, while keeping in touch via e-mail with business partners in the US and Europe.

His laptop is his "office", although he has a Dublin base where paperwork is done. He'll be back for meetings in Dublin next week, before heading for Bulgaria, where he's part of a property investment consortium.

Let's call him Conor. He, his wife and teenage children live in Dublin because the schools are good and his wife wants to be near her mother, although his wife does much of her shopping in New York and goes for "girls' weekends" with her sisters in Paris and other European cities.

The family are all looking forward to some uninterrupted family time this summer at their holiday home in Spain, while their Filipina housekeeper goes home to visit her children. In Spain, Conor will play golf with the usual crowd who are all Irish-born, but who he only ever sees in Spain. The golf club feels like a little piece of Ireland, sometimes.

In his heart, Conor is Irish, which for him is a state of mind as much as it is a place on the map. On his travels, he meets people who feel "Irish" too, even though some of them have never been to the island of Ireland. For them, Ireland is Guinness, Riverdance, literature and the stories their Irish great-grandparents told them long ago. Ireland is also represented by people like Conor, international entrepreneurs and ambassadors who seem to be at ease anywhere in the world, without losing their core identity.

Sociologist Saskia Sassen calls lifestyles like Conor's "multiplex", or multi-layered. His way of living - which many of us share to some degree, if not the same extreme - puts "multi-tasking" in the shade. Conor lives on several levels and in several places at one time. The boundaries of any particular "nation-state" - with its laws and regulations - are matters for his lawyers and accountants to sort out. Conor conducts most of his business in cyberspace, making his Irishness more a matter of personal loyalty than geographic location.

The incredible pace at which the Irish have attuned themselves to this new way of being puts this tiny country at the vanguard of the third major transition in human history, Sassen believes. The first occurred in medieval times, when people were bound to feudal rulers. The second was the emergence of the nation-state and the third - now under way - is the creation of a new world order where nation-states will gradually dissolve to make way for global allegiances that exist on a level beyond physical geography.

She argues that this State has been in the forefront of this change in two ways: by embracing membership of the EU and, in the late 1980s and 1990s, by encouraging US companies to set up here, bringing with them digital networks that have connected the State to the globe. The UK, by contrast, has continued to cling to its old view of "empire" while the US has become increasingly isolated and its people narrow in their thinking. Yet the State has managed to maintain good relationships with both the US and the UK, a further sign of our flexibility.

"The Irish State has set an example of very advanced, sophisticated thinking. It has engineered a very focused economic plan with a clear shape. Ireland is an emblemmatic, natural experiment that allows me and others to do the research that will help show us what the future will look like for all of us," she says.

Our children are completely attuned to this new way of living, using texts and websites such as Bebo to communicate with each other in preparation for the day when they too will be cyber-nomads with careers that take them all over the world, while more traditional jobs that do not require high degrees of education and travel are increasingly taken up by immigrants.

Our children will come and go, choosing - as many people do now - to live here during periods of their lives, but not for their lifetimes. We will no longer regard ourselves as "citizens" of "nations", but as members of a new order that we will have to consciously create.

The fact that the Irish, in a mere 15 years, have embraced this new way of life without social upheaval is a remarkable example of the flexibility of the human mind in general, and perhaps the Irish mind in particular, Sassen thinks.

The current wave of immigration into the State is just a symptom of the blurring of the old view of nationhood. Sasken calls this "denationalisation", and she thinks that our own painful past of emigration prepared us for it in ways we were unaware of at the time, by creating networks of people linked to the State.

In leaving the geographic island of Ireland behind, the Irish brought Ireland with them in the form of music, story-telling, theatre and literature. The result is that the emotional and artistic sensibility that is "Ireland" is familiar and appealing to hundreds of millions of people around the world - as the success of Riverdance has shown.

Thousands of "Irish" websites and chatrooms enable people to be "in Ireland" even though they may have never set foot here, or only visit occasionally.

Sassen's worldview is so drastically different that it's almost too big to comprehend. Yet the Irish are better-placed to cope than most because we already have a cultural identity that goes beyond physical geography. For many people who are not Irish citizens, "Ireland" is a much-loved place in the emotional geography of the mind. Following Sassen's argument, we may have to redefine what belonging to Ireland means as Ireland becomes a cyber-emotional "space", rather than a physical place.

To sum it up simply, territory will no longer be geographic, authority will no longer come from individual nation-states and rights will have to be defined and protected through new kinds of legal instruments that we have yet to invent.

"Ireland has a very complex identity that is flexible and can absorb differences. Look at the ease with which Irish society has switched from poverty to wealth," says Sassen. "The challenge now is for Ireland to move on from its dramatic image of the oppressed - characterised by poverty, courage and valour - and make the transition to wealth, while keeping the solid groundwork of identity that it has. There is a possibility for Ireland's transition to be so well-managed that it will show the rest of the world the way to do it. It's time for this State to wrap its brain around the idea of providing infrastructure, rather than telling us how we can treat each other nicely, which is not enough." And she's optimistic that the State will succeed in this, considering how much we've wrapped our brains around already.

• Saskia Sassen will speak at Dublin City University, Q122 Business School, tomorrow, at 4.30pm. Later, at 7.30pm, she will address a UCD conference on migrant workers' rights in Room G32, Earlsfort Terrace. Admission free to both events