Map of the World Government

The map of "World Government," developed by the French conceptual art group Bureau d'Etudes, attempts to show this kind of network both geographically and sociologically. You see the European Union at the left, with the Russian State quarantined in a microbubble above it; you see the American state surrounded by its strategic partners, with its economically powerful Japanese ally above and the Saudi state and Opec consortium in a black bubble below; and you see the Asian giants India and China in a larger zone above the Russian one, unsure how to catapult themselves into the complex structure of rivalries to which their massive populations and productive capacities nonetheless destine them as major players of the future. But in the open center region there is additionally the fully deterritorialized financial core of private banks and investment funds, centering around the two giants: the American institutional investor, Fidelity, largely owned and controlled by Edward C. Johnson and his daughter Abigail; and the more aristocratic and secretive British holding, Barclay's plc, controlling Barclay's Global Investor. The essence of transnational state capitalism, or "world government," is grasped when one realizes that the legal, communicational and technoscientific architecture necessary for the development of a global market can only be developed by complex and labyrinthine collaborations between aspects of the predominant territorial states and relatively independent actors from the corporate sector. Of course, the complexity of these collaborations means one could go on with this discussion at length, in the attempt to measure the relative weights and influences of Exxon, Opus Dei, the House of Westminster, Moody's, the Bank for International Settlements, etc. The force of these maps is in any case to represent a totality which demands specific analysis in order to grasp its potential to function as a whole. Maps of specific technological infrastructures then complete this picture, such as the map of the Internet constituted for the Next 5 Minutes conference in late 2003.

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