Ten years from now, what will be the dominant terms of public discourse in politics? At a dinner party in March (2005), I offered a spur-of-the-moment prediction: that the U.S. would have troops in Iraq, all told, for twenty years, by which point we (I spoke as a citizen) would have forgotten why we were there in the first place. Until then, we would stay in Iraq, I continued, in order to keep a Shiite Iraq from growing too close to a Shiite Iran. Another guest countered that the language and cultural barriers between Iraq and Iran would trump shared religious doctrine and practice. On one level, my comment was a watered-down Platonicism—an eyebrow raised at democratic fickleness: democrats, to paraphrase Plato, are people who don't stay the course. On another level, however, our exchange made note of the fact that much of world politics these days is about the interaction not between states but between ethnoi and states.

By ethnos I mean a social group defined as a group not because of shared political institutions (though an ethnos may have these), but because of shared language, religion, or other cultural rituals. These days it often seems that members of particular ethnoi are out to see how they can swing state institutions, to which they have diverse kinds of allegiance, in directions that are to their liking qua members of their ethnos. Thus Ahmed Chalabi and his colleagues in the Iraqi National Congress formed a party across state lines in order to influence the fate of a particular state, Iraq, by drawing on the resources of another state, the United States.

The editors of Perspectives posed the following questions. “Will the challenges of effective state-building—conflicted regions around the world—return the language of power to prominence? Will we care more about the formal institutions of the state and how states interact with one another, or will we focus more on the civil society within a given state?”

Yes, realism is likely to gain in strength in the next few years, but if the realists of ten years from now take states as their main objects of analysis, they will be like the proverbial blind men who each have hold of one, distinctly different, part of the elephant.

The world's most powerful nation is an immigrant country, and technology has changed the nature of immigration. It is possible now, to a level previously unknown, to be simultaneously a partisan at home and a partisan in one's adopted land. Given this novel fact about immigration, regional conflict is much more likely to be internationalized than in the past. To be meaningful, the realism of ten years from now will have to make common cause with subaltern studies and diasporic studies, for states will be in regular engagement with transnational parties whose origins are a particular ethnos. These transnational parties will be the underdogs trying to turn the system of states to their own advantage.

This claim that transnational parties will be relevant to politics and will count as actors alongside states is not new. It was the basic situation leading to the Peloponnesian War and also guiding events as they developed through it. Not only Athens and Sparta, but also cities like Corinth had, in the years preceding the war, sent out colonists (or emigrants) to found new cities or become substantial elements in existing cities. What's more, the Athenians tended to send out emigrants who were prodemocracy. The Greek world during the period of war could be mapped in terms of city-states and their territories, but it could also be mapped in terms of exactly where emigrants from different motherlands had settled and also in terms of where the internationalized party of democracy or the internationalized party of oligarchy was ascendant. It is really these latter mappings that explain the dynamics of the Peloponnesian War and the relative risings and fallings of particular cities. Transnational parties will, I think, in ten years, be again part of our basic political analyses. Or at least I hope they will, since I always hope that political scientists will be incisive analysts of our world.

The most important feature, however, of the landscape ten years from now—here comes another wager—will be the continued conflict between Israel and Palestine, which has put the issue of the relationship between ethnos and state at the heart of the contemporary political subconscience. It matters that one of the first state-level transformations to occur after the break-up of the Soviet Union was the peaceful separation of Czechoslovakia into separate Czech and Slovak Republics. That breakup was quick and easy, but it was also the beginning of a dynamic that has not yet fully worked itself out. This was an early case of the ethnos trumping, and requiring changes in, state institutions.

My prediction about Israel and Palestine lies simply in the claim that the conflict will still be ongoing. I feel uncertain in this prediction, however. This element of our future landscape is, I think, like the Berlin Wall. We political scientists are not good at assessing how long any given store of human psychological capital can sustain a high level of conflict. At some point the psychological resources available to be committed to conflict will be exhausted. Will that be in ten years? One would have to be on the ground to know.

Now to the question of concepts themselves. Will a resurgence of interest in realism diminish the importance of human rights in our public discourse? No. But the position of human rights within our public political discourse will shift. The language of human rights has many important and salutary effects in our world, but it also provides a basis for destabilizing national borders. In this regard the language of human rights, strangely enough, resembles the commitment to an ethnos. Think of the erstwhile de facto alliance of Michael Ignatieff and Chalabi. Insofar as the destabilizing effects of transnational parties based on ethnoi are likely to lead to a reassertion by states of control over their presently given boundaries, those states are likely too to push back at the language of human rights in favor of the language of the individual rights of citizens. In an effort to restore their own legitimacy, they will argue on behalf of their own capacity to protect the rights of their own political citizens. In Afghanistan, Karzai is not asking for the intervention of the UN on behalf of prisoners in Guatanamo. He is not seeking a world court to intervene in the housebreaking practices of U.S. soldiers. He claims that the authority and capacity of the sovereign state (namely, Afghanistan) are sufficient to protect the rights of that state's citizens. I am, then, describing something of a reaction effect. To the degree that the language of human rights feeds the destabilization of the state system, states will respond by trying to restore, in place of a language of human rights, a language about the responsibilities of states to citizens within their own borders. This is another place where technology has changed political possibilities. It was once possible for states to lose track of their citizens or residents; these people, lost and departed, could, then, reasonably be said to come under the purview of a necessary and important domain of human rights. But now, when it is harder for states to lose track of their own citizens, the language of citizen's rights comes in conflict with the language of human rights because each implies a different jurisdiction, and this is just what states and partisans of different kinds are likely to be fighting over in ten year's time.

Thus in ten years I think we'll be talking a lot about immigration, about dual and mono citizenship, about the relative capacities of states to withstand actors on the world stage such as ethnoi and transnational parties.

I'll end telegraphically by saying that in the United States I hope that we will equip ourselves to live in such a world by replacing the language of multiculturalism with the language of multilingualism, which, in contrast to its predecessor, will recognize and expect a high level not merely of cultural diversity but more importantly of cultural fluidity in our own democracy.