6 - Fragmegration

Summary

We care about being Lombards first and Europeans second. Italy means nothing to us.

Paul Friggerio

To speak of an uneven fragmegrative worldview is to conjure up processes and arrangements undergoing continual fluctuations in every country and region between globalizing and localizing tendencies, between expanding coherence and contracting solidarity. It suggests the tensions fostered by the compelling lure of both distant and immediate horizons that are succinctly captured in the above comment of a leader of an Italian regional party, the Northern League, at the time of its first electoral triumph. As the common sense of an epoch, it summarizes all the distant proximities that are leading individuals, groups, and societies to intensify their search for meaning in a world that has lost its familiar signposts. Since globalization and localization can have both positive and negative consequences, the tensions generated by uneven fragmegration greatly complicate the task of governance along the Frontier. As will be seen in chapter, it highlights a mismatch between the rapid extension of boundary-crossing activities and the authority necessary to give direction to them. On the other hand, globalizing and localizing tendencies can co-exist, and when they do, it can be expected that the more pervasive globalizing tendencies become, the more will localizing reactions accommodate to them. This expectation derives from the probability that in such situations people will become increasingly accustomed to resolving the tensions that pull them into the Frontier and those that contract their perceptual space. Until recently, the importance of fragmegrative processes could not be readily grasped in a short time frame.