Third age of nations

Fully abstracted is the phrase carrying the definition, and abstraction in this framework means putting distance between parties so that the relationship no longer registers. The second age had a powerful extranational merchant class operating between national structures and answerable to none of them. The third has a supranational empire operating above them, so the states themselves are sublated and the distance between whoever benefits and whoever pays is complete. Trade is what accomplishes the abstraction, since currency abstracts dependency and endosocialism denies the labour of the negative image, and an exchange settled in money leaves no relationship to carry a debt. The consequence is that exploitation continues with nobody in a position to be held responsible, which is the same mechanism guilt deflection uses at smaller scale. Marsh identifies the occupants. The Anglo and Germanic group became the global endo-ideal through transcendental industrial-scientific endo-idealism, and that arrangement is currently being replaced by the mono-empire, the transcendental global empire at the end of this age. She treats the mono-empire as transitional rather than final, since a structure with no outside opposition can never fully form. What follows is either that or the fourth age, a potential society more diverse, flexible and mutually supportive than the first and more rewarding and universally beneficial than this one, which is proposed rather than predicted.

World-systems theory after Wallerstein describes a capitalist world economy transcending states, and globalization scholarship debates whether state capacity has genuinely eroded. Hardt and Negri's Empire describes decentred sovereignty without a territorial centre, which is close to Marsh's supranational empire. Research on offshore finance and the transnational capitalist class documents the specific arrangements. Marsh's periodization is unusual in placing the present inside a sequence with a named successor, since most accounts of globalization describe a condition rather than an age, and having a fourth age available makes the third a stage rather than an endpoint.