The growth of pervasive state control, so often a response to crisis and social, economic or national collapse, finds its ultimate, expression in the creation of state-sponsored groups outside the established mechanisms of government and democratic control. Its most sinister and rebarbative manifestation was seen in the elite groups of fascist European states, but something similar is found now in the unaccountable patriotic groupings of modern Russia or the shadow government of party and people's army in China.
The process is of course less hindered in any effectively one-party state (Does that include coalitions of previously bitterly opposed rival parties?), and where there exists a shadow institutional apparatus of power. No doubt many will see it as a grotesque loss of a sense of proportion to find something similar, in kind, if not scale or overt intention, in the proliferation in our own country now of 'partnerships', 'pathfinder' projects, fora, and all the coming apparatus of 'localism', that ersatz handing of power to the people that bypasses established forms of democratic accountability, which national governments have been so keen to erode at local level for decades, and passes effective control to energetic interest groups. For politicians, 'localism' comes out of a different phrasebook from 'nationalism'.
