All over the world, we can see how the electric media are stimulating the 
rise of ministates: In Great Britain, Welsh and Scottish nationalism are 
recrudescing powerfully; in Spain, the Basques are demanding autonomy in 
Belgium, the Flemings insist on separation from the Walloons; in my own 
country the Quebecois are in the first stages of a war of independence; 
and in Africa, we've witnessed the germination of several ministates and 
the collapse of several ambitiously unrealistic schemes for regional 
confederation. These mini- states are just the opposite of the 
traditional centralizing nationalisms of the past that forged mass states 
that homogenized disparate ethnic and linguistic groups within one 
national boundary. The new ministates are decentralized tribal 
agglomerates of those same ethnic and linguistic groups. Though their 
creation may be accompanied by violence, they will not remain hostile or 
competitive armed camps but will eventually discover that their tribal 
bonds transcend their differences and will thereafter live in harmony and 
cultural cross-fertilization with one another.

	This pattern of decentralized ministates will be repeated in the 
United States, although I realize that most Americans still find the 
thought of the Union's dissolution inconceivable. The U.S., which was the 
first nation in history to begin its national existence as a centralized 
and literate political entity, will now play the historical film 
backward, reeling into a multiplicity of decentralized Negro states, 
Indian states, regional states, linguistic and ethnic states, etc. 
Decentralism is today the burning issue in the 50 states, from the school 
crisis in New York City to the demands of the retribalized young that the 
oppressive multiversities be reduced to a human scale and the mass state 
be debureaucratized. The tribes and the bureaucracy are antithetical 
means of social organization and can never coexist peacefully; one must 
destroy and supplant the other, or neither will survive.
McLuhan Playboy Interview 19868