
Getting Past the Dominance of the Nation State - imartin2k
http://continuations.com/post/161938064520/getting-past-the-dominance-of-the-nation-state
======
ethanhunt_
An Australian citizen is an Ecuadorian embassy in England, in order to protect
himself from multiple governments that are trying to jail him who
coincidentally have been hurt by information he's published as a journalist.
Allegedly, a politician who was quite powerful and stood to become even more
powerful asked why he couldn't just be assassinated (I think there was never a
reliable source for this last bit).

Nation states are the only thing that can protect us from the powerful.

Eliminating nation states would be like having one lawyer arguing both sides
of a criminal case. We need nation states to advocate for their citizens and
we need nation states working against each other and competing to ensure the
best outcome for everyone.

Support your nation state that supports you. In a world without nation states,
when the government turns against you, you'll have nowhere left to go.

> The Nation State is too large a unit for good experiments. Take education as
> an example. Having a national policy makes little sense at a time when
> technology is fundamentally changing how learning can occur.

So just run those experiments at a smaller scale than the federal government.
Nice to see everyone finally catching onto the idea of States' Rights.

> Information technology allows new approaches to regulation through
> transparency. In many instances what the federal level role should be is
> provide requirements for transparency of and interoperability between
> local/regional policies. This means we could have a significantly smaller
> Federal Government in terms of the number of direct employees, size of
> agencies and body of regulations.

Again, this has nothing to do with the existence of nation states.

~~~
nostrademons
Your example is kinda ironic, given that this _Australian_ citizen is in an
_Ecuadorian_ embassy in _England_ , and the politician who wanted to drone him
is an _American_ , and the reason he's still alive isn't actually any guns or
tanks protecting him, it's the PR outcry that would happen if an assassination
took place. His own nation state isn't doing a very good job of protecting
him, considering he is taking shelter in _another_ nation-state's property,
and that the resources that would attack him are owned by yet another nation-
state, and for a significant portion of the world's population, this latter
nation-state has conducted quasi-military operations against them with no
interference by their own governments. He might as well be holed up in a
private citizen's condo in California, if he could find a private citizen who
was willing to take him.

I see your point, and I get that there's a common-defense argument for the
existence of nations. But realistically, if anyone _not_ an American finds
themself opposed to the U.S's interests, their national government isn't going
to be of much help to them. Realistically, the invisible hand that prevents
the U.S. from bullying the whole rest of the world (even moreso than they do)
is that the U.S. as a nation has fairly little interest in being the boss of 7
million people, and oftentimes struggles with being the boss of 300 million
people, and the popular outcry over wars abroad tends to stop them within 8
years or so after they get started. It has nothing to do with other nations
being an effective check on U.S. power.

~~~
ethanhunt_
> It has nothing to do with other nation's being an effective check on U.S.
> power.

The example proves you wrong. Without another gov't protecting him, Assange
would absolutely be in a US jail right now, or dead. I didn't say that the
Ecuadorian military kept him safe. It is the nation states playing against
each other that has kept him safe. Whether that play is social or economic or
militaristic is just a minor footnote.

> He might as well be holed up in a private citizen's condo in California, if
> he could find a private citizen who was willing to take him.

Not an acceptable alternative. Gov't would find him. Very unlikely he would
make it out of the airport. You have to have the power of the nation state to
play against the other nation state. Ecuador provides that in this case. It
doesn't always work (US rolls over nations in middle east all the time), but
it does work most of the time most of the people (for some definition of "most
of the people" which would be people who live in nations that play the nation
state game).

~~~
nostrademons
He wouldn't, though, because with no nations, the U.S. wouldn't exist as a
nation, nor would it have jails, nor would there be an "it" to have them. You
can't take one side of the thought experiment, eliminate it, and then assume
that the other side will run amok without it, because the whole point of the
thought experiment was to imagine what would happen if we eliminate the
_concept_ of nation-states.

The bigger question is "Is there some person or organization who would cause
harm to Assange that he would not be able to protect himself against?" I don't
know the answer to that. Go back to the Middle Ages and the answer would be
that Assange would pledge his loyalty to one particular lord, who he agreed
not to spill the beans on, and he would get protection from them in return.
With city-states (popular in antiquity, and perhaps rising again), he would
reside in a city, and (assuming he wasn't exiled), that city would provide for
his defense and refuse to extradite him, and all the other cities can go to
hell.

The complexity today is that we have this whole other level of trans-national
organizations: multinational corporations, NGOs, philanthropic foundations,
Internet communities, hacker collectives, etc. Many of the "attacks" on these
organizations can't be stopped by a national border; for example, Assange can
continue releasing damaging information against the U.S. from within the
Ecuadorian embassy, and he has done nothing to physically violate U.S.
territory, and yet this doesn't matter because our lives are half lived in
cyberspace anyway. The nation-state arose as a protective force to ensure that
violence occurred only within well-defined wars at the edges of their
territories, and citizens could basically count on peace when not at war. It
basically succeeded at that, but it succeeded so well that the "battlegrounds"
now have nothing to do with physical location and often little to do with
physical force.

~~~
ethanhunt_
You make a good point, but his argument then quickly boils down to anarchist
style stuff which isn't worth a debate in my opinion. If you removed all these
power structures somehow, they would just be replaced by other (probably
identical) power structures.

> The nation-state arose as a protective force to ensure that violence
> occurred only within well-defined wars at the edges of their territories,
> and citizens could basically count on peace when not at war. It basically
> succeeded at that, but it succeeded so well that the "battlegrounds" now
> have nothing to do with physical location and often little to do with
> physical force.

This is an interesting idea, so suppose the nation state is eliminated.
Wouldn't there just be a new equivalent of the nation state that arises that
is based not around physical borders but around digital borders in some way?
People are always going to disagree about fundamental ideas, and they're going
to band together to protect their ability to live according to those ideas.
Which brings us back to the article's point #1: "Nation states, true to their
name, tend to emphasize the interests of a particular nation above others.".
We'll just end up with that again but instead of the US sanctioning Russia,
we're going to have 4chan, reddit, and instagram launching DDoS attacks
against each others' users.

~~~
nostrademons
Well, you're certainly not going to eliminate the concept of power. I've heard
that floated by some utopianists ("we'll have world government and then
everybody will get along with everybody else") and I think it's ridiculous.

I don't think that's what the article is suggesting, though. Rather, it's
suggesting that we re-draw the boundaries of how we organize that power, with
one level globally and another locally (probably at the city or territory
level).

I'd assume (based on similar writings) that this would work with a federated
world government with very limited and specifically-enumerated powers.
Basically, we accept certain principles as foundational (rule of law, property
rights, non-violence, consent of the governed), and then transfer the monopoly
on physical force to a world government whose only task is ensuring that
individuals don't violate that. The world government would have very limited
powers: aside from preserving peace, it'd basically just define the rules
around trade disputes and redress of grievances, and delegate the arbitration
of these disputes to a mutually-acceptable arbiter. Possibly it might also
serve as a market-maker for externalities (eg. selling carbon credits) and
coordinator for shared efforts (eg. fighting infectious disease, or
interstellar space travel). It would also ensure freedom to move between
municipalities as long as you accept the laws of the local municipality, i.e.
borders cannot keep people in or out, but they do define the extent of how you
must behave within the municipality.

All other powers would go toward local municipalities. This includes a great
deal of things currently reserved for a nation-state: drug laws, the place of
religion, official languages, national holidays, traffic management, growth
policies, possibly even things like free speech. So if San Franciscans want to
smoke out, Emirates want to mandate the wearing of the hijab, Texans want
complete freedom to carry a gun, Virginians want a holiday honoring Robert E.
Lee, they all get that - within their own city. They just don't get to force
_other_ people to take on their customs. If Californians are upset by how
everybody in Texas is packing heat, or Texans are upset by how Muslims wear a
head scarf, or Muslims are upset by how San Franciscans smoke out all the time
- _too bad_ , they can define how people should behave in their own city, but
they don't get to define how everybody else behaves. And the role of the world
government is to ensure that, and put down any attempt at imposing your views
on others by force.

~~~
fiblye
Maybe I'm confused, but that sounds precisely like the current condition of
countries today, except on a scale smaller than America and more similar to
small European or Asian nations. Having a global government would either do
nothing to them in the best case scenario, or more likely, end up crushing
them for the needs of the many and/or ultra rich.

Taking your example of Virginians wanting a holiday for Robert E Lee, small
countries and big countries could easily do this. You say limit it to a city
so that those who don't want it aren't affected. But even passing it at the
city level leaves people who don't want it. I see no difference between 60% of
a country the size of Malta supporting something and 60% of a city the size of
Anchorage.

~~~
muninn_
Well it kind of is, but with power being pushed even further down to the local
level, where you could actually know your leaders, you largely remove the
ability of nations to wage wars, especially on any sort of global level, and
people are better able to self organize. In the states we see a problem right
now with coast-inland and some other smaller cultures where you have some
people who are able to take power dictating wildly different views for other
people who absolutely disagree with them. It's hard to manage a multi-cultural
country. We see it right now.

------
beloch
Arguably, we're already sailing past dominant nation states into uncharted
waters in many respects. Just look at "free trade" treaties of the last couple
decades. They're less about removing barriers such as tariff's, etc. and more
about ensconcing the rights of corporations over states.

e.g. Your constituents don't like pollution in their river and, playing to
your constituents, you pass a law to ban dumping of chemical X, which was
previously thought to be harmless but now appears to be not so harmless. Oops!
Your government is being sued by foreign corporations impacted by this law,
because a treaty you signed gives them that right.

Bottom line, if we're going to continue eroding the power of nation states
(and nation states really are doing it to themselves), we'd better be damned
sure something representing and protecting the interests of people is there to
replace it. Lots of science fiction dystopias feature corporate cleptocracy's
as dominant forces, and that's for a very good reason!

~~~
friedman23
> They're less about removing barriers such as tariff's, etc. and more about
> ensconcing the rights of corporations over states.

This fud that has been spread by the illiterate folk of the internet has
caused so much damage. ISDS is for enforcing agreements between _states_ if
they feel businesses from their countries are being unfairly discriminated
against. Nation states are still perfectly able to leave the free trade
agreements if the terms are not satisfactory because they are _sovereign_.
ISDS is the mechanism by which free trade agreements actually ensure there is
free trade. Don't join free trade agreements if you want to place tariffs on
foreign businesses or enforce regulations selectively against foreign
business.

>e.g. Your constituents don't like pollution in their river and, playing to
your constituents, you pass a law to ban dumping of chemical X, which was
previously thought to be harmless but now appears to be not so harmless. Oops!
Your government is being sued by foreign corporations impacted by this law,
because a treaty you signed gives them that right.

I love your example because it shows how little you even know about what you
are spreading fear of. You clearly feel strongly about this but you were
incapable of spending 5 minutes reading wikipedia to inform yourself about
what you are writing about?

>governments retain their regulatory ability, if the agreements in question
specify that regulations protecting health, the environment, labour rights and
human rights are allowed.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investor-
state_dispute_settlem...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investor-
state_dispute_settlement#Regulatory_capacity)

e.g. don't sign an agreement if you don't want to follow the provisions of the
agreement. Otherwise don't expect other people to follow the stipulation of
the agreement either.

Why do you insist on commenting about something you are clearly ignorant
about? I am willing to bet $1000 that you have not read a single word of these
trade agreements you feel so confident to give lectures on.

Bottom line, people that are ignorant and have no idea what they are talking
about should not act as if they do.

~~~
shoo
re: ISDS, one concrete example of is the case of Australian tobacco plain
packaging regulation versus the tobacco company Philip Morris [1] [2].

In 2011 Australia passed legislation that "requires health warnings to cover
at least 75 per cent of the front of most tobacco packaging, 90 per cent of
the back of cigarette packaging and 75 per cent of the back of most other
tobacco product packaging" [3].

Philip Morris restructured and moved the headquarters of their Australia and
Asia operations to Hong Kong. By doing this they could take advantage of an
earlier 1993 trade agreement between Hong Kong and Australia, and launched an
ISDS claim against the Australian government, claiming that the packaging
regulation meant that their branding and trademarks had been confiscated.

Say what you want about "free trade" agreements between states, it is pretty
obvious that if these agreements can be potentially exploited as above then
one of the outcomes of such agreements is the erosion of the rights of states
and their citizens, and in increase in power and freedom to global capital.

[1]
[https://www.ag.gov.au/tobaccoplainpackaging](https://www.ag.gov.au/tobaccoplainpackaging)

[2] [http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-
news/austra...](http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-
news/australia-versus-philip-morris-how-we-took-on-big-tobacco-and-
won-20160517-gowwva.html)

[3]
[http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/conten...](http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/content/tobacco-
plain)

~~~
evgen
And Phillip Morris lost the case. You left out that particular part in your
example. I wonder why that is? Is it because in this case, as in most such
'examples' of the horrors of ISDS, it turns out that the system did not
prevent a nation from acting against a foreign corporate interest?

~~~
Aaargh20318
> And Phillip Morris lost the case. You left out that particular part in your
> example.

It's not about who lost or won, the problem is that there was a hearing at
all. Why would there be a need for dispute settlement between companies and
states ? There can be no dispute, the state dictates the law and the companies
either comply or leave the country.

ISDS is like giving kids the possibility of suing their parents over their
bedtime. It implies the kids have some kind of say in the matter when they
really don't.

~~~
friedman23
> There can be no dispute, the state dictates the law and the companies either
> comply or leave the country.

Why even have free trade agreements if you can create laws that will destroy
foreign business? ISDS is not so states can be subject to companies, it for
states to follow agreements they sign. If the state values muh sovereignty so
much they can simply reneg on the agreement and lose the benefit of free
trade.

~~~
shoo
> Why even have free trade agreements if you can create laws that will destroy
> foreign business?

if the business in question is only profitable because it pushes negative
externalities onto other parties due to lack of regulation (e.g. tobacco
companies, anyone on the supply/demand side of unregulated polluting
industries) then it sounds like destroying such business models through
regulation is a feature, not a bug.

------
wbillingsley
Hmm,

Getting past the dominance of your legal rights under laws you can
influence...

Getting past your having a representative government where you're more than
one six-billionth of the vote...

Getting past your sense of belonging to any kind of a shared culture...

...to that glorious future where you receive the beneficence and wisdom of
multinational corporations directing each facet of your lives, untrammelled by
that old fashioned notion that you and your compatriots might have concerns
about how they operate, and may require them to conform to your expectations,
rather than your society conform to theirs...

Sorry, but I think I'll hang on to the idea of having a national parliament
full of politicians that we can all bemoan, but that sometimes actually
defends our interest.

~~~
martinbundgaard
My thoughts exactly.

------
oyvey
If the nation state is to go away in favor of one global government then you
sure as hell are not going to get those nice things like decenralization. You
are by the nature of what you are doing getting more centralization. And thats
bad, very bad. Just to give you an example, look at modern events. Edward
Snowden can leak information of the USA government and he can get away with
that because there is Russia which acts now "as the protector of free speach".
In a global government there would be no way to run. States needs to compete
against each other. A monopoly never benefits the customer!

~~~
pikzen
A citizen isn't a customer of a nation.

~~~
jessaustin
That attitude is a sad artifact of a particular period of time. In future
there will be fewer walls and other terrible methods of custom-enforcement.

~~~
pikzen
You do not seem to understand. Customer has an implicit meaning of having your
services sold by a company. Citizens do not have services sold to them.
They're bound by a social contract, and have agreed to go ahead, together. The
services they benefiot from are the consequences of their choices. The nation
and the state are an extension of this social contract. I do not care for
borders and walls, and would gladly see them disappear. But not if it's at the
cost of becoming a "customer".

~~~
jessaustin
Customers can opt out of the "contract". If citizens can't, some of them will
have very bad experiences. That's true even if most citizens are able to
affect the terms of the contract in meaningful ways. Some citizens simply do
not have that privilege, and occasionally their happiness is contingent on the
possibility of escape.

------
mc32
I think you'll have a hard time convincing Chinese, Russians and Indians to
de-emphasize nation-states, let alone telling them not to put their nation
first.

If you travel a bit, outside of western Europe which experienced WWII, most
places --even dirt poor ones, have very nationalistic tendencies.

I don't see the idea catching on in most of the world, unfortunately. And then
remember the conspiracy theories behind "the new world order" and "thousand
points of light" and how people derided that.

That said, long term, we will have to arrive at some solution which ensures
that not one nation (or any other organization of people) have the capacity to
inflict destruction on others --the way Guangdong cannot decimate Guangxi or
Colorado cannot invade Utah.

~~~
devdas
Given that the majority of those people are trapped behind the boundaries of
those states by poverty and visa rules, I can understand why they are
nationalistic.

------
tomohawk
Getting rid of the nation states is the same as only having a single nation
state.

Something similar occurred during the Roman Empire. There wasn't any practical
way to get out of the empire, and no practical check on the power of the
government of the empire.

If the policies of the empire happened to affect you negatively, there really
wasn't anything you could do about it. You couldn't pick up an leave. You
couldn't affect the government policy. You and your family for generations
would just be stuck.

~~~
zanny
I think there is an alternate interpretation (or at least just a reinforcement
of my own beliefs) that the nation state should just occupy that local /
regional level. We consolidated nations and built empires because of the
logistical and militaristic needs of organization in the 18th, 19th, and early
20th centuries. Since WW2, though, we have:

* Solved the logistical problem with the adoption of wide area communications networks, enabling instant communication and more importantly negotiations between independent regions and areas anywhere in the world.

* Solved the military problem with the development of world-wrecking nuclear weapons, whose presence equalizes all involved nations such that it does not matter if you have a giant population and production machine to build every other weapon of war - the danger of just a few dozen advanced nuclear weapons in arsenal deters any reasonable nation from attempting invasion because that many bombs could render the Earth uninhabitable.

Additionally, computers ease the burden of managing international relations
between potentially thousands of participating bodies by instituting protcol
standards between them and the Internet gives us an environment to broadcast
transparently the terms of interaction between nations, and those can be
updated in real time in ways a generation ago couldn't consider possible.

Now there is no good motivation to maintain giant nation states. Letting large
countries break up into smaller, more focused soverignties handling their own
affairs maximizes liberty for the people. And the international economy can be
very effective as a tool of global governance - if you and _most_ nations
agree on something, and think it is important enough, you can embargo the
dissenters to put economic pressure on them to reform. Likewise, for any noble
cause, you can accept the burden of economic isolation to prove your point and
then campaign to change the minds of citizens in other countries.

If governance were localized like this, you would not run into the apathetic
superstate of the modern age where citizens demands are very often ignored.
When a legislature only rules a few million people, individual voices are
louder, and deposing the corrupt is much more straightforward - even if it
requires violence. The larger and more expansive the sovereignty the more
detached from any one locality it becomes until it is just detached from
everyone operating as this global influence without oversight.

~~~
Spooky23
When mini-states start popping up, it's usually accompanied by conflict, not
freedom.

Imagine scenarios where parts of the United States or Mexico broke up. The
result is certain warfare and likely military dictatorships.

------
coloradt
This has been tried before, Holy Roman Empire, Soviet Union. None of those
were solving these most pressing problems. We cannot expect a "global
government" to solve these problems either.

Nation states are much better.

~~~
erikb
Some people may argue that previous experiments at bigger states failed for a
lack of communication, a problem that can be solved much better with internet,
machine learning, etc.

------
KirinDave
I confess difficulty in taking any article seriously when it implies that "the
blockchain" is some sort of revolution in distributed consensus.

It's actually a very inefficient tool for this, and better methods have
existed for years.

------
wyager
How in the world is individual taxation a "global problem"? The only
interpretation I can make of that is that we should have to pay for a world
government, with which I emphatically disagree.

~~~
PeterisP
Most of the taxable income (unlike most of taxable people and organizations)
is international, mobile and very flexible, so effective taxation already
relies heavily on international agreements and cooperation.

If you'd leave Bill Gates taxation to whatever municipality he lives in, the
expected result would be that the richest person in the world would pay
practically no taxes; you need to tax (and thus cooperatively track) worldwide
revenue of people and corporations. Tax spending can and should be handled as
locally as possible, but tax collection would be best done globally,
cooperatively eliminating loopholes (like forcing tax shelter jurisdictions to
change their ways) and establishing common rules to avoid a "bidding war to
the bottom", like the current EU initiative to harmonize corporate income tax.

~~~
wyager
A "bidding war" is an extremely _good_ thing. I _want_ governments to compete
to offer me the lowest possible tax rates. What you're describing is a
monopoly, which would be very bad for the "customers" (everyone except
governments).

------
erikb
Thanks to technology our nation states will probably grow bigger. But having
no nation states is quite unlikely. The reason why there are states in one
form or another since forever is that they give people some feeling of unity,
not some feeling of exclusion of others. So without nation states people don't
suddenly feel all happy, but they don't have any unity that pulls them
together.

~~~
zanny
This implies that thousands of years of human history where people were not
members of giant continent spanning countries people had to unity.

That is absurd. People can feel a sense of community on many scales, but the
extremes are from ones own family to feeling like a citizen of Earth and a
part of a global human culture.

Nation states are one optional step on that ladder, and it has many more than
just three levels in it. Hell, just consider the difference in scale of nation
states - from a country like New Zealand that has half the population of the
New York Metro Area, to India or China with more than a billion people each.
Completely arbitrary, and the size and cultural divides between different
countries are massive. You can't even come close to placing all nation states
at one tier of social inclusion and absolutely cannot ascribe individual
happiness to membership in one.

~~~
erikb
I don't want to argue that nation states are best theoretical models to bring
people togehter, but I want to argue that the real states, as sh*tty as they
may be, are the result of hard work of many people and one of the features
they offer is a higher level of unity than anything that came before them.
Just dropping these results of hard work will not end up in more success. I
want to argue that you can't win a marathon by stopping to run before the
finish line.

------
nthcolumn
Is Globalisation no longer the 'inevitable' it was once touted as? National
leaders have for some time now been promising things which are simply not in
their gift economically whilst becoming more and more protectionist and
frankly bigoted in what they say. I get that they are merely echoing the
concerns of their constituents and that democracies being organised on
national lines that there has effectively been this incredible
disenfranchisement as a result of globalisation. I think it was Joe Stiglitz
who about a decade ago advised us to turn up at AGMs rather than polling
booths if we wanted to continue to have a say in our futures. More likely we
will have super-nation states like China and Europe before we 'get past'
nation-states entirely. And although the anti-globalists appear to be winning
currently, the market will in the end I believe choose not to have borders and
woe betide those luddites who oppose it. Trumpistas, Brexiteers et al.

~~~
zanny
Yea, globalization is still inevitable because its economic prospects crush
isolationism. Countries that don't participate will (and do) fall behind. If
legislatures try to resist it, they will find consequences to their economic
bottom line that can cripple an economy for decades.

The current crop of nationalism in the west is coming from the dying breath of
a generation on the way out. People they don't want to fade away or have
someone else take their place, that want to fight for what is effectively just
them getting younger again and wanting to be back in the 1950s and 1960s with
all that entails.

The only hope can be that rather than try to resist globalization the world
economy can collectively steer it towards positive outcomes for humanity
rather than selfish outcomes for the soon to be trillionaires steering the
ship. And that the economic tides of the modern era don't embitter new
generations into the same blind nostalgia for their own pasts when the world
moves on - back to that steering issue - we need to avoid having hundreds of
millions more people fall off the train in the future to avoid this
environment happening again.

------
mythrwy
This has been dreamed about since forever I think.

The shoddy implementation in the past has been empire. Anyone can become a
citizen of Rome. There was even a "Roman" empire which persisted for centuries
that didn't even include the city of Rome. Rather it was an idea, a uniting of
cultures under a common law and currency.

But the trouble with centralization is when it breaks down ("when", not "if")
people go right back to their natural state of bands and tribes and feudal
warlords. And it's hard to have nice things in that state. Witness Somalia or
the Middle Ages. So I think some intermediate organizational complexity is
good as a buffer and insurance against collapse back to low level tribalism.

If the idea of eventual world governance is some type of EU/UN council of
bureaucrats making detailed rules and policies I'm afraid that won't work out
well. The word "ineffective" comes to mind. Plus, the cogs and citizens in
nation states have an extreme vested interest in keeping things as they are.
So there will, for the foreseeable future, be a very large group not
interested in reporting to an international committee who have enough power to
make sure it doesn't happen.

However the problems of nation states, particularly right now, are very real.
Pollution. International crime. Tax Evasion. Sophisticated weaponry. Etc. Etc.

These things have to self organize in my opinion. Kind of like how they say
you should look for trails in the grass where people have walked to see where
to put the sidewalks.

I've always thought the eventual outcome would be something along the lines of
a very lose international order dealing with broad rules of pollution,
international trade etc. and then more detailed city/county level governments
who take care of most of the day to day governance. I've thought AI might be
best suited to run the international order. Remove the politics at that level.
Keep it math.

------
honestoHeminway
I think its time to get past the episode of surplus cash in multi-national
cooperations pockets, corroding local laws.

------
pimmen
I like what he's describing, but as he said, this could never be done in a
quick manner. We will probably not see it in our lifetimes.

Regions need other regions to help them when things are going badly (and if we
are to experiment, we need to acknowledge that bad things will happen to
regions that they themselves cannot solve). Nation states are composed of many
regions so they can force or incentivize regions to share the load.

If we truly want equal opportunity, we need to make sure that regions are not
completely stopped from innovating but also don't have to take all of the
consequences when something goes wrong. Sure, they shouldn't come off scot-
free, but it's very low for a region's children, elderly and sick to pay the
full price for something they had little chances to stop anyway.

------
return0
How can one talk about governance units and not mention safety/army? If there
is going to be another form of governance it has to protect its "citizens".
Protect from whom and how ? Who will be terrorists, who will be good guys? As
an example nowadays we have ISIS, a loose international ideology spread
through the internet across borders, from people with little hope of forming a
sovereign. Kingdoms, City states, Empires, feudal lords, nation states, their
existence depended on exchanging safety for taxes/servitude. I believe that's
the main force (fear) that unites people under a blanket term/belief. Not
"common problems" which have always existed anyways.

~~~
zanny
ISIS in a perfect world would be combated by UN peacekeepers and allies of
Syria and Iraq in the territories they control.

The international supporters are just domestic terrorists, to be dealt with by
police.

Really nothing changes from present day, except that Russia and the US aren't
doing their own thing in the region with their own militaries, which is
largely what caused most of the unrest and extremism in the region - their
interventions for the past century in that area.

------
cobbzilla
so many people seem to conclude that absent nation-states we must move to a
global government. did you even read the article or the book that was linked
therein?

The modern democratic nation state was widely ridiculed in Europe, by existing
kingdoms and fiefdoms.

I feel like what I am watching on most of this thread is whatever future comes
next being widely ridiculed by defenders of the current state of affairs.
History repeats itself.

------
orik
we've come up with a system that's created great prosperity and wealth for all
our citizens, but it's important to look back at what they had going on in the
1200's -- those were the good old days.

(I don't mean to be so dismissive, but a lot of people still don't have access
to the internet and the technology and services, and they way they get that
infrastructure built is through nation states.)

~~~
ethanhunt_
He wasn't saying to go back to 1200s, his point was that, ,=since then, those
states fused into countries which was good, therefore we should keep fusing
into (presumable) the inevitable one-world government.

~~~
ZenoArrow
One world government = single point of failure. It may work more harmoniously
if you have leaders that care about the people they serve, but if misguided
leaders get into power and cause problems your choices of living in a society
beyond the control of this leadership is greatly reduced.

~~~
zanny
Playing devils advocate a bit here, but does it actually matter to an
individual? In most parts of the world it does not matter if your country is
composed of millions or hundreds of millions of people, you can't just leave
if the government turns against your interests.

For most people, they are stuck with the government they have no matter what,
regardless of if it is a good or bad one.

For all of them, a world government changes nothing. They are already at the
whims of leaders that can work harmoniously or for selfish ends that can
better or worsen their lives with no recourse on their individual parts.

The exception, and I think this is what the OP misses, is that Europe is
demonstrating that you can take a different route, with sovereign states that
agree to open borders that allow people to instead go wherever they feel best
served by the state. The EU is new, but if it doesn't fall apart I guarantee
in a century it will evolve into different countries appealing to the
specialized interests of certain peoples who then migrate there. I would feel
that is much more healthy than trying to erect universal laws upon every human
on Earth.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "does it actually matter to an individual?"

Yes, and it's not just about population size, there are more important
concerns, such as the safety and economic mobility of the individual.

Let me put it like this, would you rather live in your current nation state
with the leadership you have, or under a world government run by a ruler like
Duerte that openly promotes killing people (my apologies if you're currently
living in a country like this).

> "For most people, they are stuck with the government they have no matter
> what"

Not really. People do move country when things get bad in their own one (for
political and economic reasons), even when they don't have much money to do
so. People even risk their lives to make such journeys.

> "They are already at the whims of leaders that can work harmoniously or for
> selfish ends that can better or worsen their lives with no recourse on their
> individual parts."

Not all countries are equally badly run. Some national governments look after
their citizens better than others. I can list some examples if you like.

> "Europe is demonstrating that you can take a different route"

Europe isn't taking a different route. The EU is becoming increasingly
centralised. The Eurozone is a step towards consolidating economic power in
Brussels, there are talks of an EU Army, etc...

> "I would feel that is much more healthy than trying to erect universal laws
> upon every human on Earth."

In my opinion, the best compromise is universal rights rather than universal
laws. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was organised by the UN
is one example of this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights)

------
ucarion
To suggest that humanity needs a global state seems to beg the question of all
of politics: how do you get people to get along and transition peacefully to
new states?

The threat of Napoleon got the Holy Roman Empire to globulate into its modern
nation-states. But I don't see how Saudi Arabia is ever going to relinquish
power, let alone share a government with the Israelis.

------
golemotron
All of humanity is never going to agree on the same values. The best we can
hope for is that people with the same values can find places to live together
and share those values.

------
ExpiredLink
The problem is not the "nation state" but nationalism.

~~~
jessaustin
In most cases, the former encourages and sustains the latter.

------
bane
I think that cyberpunk literature might have a clue here as to how this might
happen.

1) Decouple states from strictly adjacent geography. There's no reason that
"France" has to all be where it is in Europe. We already have precedent for
that with Embassies, Diplomatic vehicles and other foreign soil recognitions.
Imagine a France franchise the size of your average McDonalds, in the middle
of what we now call Thailand. Maybe it's in a mall next to a Venezuelan
franchise. You can pass between entirely different governing systems as easily
as walking between stores. There's other precedents, colonial territories and
other overseas holdings, but those have different semantics I think than
overseas diplomatic mission franchises.

2) Since states no longer are tied to specific contiguous geographic areas,
why do historic nations only get to play in the franchise game? How about
independent state franchises? What if Google opened some brick and mortar
micro nations in city centers all over the world? Or Green Peace? Or any group
of like-minded individuals able to "buy-in" to whatever threshold is required
to achieve some kind of global state franchise recognition? What if stepping
into any Walmart was effectively the same as walking into the Nation of
Walmart? Why does a nation even need territory? What about on-line nation
states?

There's some precedent here as well, with a couple non-territory owning states
like the Knights of St. John having many functions and obligations of a state,
without having any territory.

3) This effectively makes the (dys)topia of nation-companies come true. But it
also enables very free movement between nations. Don't like how Walmart taxes
the little guy? Move over to Sony, or France, or the Reconstituted U.S.S.R. in
Australia.

The other path is of course a kind of global citizenship, where citizenship to
individual nation states either doesn't exist or is purely optional. Or
another model where citizenship can happen at different scales such as county
citizenship that gives you specific rights within a tiny territory or
continental citizenship that spans across nation states. Another path might be
buying certain pieces and parts of different citizenships: I want American-
style free speech and libel laws, but U.K. style health care and Korean style
justice system...so I become fractional citizen of those three states for
those things and pay taxes (dues) into those systems apportioned to some
asking price.

Ultimately the real question here that will determine the mechanics of this
evolution will be "what's the goal?". If it's free movement between
territories, a system like the E.U. or the U.S. seems to work pretty well for
that. If it's looking for a specific kind of representation (better health
care in this place vs. that, different legal standards for property ownership,
etc.) then some other system. Nation State membership today works because it's
at some equilibrium that provides some measure of rights and obligations that
more or less works for the population.

That equilibrium in many cases has changed significantly over time, with new
rights being recognized, and new obligations also being asked of the
citizenry, sometimes states that aren't working are dissolved and sometimes
new ones take their place. But the general direction is that states with an
internal ability to peacefully move along with that equilibrium seem to be
doing well, and ones that provide too rigid of a framework finds themselves in
trouble. The unfairness of course comes with the minority of people in each
nation who are at the ends of the various internal socio-political spectrums
in each state who can't get a representation-responsibility mix that works for
them, and their particular state can't offer.

~~~
devdas
Snow Crash!

