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Nation-states came late to history, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest they won't make it to the end of the century
If you'd been born 1,500 years ago in southern Europe, you'd have been convinced that the Roman empire would last forever. It had, after all, been around for 1,000 years. And yet, following a period of economic and military decline, it fell apart. By 476 CE it was gone. To the people living under the mighty empire, these events must have been unthinkable. Just as they must have been for those living through the collapse of the Pharaoh's rule or Christendom or the Ancien Régime.
We are just as deluded that our model of living in 'countries' is inevitable and eternal. Yes, there are dictatorships and democracies, but the whole world is made up of nation-states. This means a blend of 'nation' (people with common attributes and characteristics) and 'state' (an organised political system with sovereignty over a defined space, with borders agreed by other nation-states). Try to imagine a world without countries – you can't. Our sense of who we are, our loyalties, our rights and obligations, are bound up in them.
[...] This is the crux of the problem: nation-states rely on control. If they can't control information, crime, businesses, borders or the money supply, then they will cease to deliver what citizens demand of them. In the end, nation-states are nothing but agreed-upon myths: we give up certain freedoms in order to secure others. But if that transaction no longer works, and we stop agreeing on the myth, it ceases to have power over us.
Polities will return to the city-state, or will multi-national corporations step in?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Friday September 08 2017, @04:51AM (4 children)
But the change will be evolutionary, not revolutionary. We are still too primitive to live and let live. The brain stem still rules. The cortex serves. Reason is impotent when confronted with instinct.
On the other hand, the physical universe might indeed preclude the whole concept. By nature, everything, animate and inanimate, will grow as big as it can and consume all it can until it explodes. That includes us.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Friday September 08 2017, @05:20AM
Simple(ton) solution: feed the reason with v̲i̲a̲g̲r̲a̲ (lame filter, heh!)
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Friday September 08 2017, @12:21PM (2 children)
"the change will be evolutionary"
Sadly, I disagree. That doesn't seem to be the way we humans do things. Instead, we run whatever model we have into the wall, creating a huge disaster usually involving warfare. After a period of chaos and poverty, we pick up the pieces and assemble something new.
In the current case of nation-states, we have two problems:
- Tyranny. All national governments always move steadily towards tyranny. If you doubt this, consider simply one item: Governments pass new laws, but almost never remove old one. The number of laws and regulations grows monotonically.
- Debt. Nearly all national governments borrow more and more money, which either places a huge load on the national economy or drives inflation (or both), thus impoverishing the populace over the long-term.
Governments will not solve either of these on their own, because both of them are in the short-term, selfish interests of the political elite. These problems will ultimately only be solved by the collapse of the governments, due to bankruptcy, bloody revolution or external aggression.
The way the major governments are interlinked, when one falls, the rest will follow like dominoes. Some people say that this nearly happened in 2008. It may not happen for a hundred years. Or it may happen tomorrow. There's no way to know...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday September 08 2017, @03:26PM
Tyranny and debt... both the result of subservience and the quest for domination. The alpha rules the roost.
Watch Animal Planet for a couple of hours to see the root cause. We aren't doing anything particularly different. Just apes flinging their highly explosive poo [wikimedia.org].
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @04:13PM
Or it provides the needed infrastructure to your country, enabling all those self made men to get rich and the economy to be more productive and grow. Depends on how shitty your government is I guess.