SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @05:21AM
Is defense. The whole purpose of a nation state is indeed control, but it's control that at least to some degree generally derives from those that reside within that nation. The American Revolution is an iconic illustration of this. A relatively rag tag group overthrew the most powerful empire at the time once they'd become sufficiently disenfranchised. Of course that's nothing new. The collapse of the British Empire, the French Empire (think: Algeria 1962), and so on are less well known illustrations of the same. It's the reason the question of who will govern Mars is so silly. I can tell you - "Martians" will govern Mars, even if some nation or another claims otherwise initially.
If the United States was broken up into individual and independent states, it would be easy pickings for more powerful countries to exert their will upon. It could even be done democratically. Rhode Island has a population of 1 million. Would the majority vote for allowing China to occupy the state if they were paid $10,000 a piece? That's just $10 billion to gain a strategic foothold to setup a military base right within the United States homeland from which further operations could be organized. You'd get near 100% agreement for $100,000 a piece and that's not out of the question given the value of such a piece of land. For $100k I think the vast majority would be happy to just say screw it, give the entire place to China and move.
So of course the city states could unify the create a mutual defense and agreement system, but in doing so you're basically recreating a union and federal government even if you're not going to call it that. And it would suffer the same creeping influence and corruption as our governments today do. After all the first thing you'd need is a mutually agreed upon system of funding the military and tada - you now have a federal tax. And then maybe that government wants to just standardize a few things. You know, just for the sake of the civilians. And so forth and so on.
The take away here is that the first nation state to turn to city states is going to rapidly become part of another nation state that will immediately seize upon that power vacuum.