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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: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @05:36AM
I think you're putting the cart before the horse.
Even though the US had many such freedoms, they were mostly token. There is freedom of religion, that de facto translated to you were free to practice ANY religion: Catholicism or Protestantism. And freedom of speech was much a charade. Yes you're free to say whatever you like, but rest assured that it will never appear in any medium where anybody outside of arm's reach could ever see it.
Now things like the internet are changing the world. And free speech isn't actually just a placation for the masses but indeed something that has major and real implications. Thus far we're not responding well to it. And the same is true of freedom of religion. Or take things such as the 4th amendment. Now that it's becoming inconvenient to the powers that be, it's clear it never meant anything at all.
The US has had these rights and privileges for it's entire 240 year history, yet it's only been within the past few decades that they've started to actually be put to the test. And that is a test that I think we're spectacularly failing.