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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: 3, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday September 08 2017, @08:54AM (4 children)
Having read the comments on this thread, I think that short of a global nuclear war / pandemic / zombie apocalypse that sends the world back to pre-industrial society, nations and globalism, or at the very least corporations masquerading as nations, are here to stay on this planet. The genie will not go back in the bottle.
However, once we have the technology to live self-sufficiently in space, all bets are off. An O'Neill Cylinder at some distant Langrange point could operate very effectively as a city state, and in fact might have very little interest in joining any kind of larger political construct.
Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable. [vavatch.co.uk]
To survive in space, ships/habitats must be self-sufficient, or very nearly so; the hold of the state (or the corporation) over them therefore becomes tenuous if the desires of the inhabitants conflict significantly with the requirements of the controlling body. On a planet, enclaves can be surrounded, besieged, attacked; the superior forces of a state or corporation - hereafter referred to as hegemonies - will tend to prevail. In space, a break-away movement will be far more difficult to control, especially if significant parts of it are based on ships or mobile habitats. The hostile nature of the vacuum and the technological complexity of life support mechanisms will make such systems vulnerable to outright attack, but that, of course, would risk the total destruction of the ship/habitat, so denying its future economic contribution to whatever entity was attempting to control it.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday September 08 2017, @08:57AM
D'oh! Screwed up my hyperlinks. The last two paragraphs should be quoted and linked to the late great Iain M Banks.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday September 08 2017, @09:20AM (2 children)
"The hostile nature of the vacuum and the technological complexity of life support mechanisms will make such systems vulnerable to outright attack, but that, of course, would risk the total destruction of the ship/habitat, so denying its future economic contribution to whatever entity was attempting to control it."
Sometimes victory can be had not by controlling the others resources, but by denying resources to the others. As such destruction of habitats that cannot be conquered is still better than leaving them for the opponent to use.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @10:44AM (1 child)
Indeed, the very vulnerability of the habitats will make the states/companies more powerful: If you control a hundred habitats, you will survive the loss of one of them. If you inhabit it, you won't survive the loss of it.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday September 08 2017, @11:36AM
Please read the relevant part of the linked text, your point is addressed there.