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posted by martyb on Friday September 08 2017, @04:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the who's-the-boss? dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 08 2017, @11:33PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 08 2017, @11:33PM (#565389) Journal

    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.

    The security situation had decayed during the 4th century creating informal feudal systems empire-wide. The facts that so many people were much less free than they were a few generations earlier due to the threats of the day combined with a decline in the ability to maintain the engineering works such as aqueducts and water/sewer systems, would indict to the alert person that things weren't going well for the empire. The invasions by the Huns and other barbarians over the last couple of centuries was symptoms of deeper problems that were never fixed.