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What comes after the "Nation-State"?
Glyph
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
The nation-state is a relatively recent phenomenon, having been preceded by city-states, empires, alliances and so on.
This most of you already know.
My question is what's meant to legitimately succeed it? What's the next possible step in sociopolitical organization? Because I don't think anyone here is naive enough to think nation-states are the last word in the development of civil society.
Myself, I'm sort of drawing a blank here because everything else just feels like a retread of outmoded systems...
The closest I can figure is something drawn more along economic/corporate lines.
This most of you already know.
My question is what's meant to legitimately succeed it? What's the next possible step in sociopolitical organization? Because I don't think anyone here is naive enough to think nation-states are the last word in the development of civil society.
Myself, I'm sort of drawing a blank here because everything else just feels like a retread of outmoded systems...
The closest I can figure is something drawn more along economic/corporate lines.
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turns out I am the Mr. Magoo of dictators
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
More seriously, I think we're going to see a further refinement of the supernational federation--right now, we're used to governments within governments, but there's still a lot of experimentation to be done in the area of governments^cubed. China comes to mind immediately, but I'm a Taiwanese national, so a future in a "United Republics of China" is thought-provoking.
In Nation-States, this basically meant you were the Mr. Magoo of world leaders. Though even then, I struggle to imagine what that was like.
Basically, one global "nation", though obviously not organized along the same strict lines and without the powers we'd think.
You can see it already happening wit the idea of a global community and of what one nation may owe the people of another who are suffering.
Canada.
All of a sudden cultural and linguistic differences don't seem that important anymore.
I find it incredibly unlikely that any modern nation-state will voluntarily cede top-level control of its military.
This is one such surprise. If any nation seriously militarized the L points around earth and the lunar surface, they could not only strike anywhere on the planet but also prevent any successful space launch from getting anywhere with impunity. That's an game-over scenario for any nation on earth said military power didn't like, and not just militarily. The nation controlling space traffic off of earth could completely determine the format of any colonies to be established (when the time for such activity comes) right down to their population makeup.
My belief is similar. Nation-states evolve into international unions, with the end-goal being a cohesive world government. However, the problems along the road to getting there will probably push that dream back till god knows when.
Generally, the trend would appear to be towards technocratic continent/regional blocs; south america, africa, maybe the middle east. I mean, there are African Union troops in Somalia right now fighting Islamists, and asking for assistance from the EU anti-piracy fleet in the area. Technocratic governance isn't necessarily a bad thing, it is less subject to pork barrel politics, but a certain minimum standard of democracy must exist. You've got to wonder if every economic union of nation states will reach a tipping point where democracy is at its lowest, there is enormous pressure to take the plunge into full union, meanwhile with the general population increasingly opposed to the whole process. The result could be collapse, stagnation, or full union.
Paul Krugman made a good observation regarding the Euro crisis; either the Euro collapses, which is impossible, or a full Union emerges, which is impossible. One of two impossible things are going to happen. Maybe there is a middle ground...I'm not confident of that myself.
I'm a Realist, so the thought of Nation-States (or something like them, be it empires, city-states, tribes, whatever else you wish to include) disappearing makes me giggle. Major powers will balance against one another and look out for their best interest no matter how the world is organized.
I suppose you could argue that we could be heading towards coalition states, but I think it more likely Europe divides than unites behind Brussels.
Another option is Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations", but that tends to make people uncomfortable because Sam suggests some rather...unflattering things about certain cultures in the world.
Then succession wars, then the return of supertech to unite us all again? I like where you're going with that.
So, whatever-the-hell the EU is, unless it fails miserably and we all avoid the concept like the plague.
The only answer I could give to the OPs question is to ask me again in a hundred years.
There will always be some sort of division, we're too good at Othering. The trend of political globalization is also reversing I feel, as the economic realities of the world have made people suspicious of each other.
I'd also question whether nation states are really all that new. Technically the old empires could be considered a type of nation state.
Until there is another "THEM" that is not from Earth, I suspect the idea of total globalization will remain and idea.
Purely economic globalization has a tendency to weaken the grip of the state. Economic conditions in other countries matter too much for each country's material welfare, so a degree of upward centralization of power is highly attractive. Combine that with the unacceptability of population transfer by force and you have the fragmentation of national identity within each state too. State borders never keep up with demographic shift precisely but you can't kick them out and you can't assimilate them by force, so what can you do?
I also think this is fairly likely.
Personally I'd love to see the end to a top-down hierarchical government and the rise of something more free-form that can easily be created or disbanded as needed by the citizens to provide for their needs. A lot of problems in our current systems seem to come from the idea that once a central government becomes filled with people who self-identify with that government and the privileges it grants them they feel loyalty to that system of privilege and see a need to maintain it regardless of the cost. It's just predictable human behavior, once people become self-aware of the benefits/privileges their power bestows they will invariably seek to (at least) protect (and at worst vastly expand) that power or privilege as long as they are allowed to. So the only way to prevent that is to prevent the privilege to begin with and instead re-think how we form and maintain governments.
It'd be nice if we could model governments more around the idea of local cooperatives and then have larger cooperatives that form around those to take care of larger regional needs and so forth, with offices and positions created organically to fill specific needs (and to disband the moment those specific projects are met.) Even if it's faster and more responsive to have a powerful singular central government just like it's faster to have a vast and powerful standing army, the problems caused by maintaining those sources of singular power are huge over the long term. People are prone to err, even the best of them, so rather than wish for the impossible philosopher king wielding central power, I'd much rather a government be built around a scientific understanding of why we err and is able to adapt robustly around any errors. (Rather than what we have now, where the government uses State Secrets to hide its errors and then pumps us full of Propaganda to make us feel better about some of the horrible things we do. Like the CIA's drone program and how we mark all males of "combat age" as enemy combatants to massage the statistics for PR.)
I host a podcast about movies.
Anecdote time! Not a real story, but meant to give food for thought!
Suppose for a moment the only reason everyone would want a pony was exactly because not everyone who wanted one was allowed to have a pony. Realizing this natural facet of human desire, to make money on the sale of ponies, the government at the voracious request of aware pony breeders (who for the sake of the analogy we'll say are a fairly GDP productive segment of our current economy, looking to keep ever-growing and increasing their profits still further) pursues policies which destroy the entire wild population of them letting a smattering of corporations claim the remainder as captive breeding stock who would be forever "sold" as property to those desiring of ponies. The entire point behind this being to corner the market on what was once a naturally abundant and replenishable good, destroy its natural supply and natural ability to replenish unfettered, to forever make the people who will now (facing a heretofore unknown level of artificially created scarcity) want ponies jump through hoops (usually the other way around, I know! ;p) economically to enrich the government or various corporations it serves which now may perpetually extract wealth by both cornering the supply and creating demand for ponies among the population through constant advertising. (which is now being tailor made from our social networking and other available demographic data to achieve maximum audience penetration)
Would it be fair under these circumstance to lump disdain on the people who want ponies? Or the people who slash/burned the environment to destroy their natural supply entirely so that they could force an artificial scarcity giving them a now captive market (so that) they no longer need to do serious work to maintain their monopoly in perpetuity?
I think you should elaborate on why you dismiss Fukuyama's theory on this. It's actually a lot more sophisticated than you seem to acknowledge when you present it as unserious doomsayerism.
I mean, there are criticisms to be made of his views here, for sure, but do say more.
Or Shadowrun
Fair enough. I'm actually pretty sure that Fukuyama's position has actually evolved at least a little since The End of History and the Last Man, but since that was what I was thinking of at the time (and it remains what he's best known for, by and large), I'll address that. Fukuyama largely ignored the possibility that any "unimportant" stuff like cultural history and ties and religious fundamentalism (not limiting to Christianity and Islam, mind you) might be able to stand in the way of the all-powerful capitalist representative democracy state as he originally spoke of it in the late 80s. The notion that that particular form of government (specifically, a sort of Reagan-period American state, since that most closely mirrors what he described, as far as I can tell) was strong enough to overcome all different histories, cultures, faiths, etc., seems to suggest that there would be no other government after the American-style nation state, engaged in economic competition with others and in league with a particular free-market bloc. Forever (barring nuclear war or something). Even as an atheist, I find this pretty laughable.
As far as I remember (it's been a while), Fukuyama was also content to make this theory for the end of history while not reconciling with the end of human development, or even scientific development. I think even he acknowledged that this was kind of a big goddamn gap in his original thesis some time later.
There are a few of us who think Fukuyama was totally full of crap before, and just largely full of crap now. I think you asked a valid question (if you were being sarcastic or whatever, I could have totally missed it, wouldn't be the first time), and deserved at least an attempt at a thoughtful answer. Hope this fits.
There's the possibility that the sheer cost of militarizing the Lagrange points will involve a huge population commitment as any sort of prerequisite--thus, colonization. Facilitating that would take such a pan-global effort, especially since only so much military and warfare development goes towards extraterrestrial technology (and with the use of drones and automated warfare over the ICBM, for obvious reasons, more and more), it'd be hard to see it working with only one country dominating manned space travel (Russia with the Soyuz rockets), putting aside the ideological problems. Of course, Soyuz being the cheapest and safest ride right now is a temporary thing, as technology progresses. But a global commitment towards colonization of the Lagrange point would be best facilitated with international compacts--but you'd be left with the problem of rival compacts vying for power back on Earth.
So, that basically leaves us with one comparatively safe option: the United Earth (Sphere) Alliance. We'll dominate the colonies, and it will be repressive, mind you, but at least we'll have those cool artificial colonies and no one will be able to drop one back on Earth.
Really it's a difficult thing to say how an overarching super-national organization will operate and what structure it will take. As we've said, economic unions and federations with varying amounts of power over their member states are the best bet in the relatively short term. The long term depends on so many variables that all you can say is that externally powers will appear much the same.
A bunch of shitty economic planning and meaningless nonsense laws? Woo.
@Synthesis
No I wasn't being sarcastic, I'm just getting the impression that you're attacking Fukuyama on positions he's refined and/or backed down a bit in the decades that followed that text. I think there's definitely something to be said for his original theory - liberal democracy is still something basically every industrialized nation has to contend with philosophically and practically. Nations are modeled after it, sometimes unsuccessfully, and people clamor for it, sometimes successfully. It seems to me that, despite the presence and influence and success of alternative styles of government or society, the global context is still that of Western democracy. I think this is evidenced by the proliferation of the concept of universal human rights, and the demand for a constitution and balance of powers that oft occurs in emerging governments.
He has a much more recent work, Origins of Political Order that takes a rigorously subjective view of political history. Give that a look and I think you'll be hard pressed to level the accusation that he is somehow lacking in perspective on forms of government and social order. To me, at least, it gives his previous theories a little more weight (not to say I don't have problems with it myself) because he's not making those predictions out of ignorance of those things you said, but rather in spite of those things.
I think, ultimately, the arguments from religious fundamentalism and cultural histories do not overcome his theses. The changes brought on by modern technologies and the information age, however, pose a considerably greater challenge the predictive power of his theory. Of course I can imagine an argument to be made that those things wind up reinforcing the primacy of liberal democracy, but I think we're working with increasingly attenuated facts and theories when we go that far.
"Your argument is disdainful of my conclusions, so I reject it"? Is there a name for this manner of fallacy?
Leaving the economics of this argument aside - which I regard as suspect, to say the least - the raw politics is that in such a dystopia posited to be full of roving bands of corporate pony-hunters, to advocate open ranching of ponies in response is comically suicidal. It's the worst possible response one could come up with!
Help, help, we're being oppressed by enclosure and privatization of the commons, let's put even more unguarded valuables into the commons and advocate removing what rights we have left over the commons! So as to, I don't know, make the raiders stop because they've collapsed in laughter?
If those were the options I'd hope for federation because the mega corps are assholes every single time.
Like, what if it was Google Earth for realz?