Debora MacKenzie - End of nations: Is there an alternative to countries?
Try, for a moment, to
envisage a world without countries. Imagine a map not divided into neat,
coloured patches, each with clear borders, governments, laws. Try to describe
anything our society does – trade, travel, science, sport, maintaining peace
and security – without mentioning countries. Try to describe yourself: you have a right to at
least one nationality, and the right to change it, but not the right to have
none.
Those coloured patches
on the map may be democracies, dictatorships or too chaotic to be either, but
virtually all claim to be one thing: a nation state, the sovereign territory of
a “people” or nation who are entitled to self-determination within a
self-governing state. So says the United
Nations, which now numbers 193 of them.
And more and more
peoples want their own state, from Scots voting for
independence to jihadis declaring a new state in the Middle East. Many
of the big news stories of the day, from conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine to rows
over immigration and membership of the European Union, are linked to nation
states in some way.
Even as our economies
globalise, nation states remain the planet’s premier political institution.
Large votes for nationalist parties in this year’s EU elections prove
nationalism remains alive – even as the EU tries to transcend it. Yet there is a growing
feeling among economists, political scientists and even national governments
that the nation state is not necessarily the best scale on which to run our
affairs. We must manage vital matters like food supply and climate on a global
scale, yet national agendas repeatedly trump the global good. At a smaller
scale, city and regional administrations often seem to serve people better than
national governments.
How, then, should we
organise ourselves? Is the nation state a natural, inevitable institution? Or
is it a dangerous anachronism in a globalised world? These are not normally
scientific questions – but that is changing. Complexity theorists, social
scientists and historians are addressing them using new techniques, and the
answers are not always what you might expect. Far from timeless, the nation
state is a recent phenomenon. And as complexity keeps rising, it is already
mutating into novel political structures. Get set for neo-medievalism.
Before the late 18th
century there were no real nation states, says John Breuilly of the London
School of Economics. If you travelled across Europe, no one asked for your
passport at borders; neither passports nor borders as we know them existed.
People had ethnic and cultural identities, but these didn’t really define the
political entity they lived in… read more:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329850-600-end-of-nations-is-there-an-alternative-to-countries/also see
