Jamie Bartless - Return of the city-state
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
f 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.
Which is all rather
odd, since they’re not really that old. Until the mid-19th century, most of the
world was a sprawl of empires, unclaimed land, city-states and principalities,
which travellers crossed without checks or passports. As industrialisation made
societies more complex, large centralised bureaucracies grew up to manage them.
Those governments best able to unify their regions, store records, and
coordinate action (especially war) grew more powerful vis-à-vis their
neighbours. Revolutions – especially in the United States (1776) and France
(1789) – helped to create the idea of a commonly defined ‘national interest’,
while improved communications unified language, culture and identity.
Imperialistic expansion spread the nation-state model worldwide, and by the
middle of the 20th century it was the only game in town. There are now 193
nation-states ruling the world.
But the nation-state
with its borders, centralised governments, common people and sovereign
authority is increasingly out of step with the world. And as Karl Marx
observed, if you change the dominant mode of production that underpins a
society, the social and political structure will change too. The case against the
nation-state is hardly new. Twenty years ago, many were prophesising its
imminent demise. Globalisation, said the futurists, was chipping away at
nation-states’ power to enforce change. Businesses, finance and people could up
sticks and leave. The exciting, new internet seemed to herald a borderless,
free, identity-less future. And climate change, internet governance and
international crime all seemed beyond the nation-state’s abilities. It seemed
too small to handle international challenges; and too lumbering to tinker with
local problems. Voters were quick to spot all this and stopped bothering to
vote, making matters worse. In 1995, two books both titled The End of
the Nation State – one by the former French diplomat Jean-Marie
Guéhenno, the other by the Japanese organisational theorist Kenichi Ohmae –
prophesised that power would head up to multi-national bodies such as the
European Union or the United Nations, or down to regions and cities.
Reports of its death
were greatly exaggerated, and the end-of-the-nation-state theory itself died at
the turn of the millennium. But now it’s back, and this time it might be right…
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