In other forums, I’ve gone around and around with people about the future of extra-national entities like Europe or the North American Union. Everyone alive has grown up in a world of countries and nations. They think that’s the natural order and anything that runs counter to it is doomed to fail.
People believe the nation is the natural end point of human societal evolution. European history was taught this way in American schools when we still taught history so maybe that’s the reason it is embedded in people’s minds. More likely it is just the fact that we have known nothing else. Even places where “country” is barely recognizable like the Middle East, we insist on maintaining national boundaries.
My contention is that history shows a steady evolution toward larger and larger organizing entities. Britain is a good example. When the Romans arrived, the people were organized into tribes. When the Romans left, the island was organized into small kingdoms. By the middle ages they had the Heptarchy. Eventually, all of Britain was unified under one banner and one identity. In a few years, Britain will be absorbed in the EU as a province of Brussels.
That seems to be the way to bet. Europe is becoming an amorphous blob of people from all over creation. What was once thought of as countries are becoming administrative districts. When the German district runs low on people, they import more from Turkey or the Balkans. The French district imports people from Algeria and Tunisia. Being a French citizen has the same value to the local government as being a citizen of Swaziland or Jupiter.
The TPP that Republicans are hell bent on passing for Barak Obama will create an extra-national organization that will decide immigration, trade, tariffs, taxes, environmental issues, etc. Just as with the EU, this organization will absorb more and more of the duties national governments used to manage. Over time, the US government will simply be an enforcement arm of various world governing authorities.
That sounds like bad theater, but it is already happening in Europe. The EU recently passed a rule requiring cars to have tracking devices. The responsibility for enforcing such a rule will fall to what we used to call national governments. Those government will, in turn, delegate some portion of their duties to provincial and municipal governments. Those governments don’t get a say in it. They just enforce it on whoever happens to be coming through their administrative zone.
You can vote yourself silly in local and national elections, but all you will be doing is picking the people responsible for enforcing the rules. You will have no say in the writing of laws and formulation of policy, because the people for whom you are voting will have no power to write laws. That’s on display in Greece right now. They can have an election every week and the facts on the ground remain unchanged, because the decisions are made in Brussels.
This means citizenship goes away, for all practical purposes. Citizens participate in the management of their societies because they share a language, customs and history with the people of their society. If you no longer share these things and have no way to participate in the management of your society, why have any loyalty to any of it? Why bother calling yourself a citizen? You’re just someone who happens to live in an administrative district named after what it used to be.
Of course, humans are not atomized, transactional creatures. We are social animals. Even when we find ourselves randomly dispersed, we coagulate into groups based on our natures. There’s a reason that in every school cafeteria in America kids self-segregate by race, sex and age. Kids have to be forcibly integrated, despite being marinated in multiculturalism.
So, people will still group together and have in-group loyalties and out-group hostilities. How the global elite figures on managing that is anyone’s guess. It works now as most people remain patriotic and participate in civic life thinking it makes a difference. Everyday, however, more people come to the realization that citizenship is a suckers game. At some point, the legacy institutions will be abandoned by even the most romantic and a new way of controlling the population will be required.
The most likely solution is the soft authoritarianism you see in the ghetto. The dependent class is kept in-line by a mix of the lash and the leash. When you rely on the state to supply your house, your food, your entertainments and your drugs, even the dumbest ghetto dweller figures out how to play by the rules. Those who can’t behave are rounded up by the cops, if they don’t shoot one another.
Maybe some new organizing ethos will fill the void, allowing people to rally in support of their rulers like we had with patriotism and tribalism. It’s hard to imagine what it could be, but maybe nationalism was unfathomable before The Hundred Years War. Alternatively, maybe the future is just a cleaner, more orderly version of the ghetto where everyone is running a scam, loyal only to their circle of confidants.
Ghettos require riot police and fences and those cost money. Why not just keep ruthlessly atomizing society until all you have is a gas (the analogy here being the the behavior of gasses is very easy to predict… solids and liquids much less so) of people who you can very easily control. Drugs, sex, the state in place of the family… OK, Aldous already was all over that one.
I’m just playing with the dialectic here, so don’t hate on me, but why just not use a culling strategy? Start with anyone with an IQ under 80 and work your way up as capital deepening and productivity rise. It’s not like our elites have shown much hesitation in the past when it comes to killing very large numbers of Armenians, Jews, Slavs, ungoodthinking petty bourgeoisie, etc. over the past century. When you have large numbers of truly unemployable (no more need for porters, wheat reapers, ditch diggers and all the rest of the pre-industrial labor pool. Not much need for IQ 100 jobs like steno and typing pools, phone operators, and filing clerks either).
But there are still parts of the planet populated by large numbers of freeholders armed with guns. They might fold, but they might fight either a Brave New World or Soylent Green. So instead of risking civil war, why not invest in intelligence boosting medical research? Back in the days of when it was OK to use the scientific method to study the roots of intelligence, scientists used to try to correlate the size of the brain pan with IQ. They found that while size does matter, there were some really smart people with well below average sized skulls, so some brains seem to be wired more efficiently than others. Could we have an intelligence revolution like we had (God bless Norman Borlaug) a green revolution? Rather than declaring ever larger numbers of our fellow men obsolete, can we bring them along for the ride? All of the evidence indicates that we’ve maxed out the benefits of mass education. So all that is left for us is science without an exclamation point.
For every locality __A__ the term “the government of A” refers to the largest dealer in interpersonal violence in that locality (definition, after Weber). The size of a government is a function, in part, of the speed of communication and transportation. For a government to cohere, orders and troops must move from the center to the periphery in time to meet challenges. Most large empires were noted for their communication and transportation technology: Egypt for the Nile (lower the sail and drift downriver, raise the sail and sail upriver), Rome, the Inca, and the Americans for roads. Qin Shi Huangdi standardized axle lengths and built roads and canals specifically to supply his army.
In terms of the speed of communication and transportation, the world today is smaller than Rome at its height or Han Dynasty China. National boundaries may persist for a while, like ancient mid-continental plate boundaries or flaws in a block of ice.
Perhaps this answers the astrobiologists’ question: “Where are they?” Perhaps once a civilization dominates an entire planet the competitive spur to further advance in transportation technology wanes.
If civilization can somehow keep itself out of the One-World Feudal Oligarchy so ardently desired by our control-freaking satanic ‘elites’, then I think we will have nation-states for a good long time to come. There will be different cultures, and they will primarily be based on geography and language, as they are now. Many smaller, more independent states might emerge and thrive, as we become globally wealthier through better energy technologies etc.
That is a pleasant dream, isn’t it?
If it’s going to happen in any kind of a peaceful fashion, I think it will probably begin in America. The US could probably evolve into a a federation of a half-dozen or more countries that would work better than it does now. In fact, if the US political system were simply re-balanced to the point originally intended by the founders, that would be ideal. And it would be a shining example for the world to follow.
I question that a civilization that has accumulated the habits of civilization under nationalism can retain them without it.
New opt outs if we indeed do vote to stay in Europe will leave Britain stronger and more independant than the last 20 years.
If the Post-National World happens will be limited to Europe and North-America with maybe Latin-America and some Asian countries like Korea and Singapore joining.