Рецензия · 2. Национальные государства — устаревшие технологии управления

2. Nation States Are Obsolete Governance Technologies

2.1 Preliminaries

In 1994, during the Rwandan genocide, Immaculée Ilibagiza, a member of the Tutsi tribe, hid in a secret space in her pastor’s house, listening to Hutu tribesmen who were armed with machetes as they searched for her. She heard them say that they needed to terminate the Tutsi ‘cockroaches’, and then, ‘“She’s here . . . we know she’s here somewhere. Find her – find Immaculée.”’

Immaculée heard one of the Hutus brag that he had killed 399 cockroaches and wanted her to bring his record to an even 400. In her book Left to Tell, Immaculée described the experience:

I tried to swallow, but my throat closed up. I had no saliva, and my mouth was drier than sand. I closed my eyes and tried to make myself disappear, but their voices grew louder. I knew that they would show no mercy, and my mind echoed with one thought: If they catch me, they will kill me. If they catch me, they will kill me. If they catch me, they will kill me.¹

When Immaculée finally left her hiding spot three months later, she learned about the damage that had been done to her family and tribe. Her father, her mother and two of her three brothers had been butchered. Uncounted neighbours perished as well. The estimates of her Tutsi tribespeople that had been killed ranged from half a million to a million.² The number of Tutsi women raped ranged from 200,000 to a quarter of a million.³ The psychological damage done to survivors was incalculable.

In the wake of this atrocity, it was natural to talk about the evil of the Hutu murderers, and to be sure, the murderers cannot and should not be absolved. However, it also needs to be observed that these events may not have happened at all had two different tribes with diverse cultures and histories not been kettled together within the boundaries of a single nation state, with those boundaries drawn by colonial European powers.

Indeed, once kettled, the question became which of the two tribes would rule the other. When Germany controlled Rwanda, the minority Tutsi were placed in power, with consequences that set in motion a deep resentment that festered up to and through the horrific genocide of 1994. To put it another way, whatever the benefits to Europe that accrued from the Peace of Westphalia, the attempt to impose this political technology on Africa, ignoring tribal boundaries and creating new and artificial nation-state boundaries, has been disastrous.

Sadly, the Rwandan story is not unique. Even today, our political landscape is full of examples of ethnic groups forced to live together within nation states, with one group lording power over the other and, all too often, resulting in attempted genocide. Modern states are, as we write, the settings for numerous examples. The victims include the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Nuer in South Sudan, Christians and Yazidis in Iraq and Syria, Christians and Muslims in the Central African Republic, Darfuris in Sudan, and the list goes on.

Even when people are not dying on a genocidal scale, rights are often trampled upon in nation states. If inhabitants have diverse values, and someone is in charge of enforcing one set of values, then someone’s interests are being protected and someone else’s are not. Thus, the result for nation states like the United States is what the media calls ‘culture wars’ – conflicts that generate lots of existential anguish and a few hate crimes and murders, but no mass killings. At least, not yet.

You might be thinking that all these examples of genocide and repression are indeed terrible, but are not nation states the only viable option? Is there not an alternative system of government that can avoid such outcomes or that can at least allow people to safely escape such situations when they implode? What is the alternative to nation states?

2.2 Nation states are not the only option

Sometimes, it seems that nation states have been with us forever. Before the United Nations, after all, there was the League of Nations, and before that, there were surely nations, no? But while nations and, in particular, nation states seem to be set in stone in our world today, it was not always so.

Indeed, it was not so long ago that people used alternative systems to organise themselves for political and economic purposes. There have been kingdoms and city states, empires and duchies, federations of city states, caliphates, palatinates, papal states, clans, tribes, and ‘nations’ of people sharing common heritage but not yet organised into states. Indeed, until the arrival of European powers, the entire continent of North America was principally organised into tribes, with occasional empires rising up and then fading away.⁴

The fact is that nation states are relatively recent inventions. They are a form of government that has its roots in the Protestant–Catholic wars that swept through Northern Europe after the Reformation and a form of government designed to solve a very particular problem: How do we contain conflicts over religion and ideology that might otherwise sweep across continents consuming everything in their path?

As we noted in Chapter 1, nation states as we know them were born in 1648 with the aforementioned Peace of Westphalia – the treaties that marked the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Leo Gross, writing in the American Journal of International Law on the 300th anniversary of the Peace (shortly after the founding of the United Nations), described the Peace of Westphalia as ‘the majestic portal which leads from the old into the new world.’⁵ According to the standard view, the Peace of Westphalia secured peace by establishing the convention that we should not look too closely at what goes on within national boundaries. National boundaries could thus serve as bulkheads against waves of violence that might otherwise sweep across continents.

Fifty-six years later, Henry Kissinger echoed this take in his book, World Order:

The Peace of Westphalia became a turning point in the history of nations because the elements it set in place were as uncomplicated as they were sweeping. The state, not the empire, dynasty, or religious confession was affirmed as the building block of European order. The concept of state sovereignty was established. The right of each signatory to choose its own domestic structure and religious orientation free from intervention was affirmed, while novel clauses ensured that minority sects could practice their faith in peace and be free. Beyond the immediate demands of the moment, the principles of a system of ‘international relations’ were taking shape, motivated by the common desire to avoid a recurrence of total war on the Continent.⁶

Not everyone buys this interpretation of the Peace of Westphalia, and some have dubbed Leo Gross ‘the Homer of the Westphalia myth’,⁷ but the critics are not so much troubled by the thought that nation states are inventions as they are with the concern that Gross was attempting to canonise the legitimacy of nation states by giving them a date of birth and connecting them with important international accords. Cormac Shine, writing in History Today, complained that the Westphalia myth is designed to ‘make the formation of the existing settlement seem inevitable. Any alternatives outside the realm of sovereign states are discounted.’⁸

Similarly, in this book, our idea is that we should not think of nation states as inevitable or necessary. They are human inventions and, perhaps, not particularly good ones, despite their canonisation in international law. Two things should be kept in mind here. First, if the idea of nation states was to have a system of human political organisation that avoided wars of religion and ideology sweeping across continents (or the globe, for that matter), they have not been all that successful. The second thing is that sometimes nation states make the problem worse by kettling persons of diverse interests and backgrounds within artificial borders, where one group typically dominates the other (leading to extreme examples like the Rwandan genocide).

As we stated, it was not always like this. Tribes of people came into conflict with each other, to be sure, but they were not typically locked together within artificial territorial boundaries and told to choose which set of interests would dominate that shared territory. A tribe might be forced out of a territory as, for example, when the Lakota forced the Cheyenne out of the Black Hills before Europeans arrived there, but the Cheyenne were still self-governing and still controlled their values, even if they were displaced from their previous territory.⁹

Here lies the problem: when persons of conflicting religions and ideologies are locked into the same space and forced to work things out, compromise is possible, but more likely, someone is going to be the loser. Maybe a strongman like Saddam Hussein will resolve the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites by dictatorial decree and military suppression of one group. Or maybe a government, like that of the Soviet Union, will outlaw all religious beliefs or at least create obstacles for believers. Or maybe an election will be held in which the larger group will prevail, leading to the minority group’s values being disregarded. But whether the system of governance is democratic or dictatorial, there always seem to be winners and losers, and because there are losers, there is typically also a group of people that are left resentful and angry, even if not yet physically harmed.

One way to take this point is that we are trying to solve new problems today – not just the problems that drove the solution in the Peace of Westphalia. To be sure, we are still dealing with the ideological differences of the time, but their culture wars are not the same as ours today. And while the problems faced in Northern Europe in 1648 were arguably worse than those we face today in the West, we still face problems that call for solutions. It is not enough to kettle communities together and tell them to deal with it. What we are looking for are solutions that minimise distrust, allow communities to be self-determining and provide safe exit if necessary.

Often housing groups of people with radically different interests and goals and values, nation states are odd by their very nature. However, they are also odd in how they operate externally. Nation states do go to war. They do it all the time. And while tribes also went to war, when a nation state engages in kinetic conflict, it is really something to behold. Because some nation states are drawn with borders that have enormous territories and numbers of people, they typically also have vast resources to wage wars – wars in which weaker nations are turned into economic vassals. When large nation states find themselves in conflict with their peers, the result (as seen in those wars of the twentieth century) is typically the deaths of tens of millions of people.

Indeed, some thinkers, like the conservative French philosopher and political theorist Bertrand de Jouvenel, have argued that nation states are, by their very nature, inevitable engines of violence and repression. Having fought in the resistance during World War II, he had seen more than enough warfare and observed that the modern nation state had become a meat grinder in its execution of warfare. When nation states went to war, Jouvenel argued, ‘national resources’ became targets. ‘In this war everyone – workmen, peasants, and women alike – is in the fight, and in consequence everything, the factory, the harvest, even the dwelling-house, has turned target. As a result, the enemy to be fought has been all flesh that is and all soil, and the bombing plane has striven to consummate the utter destruction of them all.’ As he put it, ‘the whole nation becomes a weapon of war wielded by the state.’¹⁰

In Jouvenel’s view, this sort of violence could not have happened in the pre-Westphalian age. Back then, kings might go to war, but they would need to tax and enlist the support of nobles, who often refused their support. However, in the new age, there were no such checks on a leader. In the age of nation states, wars simply became too easy to execute, and economic resources were rarely, if ever, denied.

The curious thing is that while political discourse can go on and on about the best system of government for nation states – the best way to organise democracy or theocracy or whichever alternative – and we can argue about which nation states are behaving well and which are part of the ‘axis of evil’, we seldom ask ourselves why we need nation states at all. Are they even a good idea?

Let us set aside the issue of whether nation states prevent or actually contribute to genocides and other atrocities. Are they even that good of a system for trade, taxation, economic growth or really any aspect of human flourishing? Can it really be that an almost 380-year-old technology is the best tool we have for approaching these problems?

2.3 Are nation states bad at everything?

Our point here is not that nation states have been bad at stopping genocide and atrocities and religious oppression, which, let us remember, is the task for which they were originally created. Our point is that they seem to be bad at everything.

Consider the issue of national currencies. If nation states have failed to protect human rights and minimise acts of genocide around the world, are they at least good at setting up national currencies with which people can carry out economic activities? Sadly, no. Currencies, under the control of nation states, have been notorious failures. There has been a litany of famous cases in which currencies have collapsed utterly.

The most famous case, of course, is the collapse of the German currency in the Weimar Republic after World War I. As the pseudonymous writer Peruvian Bull notes in his book The Dollar Endgame: Hyperinflation is Coming, inflation reached rates of more than 30,000%, meaning that prices doubled every few days. People burned paper currency to stay warm, as it had less value than the wood from which it was made.

That might be the most famous case, but it was hardly an isolated example. Again, Bull observes that economists estimate that the annual inflation rate in Hungary reached 41.9 quadrillion percent after World War II. This means that prices in Hungary doubled approximately every fifteen hours. There is a seemingly endless supply of additional cases. In 2008, Zimbabwe famously had to start printing bills with denominations greater than a trillion. Other recent hyperinflation casualties included the Greek drachma (1941–1944), the Chinese yuan (1947–1949), the Chilean escudo (1971–1974), the Argentine peso (1975–1992), the Peruvian sol (1985–1991 and 1992–2003), the Yugoslavian dinar (1992–1995), the Belarusian ruble (1992–2003) and the Angolan kwanza (1999). Even when the result is not hyperinflation, a modest inflation rate of 2% can wipe out family wealth within 100 years if it is kept in the national currency.

Bull notes that ‘an eventual collapse of fiat currency is the norm, not the exception’ and adds:

In a study of 775 fiat currencies created over the last 500 years, researchers found that approximately 599 have failed, leaving only 176 remaining in circulation. Approximately 20% of the 775 fiat currencies examined failed due to hyperinflation, 21% were destroyed in war, and 24% percent [sic] were reformed through centralized monetary policy. The remainder were either phased out, converted into another currency, or are still around today.

More poignantly, Peruvian Bull adds that ‘the average lifespan for a pure fiat currency is only 27 years’¹¹ – much shorter than a typical human life.¹²

This does not mean that earlier forms of human organisation fared much better with monetary integrity. The Roman Emperor Diocletian diluted the amount of silver in the Roman coin, the denarius, leading to one of the first recorded examples of hyperinflation. However, our point is not that hyperinflation is unique to nation states; it is rather that nation states have not been effective in forestalling such phenomena. In fact, they have made hyperinflation quite common in today’s world. All of this is to ask why currencies should be under the control of nation states at all.

In her recent book Money is Broken, Lyn Alden makes an interesting observation about the inevitability of nation states debasing their currencies. Thanks to centralised national currencies, nation states can undertake actions that would otherwise call for the levying of new taxes. However, rather than face that political challenge, it is easier to print more money, thereby diluting the value of their currency with the effect of syphoning away the wealth of their citizens. Ultimately, this path continues until the wealth of the nation is exhausted.¹³

The other interesting observation that Alden makes is that the debasing of national currencies is central to the capacity of nation states to wage war. In many (perhaps most) cases, the loser of the war is the power that exhausts the wealth of its people first. In special cases, like the United States, which currently holds the world’s reserve currency, the wealth of the whole world – at least every nation holding dollars – is tapped to execute its military operations. In this case, there is no threat of being exhausted first, but there is a definite danger that a state can lose its reserve currency status by constantly destabilising its currency at the expense of its holders and users.

One might think that the problem is not with nation states per se but rather with central bankers printing money or with the failure to link units of currency to gold or silver, but these are just symptoms of the problem. Of course, we know how to avoid hyperinflation; the problem is that nation states, when they have control of their currencies, feel that they are free to print money to avoid the economic problems that they face. These phenomena are symptoms of the deeper problem, which is that we are operating with obsolete methods of human organisation.

2.4 Questioning sovereignty

This observation is not unique to us. For these reasons and others, the idea of the sovereign nation state has been unravelling for some time. Consider the issue of sovereignty itself to begin with. Not surprisingly, in response to events like the Rwandan genocide, people have begun to question the wisdom of state sovereignty. The growing recognition of universal human rights has challenged the idea that a nation’s internal affairs are solely its own business. Quite sensibly, many thinkers now argue that human rights abuses should be addressed by the international community, even if they occur within the borders of a sovereign state.¹⁴

The concern about sovereignty has not only been driven by cases like Rwanda; there is a growing list of issues that are undermining the idea of national sovereignty. In the discussion that follows, we touch on a few of these issues, and our point is that these issues, whether or not you believe in them or consider them important, are driving wedges into the material integrity of nation states across the globe. They are breaking the Westphalian order.

For example, environmental issues, such as pollution, are transnational in scope and are leading to actions that undermine nation-state sovereignty. It is clear why this would happen. Poisoned air and water are not contained by borders. No one simply pollutes their own air or their own water because air and water do not recognise the boundaries of nation states. If poisonous chemicals are dumped into a nation’s river systems, they soon find their way into the world’s oceans. It is thus a problem that transcends the boundaries of Westphalian nation states. And new centralised powers in our world are undoing aspects of national sovereignty in order to address these issues.

Similarly, on the economic front, regional blocs and trade agreements can be used (and are being used) to limit a nation’s ability to fully exercise its sovereignty. If you enter into a trade agreement with another country, there will be disputes, and it is folly to think that you alone get to call the shots when resolving those disputes. International agreements, as structured today, require the relinquishing of at least some sovereignty to international adjudicators.

Finally, the rise of global security threats has led some to argue that traditional sovereignty is out of touch with respect to the reality of conflict today. The rise of non-state actors and transnational threats, such as terrorism and narcotrafficking, has led many to conclude that no country can fully protect itself without ceding some of its security operations to other states or to new forms of centralised authority.

All of these concerns are, of course, reflected in recent international law. The growth of international institutions such as the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice has, by their very existence, carved out exceptions to absolute national sovereignty. These institutions are not toothless and they can and do limit a nation’s ability to act unilaterally in certain areas, such as human rights and war crimes.

These are all cases in which nation states have had to cede some of their sovereignty to larger groups of nations or, at a minimum, to other nations. However, things cut in the other direction, too. Nation states are also losing sovereignty to smaller groups within their borders as well as to transnational groups that do not recognise national borders at all.

Nation states and familiar international organisations like the UN are no longer the only available option as far as global governance is concerned. There has been a Cambrian explosion in new forms of governance on the global stage, and there is an interesting question as to whether traditional nation states (and organisations of nation states) will even have a place in the new global environment. They are certainly no longer the only players at the table.

We can start with some dramatic cases. We often overlook the global scope and power of international drug cartels like the Cártel de Sinaloa (Sinaloa Cartel) in Mexico and the now-defunct Cártel de Cali (Cali Cartel) in Colombia. They operate across multiple borders and have significant economic and political power. It is fair to say that in many parts of Mexico, the cartels are the de facto governing authority. This is true even for the less powerful cartels.

Until his death in 2014, Nazario Moreno González – aka El Chayo,¹⁵ aka El Dulce (The Candy), aka El Más Loco (The Craziest) and sometimes known as Emiliano Morelos Guevara¹⁶ – ran an evangelical Christian mission and narcotics trafficking operation, La Familia Michoacana, which ultimately evolved into a narcotrafficking organisation known as Los Caballeros Templarios (The Knights Templar). Under his stewardship, the two successive cartels flourished economically, but they also served as a nongovernmental aid programme to the indigent and as the de facto government for many of the citizens of the Mexican state of Michoacán. As we shall see, they also created problems for people living within their area of control.

On the business end, González’s cartels were involved in the manufacture and export (to the United States) of methamphetamines but also in the mining of iron ore for sale to China. The Mexican government said that the iron ore mining was illegal. That did not seem to phase González, who sold the ore anyway and distributed some of the proceeds to the poor in Michoacán. He also gave loans to farmers, funded schools and churches and, in general, provided the kinds of services that governments were supposed to provide but which the official Mexican government was not willing or able to do. It is no surprise that, on his death, he became an unofficial saint and to this day is venerated as San Nazario.¹⁷

Cases like this call us to rethink where the real power resides in today’s world. For example, in many parts of the world, terrorist organisations have more actual control over terrestrial regions than do the nation states in which they operate. Groups such as Al-Qaeda, ISIS and Boko Haram operate in multiple countries and have their own political ideologies and agendas, which are not aligned with any of the nation states in which they operate.

In a Guardian essay aptly titled ‘The Demise of the Nation State’, Rana Dasgupta notes that the adherents of such organisations ‘have lost the enchantment for the old slogans of nation-building.’ Instead, ‘their political technology is charismatic religion, and the future they seek is inspired by the ancient golden empires that existed before the invention of nations.’ The most telling part of the story is how terrorist organisations rework the plumbing of global governance, completely indifferent to the borders of nation states. They are not interested in seizing the state apparatus, but ‘instead, they cut holes and tunnels in state authority, and so assemble transnational networks of tax collection, trade routes and military supply lines.’ The networks they build are impressive, tunnelling under the purview of nation states ‘from Mauritania in the west to Yemen in the east, and from Kenya and Somalia in the south to Algeria and Syria in the north.’¹⁸

Like the Mexican cartels, terrorist organisations also take on many roles of governing institutions, or at least try to. Thus, they take on infrastructure projects, project taxing authority and, like the Los Caballeros Templarios, provide social services to local populations. Whether it is out of the goodness of their hearts or to capture the hearts and minds of their subjects is beside the point. What is critical for our discussion is how nation states have become almost invisible to these organisations.¹⁹

Meanwhile, transnational corporations (TNCs) are doing a ‘legitimate’ version of the same thing – tunnelling under and around nation states and taking over the roles that nation states once performed. TNCs have become increasingly powerful and influential in global affairs, operating across multiple countries and regions, often with more economic and political clout than many states. Sometimes, they have come under criticism for flexing their power by involving themselves in what is traditionally the province of governments.

We can start with a relatively benign example. Shell, the multinational oil and gas company, has played a quasi-governmental role in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, where it has operated for decades. While it did not exactly replace the Nigerian government, it did play a major role as a kind of police force working with the national government. It was accused of sharing intelligence with the Nigerian security forces, allowing them to carry out operations against local communities and activists. Shell was also accused of providing financial support and logistical assistance to the security forces, including transporting soldiers and equipment to areas where they were carrying out operations.²⁰

Cases like this are just a small part of the story, given that corporations today are bypassing nation states in their traditional domain of controlling the flow of money within their borders. Those borders are nearly invisible to TNCs, and TNCs do their best to cut nation states out of the loop entirely. Dasgupta notes that TNCs are specifically designed to avoid nation-state taxation systems. In 2018, 94% of Apple’s cash reserves were held offshore, which means that the amount of money Apple offshored was $250 billion – more than the combined foreign reserves of the British government and the Bank of England. However, it is not just about money. As Dasgupta notes, big data companies like Google and Facebook have ‘already assumed many functions previously associated with the state, from cartography to surveillance.’²¹

Even some nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) have become quite powerful on the global stage. NGOs, of course, are independent organisations that advance specific causes, such as human rights, environmental protection or economic development. They often operate on a global scale and can have a significant impact on policymaking. Famous examples include Médecins Sans Frontières (better known in the Anglophone world as Doctors Without Borders), Oxfam International, CARE International, Save the Children, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Transparency International. These are all perhaps worthy organisations, but they have been criticised for usurping roles that traditionally belonged to national governments.

For example, Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, has argued that NGOs may undermine the development of strong, accountable government institutions. He claims that ‘by substituting for government in the provision of basic public goods and services, NGOs risk diminishing the incentives and capacity of governments to deliver these services themselves.’²²

Dean Karlan and Christopher Udry, codirectors of Kellogg’s Global Poverty Research Lab, subsequently investigated whether it was true that NGOs could ‘crowd out’ governments. They summarised studies of aid groups in Ghana and Uganda and concluded that in those nations, ‘government funding decreased by 6.8% in the sectors where the NGO was active, even as it increased by 7.4% in areas where the NGO was not focused. This indicated that money was flowing away from the government institutions that villagers had previously relied upon and into the new programmes and services sponsored by the NGO – yet these new programmes and services were less effective at improving people’s well-being.’²³

We are not here to judge whether NGOs, on balance, do good or bad work. Our point is merely that they end up doing the work that was traditionally done by governments, for better or for worse. They are just another example of how the function of governance on the global stage is being taken over by new actors.

We are also not the first to notice this. In fact, some authors have pointed to the rise of transnational policy networks (TPNs) or, as they are sometimes called, ‘informal governance’. As Oliver Westerwinter, Kenneth W. Abbott and Thomas Biersteker note, ‘There is a growing and increasingly broad-based consensus that it is no longer possible to focus exclusively, or even predominantly, on states and their interactions in intergovernmental organizations to comprehend, understand, and analyze contemporary global governance.’²⁴ Their view is that TPNs of informal governance mechanisms are replacing traditional organisations like the United Nations and the African Union because those organisations view the world at the wrong level of granularity – they believe that states still hold the power in today’s world. However, as we look at case after case, we see this is not so.

For another challenge to nation-state sovereignty, we can examine the phenomenon of city networks. Some cities have formed networks to collaborate on issues such as urban planning, climate change and economic development. Examples include the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and the Global Parliament of Mayors (GPM) – an organisation that has over 1,000 mayors and city leaders from more than 130 countries as members.

The GPM is a particularly interesting case. The organisation was inspired by a 2013 book by Benjamin Barber, entitled If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities. And one can see why mayors like the ideas in the book.

Nation-states have made little progress toward global governance. Too inclined by their nature to rivalry and mutual exclusion, they seem quintessentially indisposed to cooperation and incapable of establishing global common goods. Moreover, democracy is locked in their tight embrace, and there seems little chance either for democratizing globalization or for globalizing democracy as long as its flourishing depends on rival sovereign nations. What then is to be done? The solution stands before us, obvious but largely uncharted: let cities, the most networked and interconnected of our political associations, defined above all by collaboration and pragmatism, by creativity and multiculture, do what states cannot. Let mayors rule the world. Since, as Edward Glaeser writes, ‘the strength that comes from human collaboration is the central truth behind civilization’s success and the primary reason why cities exist,’ then surely cities can and should govern globally.²⁵

And to be sure, this attitude is not just talk. Mayors have organised their own climate initiatives and their own approaches to problems of illegal immigration and drug trafficking.

Climate change is the most salient example. Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel issued a news release after a 2017 summit of mayors on climate change, stating, ‘Even as Washington fails to act, cities have the power and will to take decisive action’. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, also a leading figure in the movement, put a sharper spin on the idea. ‘All the U.S. cities signing the Chicago Climate Charter [. . .] sends a strong signal to the world that we will keep moving forward toward our Paris goal, with or without Washington.’²⁶

Of course, this did not pass without criticism. Mark Anderson, a climate change sceptic writing in the UK Column, complained that ‘these “climate mayors” have little or no qualm about usurping the role of national leaders. [. . .] this “grassroots globalism”, if you will, appears to be a revolutionary means of undercutting national authority from the bottom up.’²⁷

As you have probably guessed, our point is not about climate change or the rightness of mayors and networks of mayors seizing sovereignty from nation states. It is, of course, that this is yet another example of how the sovereignty of nation states is unravelling.

As nation states unravel, or rather, as the very idea of the nation state unravels, new forms of governance are emerging in unlikely places. For instance, there is the important example of so-called ‘stateless nations’. These are ethnic or cultural groups that have distinct identities and aspirations for self-rule but do not have a recognised nation state. Examples include the Kurds, Palestinians and Basques. Do they have their own state-independent form of governance? Absolutely yes.

Dasgupta draws attention to the fact that these stateless nations are constructing governance mechanisms and their own forms of sovereignty from the detritus of the collapse of nation states. He notes that ‘several ethnic groups, meanwhile – such as the Kurds and the Tuareg – which were left without a homeland after decolonisation, and stranded as persecuted minorities ever since, have also exploited the rifts in state authority to assemble the beginnings of transnational territories.’ He adds that ‘it is in the world’s most dangerous regions that today’s new political possibilities are being imagined.’²⁸

We have not even arrived at what is probably the most impactful example – special economic zones or special enterprise zones (SEZs). These are designated geographic areas within a country that are given preferential treatment to attract foreign investment and promote economic growth. Examples include Shenzhen in China, Dubai in the UAE and the Suez Canal Economic Zone in Egypt. Quite voluntarily, nation states have ceded authority over law enforcement, taxation and the provisioning of infrastructure to these SEZs.

Earlier, we mentioned the book Your Next Government by Tom W. Bell. It goes into great detail about the recent rise of SEZs and their place in today’s world. However, one of the critical remaining questions is why nation states would cede so much authority to SEZs, and the answer seems to be that nation states, as evidence of their collapsing authority, are all too happy to cede the actual business of governing – providing services, fixing potholes and so on – as long as they retain the critical component of governance – the ability to control how favours are distributed and thus how favours are returned. This is a point we will return to later when we dive deeper into the forms of corruption that have often accompanied the presence of SEZs around the world.

We should also mention the rise of micronations. These are self-proclaimed independent nations that are not recognised by the international community. They often operate on a small scale and have unique political systems, such as the Principality of Sealand in the UK or the Republic of Molossia in the US. More recently, people have proposed and are currently involved in trial efforts to make new micronations in the form of seasteading operations in international waters.²⁹

We could cite additional examples, but you get the point. Nation states are losing their sovereignty (sometimes voluntarily), and many of their fundamental functions – security, taxation, monetary policy, climate initiatives, welfare, industrial policy and so on – are being taken over by other governmental institutions. And the source of this pressure is the aforementioned Cambrian explosion of organisations and institutions that are taking on the role of traditional nation states – TNCs, NGOs, terrorist organisations, networked cities, stateless nations, drug cartels, SEZs, micronations and more.

The aggregate effect of these new organisations on the future of the nation state should not be dismissed. As Sean McFate, writing in The New Rules for War, put it:

The Westphalian Order is dying. Today states are receding everywhere, a sure sign of disorder. From the weakening European Union to the raging Middle East, states are breaking down into regimes or are manifestly failing. They are being replaced by other things, such as networks, caliphates, narco-states, warlord kingdoms, corporatocracies, and wastelands. The Fragile States Index, an annual ranking of 178 countries that measures state weakness using social science methods, warned in 2017 that 70 percent of the world’s countries were ‘fragile.’ This trend continues to worsen. The ability of the United Nations or the West to police the situation fades each year, while nonstate actors grow more powerful. International relations are returning to the chaos of pre-Westphalian days.³⁰

Whether we consider these developments to be good or bad, the important point is this: it is now myopic to only consider traditional governance structures like nation states when we think about the principal actors in human governance on the global stage. The point is that a lot of individuals and a lot of institutions have seen the writing on the wall for national sovereignty, but the question is, have they also seen the writing on the wall for the idea of the nation state itself ? Not exactly.

2.5 Searching for alternatives

There is a prevailing view that the nation state can still be saved – that it can coexist with all these competitors and that what we need is a global level of governance to tie things together, keeping nation states in the game but with diminished roles.

According to this view, global governance would complement and enhance the existing system of nation states.³¹ Sometimes, this takes the form of what Anne-Marie Slaughter has called ‘networked governance’.³² She proposes a model of governance that involves multiple actors, including states, non-state actors and international organisations, collaborating to solve problems through networks of connections.

Similarly, Robert Keohane has developed the concept of ‘complex interdependence’. His idea is that as the world becomes more interconnected, the traditional system of states interacting through military force and economic coercion is no longer sufficient to address global challenges. As a solution, he proposes a model of governance based on cooperation and mutual dependence among states – this is the complex interdependence idea. Key to this is the need for global governance mechanisms to manage this interdependence.³³

For the most part, such theorists, while critical of traditional notions of sovereignty, have argued that more layers of centralised governance, such as global or regional governance, are necessary to address the challenges posed by globalisation and promote cooperation among states. They see these forms of governance as complementary to, rather than a replacement for, the existing system of nation states. However, from a centraliser-versus-decentraliser perspective, one could say that they are more of the same.

In other words, even if we adopt a system of global governance structures designed to ameliorate the problems with national sovereignty, those structures can create precisely the same problems at a second-order level. They are, if you will, meta states and, as such, inherit the same problems that traditional nation states have had. They represent the same points of failure, invitations to corruption and opportunities for centralised hegemony.

For example, the United Nations, for all the good it does in the world, is very much a centralised institution. It is no stranger to bureaucratic failures and incidents of corruption and seems unable to prevent or halt episodes of violence and genocide. The same can be said of all international organisations and courts. They are just another layer of centralisation, and adding a meta layer does not solve the problems inherent to centralisation if the meta layer is centralised as well. A cocktail of such organisations, mixed with traditional nation states, is not the answer.

Even if we like the cocktail, we need to consider its individual ingredients. Just because they are not nation states does not mean that they cannot have the same weaknesses as nation states. They can all be either centralised or decentralised in their internal structure.

In view of the chequered history of the nation state and the proliferation of alternative forms of governance, we think it is time to rethink traditional conceptions of government at the global (and local) level. Let us face it: nation states were not a particularly good idea at their inception, and after 377 years of tinkering with the formula, they are still a bad idea. The good news is that there is no universal law insisting that we organise ourselves within nation states or even that traditional nation states need to be part of the new equation. Maybe they were a noble experiment; we can argue about that. But the point is that today, we have alternatives – better alternatives. And we should avail ourselves of those better alternatives.

Those better alternatives are not necessarily the new players in the international order. Some of those new players are simply offering new attempts at centralised solutions. Some of them are actually very old attempts at centralised solutions (as when terrorist organisations call for caliphates, for example). They are symptoms of the underlying problem rather than the solution to that problem.

So, what is the alternative? Are we going to advocate for a new version of kingdoms? Tribes? City states? Empires? Those alternatives were not particularly successful either. Do not worry; we are not going to propose rolling back the clock to an imaginary age of better forms of government. What we are proposing is the utilisation of blockchain technologies as the scaffolding of new, more effective forms of government. Our goal is to show how blockchain governance can lay the foundations for a broad range of governmental alternatives, including a reimagining of the nation state.

In the subsequent chapters, we will sketch an alternative to traditional governance – one in which people are organised in a decentralised-yet-cooperative manner, one in which governments operate transparently and in which people retain their privacy, and one in which individuals maintain their sovereignty and in which they are free to exit from communities that do not align with their values. If all this sounds too good to be true, it means you have been paying attention. It does sound too good to be true, and we have a lot of work to do to explain how all of this is possible.

To see where we are headed, recall the issue that started this chapter – the way in which nation states tend to kettle together people of conflicting interests and values. The good news is that we do not actually have to lock people of conflicting values together within a single, unified governance structure. Sunnis and Shiites, Catholics and Protestants, Tutsis and Hutus do not need to be forced together and told they must fight over who controls the levers of power.

Our idea is that any start over should utilise communities organised around blockchain technology, taking communities in the very broad sense of any group of individuals that need to cooperate towards some common interest. The central idea driving our thesis is that the use of blockchain technology can enable distributed-yet-cooperative organisation. This will open up a whole new basket of questions, of course. How will all these blockchain communities be organised with each other? What happens when they come into conflict? Do they overlap in function? How are we to understand sovereignty going forward?

We will get to these questions soon enough, but first, we need to examine the nature of the problem with nation states and why many of the new alternative forms of governance fail to provide a solution.