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Your example is kinda ironic, given that this Australian citizen is in an Ecuadorian embassy in England, and the politician who wanted to drone him is an American, and the reason he's still alive isn't actually any guns or tanks protecting him, it's the PR outcry that would happen if an assassination took place. His own nation state isn't doing a very good job of protecting him, considering he is taking shelter in another nation-state's property, and that the resources that would attack him are owned by yet another nation-state, and for a significant portion of the world's population, this latter nation-state has conducted quasi-military operations against them with no interference by their own governments. He might as well be holed up in a private citizen's condo in California, if he could find a private citizen who was willing to take him.

I see your point, and I get that there's a common-defense argument for the existence of nations. But realistically, if anyone not an American finds themself opposed to the U.S's interests, their national government isn't going to be of much help to them. Realistically, the invisible hand that prevents the U.S. from bullying the whole rest of the world (even moreso than they do) is that the U.S. as a nation has fairly little interest in being the boss of 7 million people, and oftentimes struggles with being the boss of 300 million people, and the popular outcry over wars abroad tends to stop them within 8 years or so after they get started. It has nothing to do with other nations being an effective check on U.S. power.

> It has nothing to do with other nation's being an effective check on U.S. power.

The example proves you wrong. Without another gov't protecting him, Assange would absolutely be in a US jail right now, or dead. I didn't say that the Ecuadorian military kept him safe. It is the nation states playing against each other that has kept him safe. Whether that play is social or economic or militaristic is just a minor footnote.

> He might as well be holed up in a private citizen's condo in California, if he could find a private citizen who was willing to take him.

Not an acceptable alternative. Gov't would find him. Very unlikely he would make it out of the airport. You have to have the power of the nation state to play against the other nation state. Ecuador provides that in this case. It doesn't always work (US rolls over nations in middle east all the time), but it does work most of the time most of the people (for some definition of "most of the people" which would be people who live in nations that play the nation state game).

He wouldn't, though, because with no nations, the U.S. wouldn't exist as a nation, nor would it have jails, nor would there be an "it" to have them. You can't take one side of the thought experiment, eliminate it, and then assume that the other side will run amok without it, because the whole point of the thought experiment was to imagine what would happen if we eliminate the concept of nation-states.

The bigger question is "Is there some person or organization who would cause harm to Assange that he would not be able to protect himself against?" I don't know the answer to that. Go back to the Middle Ages and the answer would be that Assange would pledge his loyalty to one particular lord, who he agreed not to spill the beans on, and he would get protection from them in return. With city-states (popular in antiquity, and perhaps rising again), he would reside in a city, and (assuming he wasn't exiled), that city would provide for his defense and refuse to extradite him, and all the other cities can go to hell.

The complexity today is that we have this whole other level of trans-national organizations: multinational corporations, NGOs, philanthropic foundations, Internet communities, hacker collectives, etc. Many of the "attacks" on these organizations can't be stopped by a national border; for example, Assange can continue releasing damaging information against the U.S. from within the Ecuadorian embassy, and he has done nothing to physically violate U.S. territory, and yet this doesn't matter because our lives are half lived in cyberspace anyway. The nation-state arose as a protective force to ensure that violence occurred only within well-defined wars at the edges of their territories, and citizens could basically count on peace when not at war. It basically succeeded at that, but it succeeded so well that the "battlegrounds" now have nothing to do with physical location and often little to do with physical force.

You make a good point, but his argument then quickly boils down to anarchist style stuff which isn't worth a debate in my opinion. If you removed all these power structures somehow, they would just be replaced by other (probably identical) power structures.

> The nation-state arose as a protective force to ensure that violence occurred only within well-defined wars at the edges of their territories, and citizens could basically count on peace when not at war. It basically succeeded at that, but it succeeded so well that the "battlegrounds" now have nothing to do with physical location and often little to do with physical force.

This is an interesting idea, so suppose the nation state is eliminated. Wouldn't there just be a new equivalent of the nation state that arises that is based not around physical borders but around digital borders in some way? People are always going to disagree about fundamental ideas, and they're going to band together to protect their ability to live according to those ideas. Which brings us back to the article's point #1: "Nation states, true to their name, tend to emphasize the interests of a particular nation above others.". We'll just end up with that again but instead of the US sanctioning Russia, we're going to have 4chan, reddit, and instagram launching DDoS attacks against each others' users.

Well, you're certainly not going to eliminate the concept of power. I've heard that floated by some utopianists ("we'll have world government and then everybody will get along with everybody else") and I think it's ridiculous.

I don't think that's what the article is suggesting, though. Rather, it's suggesting that we re-draw the boundaries of how we organize that power, with one level globally and another locally (probably at the city or territory level).

I'd assume (based on similar writings) that this would work with a federated world government with very limited and specifically-enumerated powers. Basically, we accept certain principles as foundational (rule of law, property rights, non-violence, consent of the governed), and then transfer the monopoly on physical force to a world government whose only task is ensuring that individuals don't violate that. The world government would have very limited powers: aside from preserving peace, it'd basically just define the rules around trade disputes and redress of grievances, and delegate the arbitration of these disputes to a mutually-acceptable arbiter. Possibly it might also serve as a market-maker for externalities (eg. selling carbon credits) and coordinator for shared efforts (eg. fighting infectious disease, or interstellar space travel). It would also ensure freedom to move between municipalities as long as you accept the laws of the local municipality, i.e. borders cannot keep people in or out, but they do define the extent of how you must behave within the municipality.

All other powers would go toward local municipalities. This includes a great deal of things currently reserved for a nation-state: drug laws, the place of religion, official languages, national holidays, traffic management, growth policies, possibly even things like free speech. So if San Franciscans want to smoke out, Emirates want to mandate the wearing of the hijab, Texans want complete freedom to carry a gun, Virginians want a holiday honoring Robert E. Lee, they all get that - within their own city. They just don't get to force other people to take on their customs. If Californians are upset by how everybody in Texas is packing heat, or Texans are upset by how Muslims wear a head scarf, or Muslims are upset by how San Franciscans smoke out all the time - too bad, they can define how people should behave in their own city, but they don't get to define how everybody else behaves. And the role of the world government is to ensure that, and put down any attempt at imposing your views on others by force.

I've been wondering whether the web and sites like Wikileaks signal the emergence of a meta-state level of power, one in which the ability of states to function is governed non-locally.

Maybe I'm confused, but that sounds precisely like the current condition of countries today, except on a scale smaller than America and more similar to small European or Asian nations. Having a global government would either do nothing to them in the best case scenario, or more likely, end up crushing them for the needs of the many and/or ultra rich.

Taking your example of Virginians wanting a holiday for Robert E Lee, small countries and big countries could easily do this. You say limit it to a city so that those who don't want it aren't affected. But even passing it at the city level leaves people who don't want it. I see no difference between 60% of a country the size of Malta supporting something and 60% of a city the size of Anchorage.

Well it kind of is, but with power being pushed even further down to the local level, where you could actually know your leaders, you largely remove the ability of nations to wage wars, especially on any sort of global level, and people are better able to self organize. In the states we see a problem right now with coast-inland and some other smaller cultures where you have some people who are able to take power dictating wildly different views for other people who absolutely disagree with them. It's hard to manage a multi-cultural country. We see it right now.

Thinking strictly about the freedom of movement, there is a huge difference between Malta enacting a policy I hate enough to leave it and Anchorage doing the same. In the latter case it's easier for me to pack up and go somewhere else. This may or may not be the case in the absence of nation-states, but I suspect that freedom of movement would be greater than it is between nation-states today--at least in the vast majority of cases.

For someone who is apparently considering what life without nation states would be like for the very first time, you're remarkably confident in their necessity.

Imagination is difficult. Ask a simple person what would happen, "if women didn't have babies." After attempting to think for a while, they'll just sputter, "but women have babies!"

>He wouldn't, though, because with no nations, the U.S. wouldn't exist as a nation, nor would it have jails, nor would there be an "it" to have them.

That's naive. Nations or no nations, in the resulting mega-empire, the US powerful (which are in the top 0.01% of the world) and its special interests, will still dominate most of the goings on. If they're joined by EUs 0.01% even better, and even less chances for Assange. Heck, they already do all that through their allies (NATO, political lackeys etc), that wont stop because "nation states have now disbanded").

This argument is like what we hear from drivers of really big SUVs. "I've got to drive a big SUV! Otherwise I would be run over by one! You're crazy for riding a bicycle!"

> the politician who wanted to drone him is an American, and the reason he's still alive isn't actually any guns or tanks protecting him, it's the PR outcry that would happen if an assassination took place

Are you talking about Hilary Clinton? I wouldn't trust the sources on that. Additionally, it's just plain ridiculous. A Predator drone dropping 100lb bombs on an embassy in London? A PR outcry of an assassination would be the least of the repercussions that this would incur.

I don't actually care whether it's true or not - the OP brought it up as an example, so rather than challenge the example I'd rather challenge the point. This blog post starts as a thought-experiment for what would happen if there were no nation-states, which is clearly already in the realm of fiction, so if it's not true then just posit hypothetically that a Secretary of State suggested that the U.S. drop a bomb on an Australian citizen in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

My point is that it's not actually Ecuador or the UK who keeps him alive, it's that the U.S. would be dropping a bomb on a private citizen in the midst of a city.

> My point is that it's not actually Ecuador or the UK who keeps him alive, it's that the U.S. would be dropping a bomb on a private citizen in the midst of a city.

Don’t they already do that?

Yeah, but only in uncivilised places and fortunately the casualties are always suspected militants. So that doesn't count.

In other words, in places where the nation-state is weak

Yeah, but non in cities-proper, in arab, asian etc cities. Who cares about those people and their kids?

/s

Not on NATO signataries.

The UK is the US's closest ally, forged in the blood of millions of dead fighting for common causes. The last military action between the two was over two centuries ago.

It would be truly unprecedented to bomb the capital of our closest ally, an act which is undoubtedly an act of war, in order to assassinate a US citizen accused of crimes.

There's no comparison whatsoever between this hypothetical act and airstrikes in an active warzone.

Assange is not a US citizen.

I was mistakenly thinking of Edward Snowden, who is in Russia, not London. Bombing Russia to get Snowden would also be very bad.

> A Predator drone dropping 100lb bombs on an embassy in London?

Obviously that wouldn't happen, but there's more discreet ways of killing someone than that. Obama has an enormous amount of people assassinated without trial, including American citizens. It's more than just a thought experiment.

> I wouldn't trust the sources on that Like I said, I think there's no good source for it. That the highest levels of the US govt considered the idea of assassinating Assange because he is damaging to the image of America is plausible though.

It isn't ironic at all. Ecuador gets some political points for making the US and Australia look foolish. The US, Australia and UK respect sovereignty and won't breach it.

They would if they could, but there would be a cost, and they consider the price too high to pay.

Nation states are not the problem. The use of physical (including military) and economic violence between competing interest blocs is the problem.

Eliminating nation states won't solve the problem of competition.

If it did we would all be a lot better off, because the cost of the perpetual proxy war between the different interest blocs does unbelievable harm to the planet's collective intelligence, and to our economic and scientific potential.

Well, he probably could be assassinated if he annoyed the wrong government:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-police-evi...

Nation-states are not necessarily the optimal site of democracy, but eliminating them without implementing some other site of democracy is lunacy.

it's the 🇪🇨 Ecuadorian Embassy, if were thinking of the same Australian

I think we are. Fixed.