Hacker News Reader

Comment by ethbro | Hacker News Reader

Imho, what keeps the nation-state from being undermined by the techno-anarchist crowd is the requirement to hold territory.

Any halfway competent person in a number of fields (cyber security, virology, chemistry) could probably "take over" a small town with a few buddies.

And then the US government surrounds it. Blockades it. Allows nothing in or out. And waits.

As the Palestinians, South Sudanese, Tibetans, Taiwanese, Hongkongers have found (with varying degrees of success), independence is only viable as a going concern if you have international allies and trade.

View on HN

Having mentioned the Palestinians, it's only fair to include the Israelis. Especially because it was US support that almost guaranteed their independence. The British had been far more even-handed, back in the 20s to early 40s. But they were (in a way) defeated by the US in WWII, along with just about every other nation involved, except for the Soviets.

Agree completely. I think this is one of the reasons for so much interest in seasteading despite the high barrier of entry and maintenance compared to living on land (not that a group of ships can't be surrounded and sanctioned). Ultimately, I fear that joining the WMD club is a prerequisite to true self determination.

And the price of leaving the WMD club (eg Ukraine and Libya) is so high that there is no way a diplomatic solution to denuclearization

History shows any group that is disarmed by another group is about to get run over. The logic scales from the individuals of a nation to the nation itself.

As a small note, I think the word we're looking for in this thread is not "nation-state", but simply "state" i.e. sovereign country or polity.

Not all states are "nation-states". A "nation" (⋆) is specifically a group of people who are culturally homogeneous, and a "nation-state" (⋆⋆) is a sovereign state that is also culturally homogeneous. In most of these discussions we are talking simply about sovereign states, not nation-states specifically.

Someone else pointed this out onetime in another HN comment, and now "can't unsee".

(⋆) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation (⋆⋆) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state

That's certainly what "nation" meant a hundred years ago, and what it means in context of nationalist ideology.

I think that in modern English, "nation" and "nation state" mostly mean "sovereign country or polity". I think this usage is partly because obviously most uses of "state" are references to obviously-non-sovereign internal divisions of territory, whether in the US or Austria or Australia or Brazil or India, and including extremal cases like the states of Palau (most of which comprise less than a thousand people).

Probably another cause is that so few people take 19th-C / 20th-C nationalism seriously that there's no real need for the word "nation" in this context.

But if you're keen on the political-science definitions, note that states don't have to be sovereign. The word "country" won't do because they don't have to be sovereign either (e.g. England or Greenland). I think if you want to formally say "sovereign state", you have to say "sovereign state".

I think that in modern English, "nation" and "nation state" mostly mean "sovereign country or polity".

It's just very recent modern infosec and internet English and it's seeping out into all sorts of other places. Probably too late to stop it.

As a check, I just searched NYT's site for 'nation state' and other than its original non-redundant sense or in quotes, they don't use it, best I can tell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com