Unlearning The 'Nation State'
softwaredoug.com
softwaredoug.com
It is always easy to dismiss something, which is not perfect --- and what is perfect? But nothing is just removed from society. Something else always takes its place. So usually it is naive and bad idea to concentrate on what is going wrong. If you want to improve the world you have to concentrate on what should be done better and how should it be done better? In this case, what is the alternative to nation states that you envision? Kingdoms? Anarchism? A Star-Trek like utopia? A global communist state? Or simply a failed state, like Afganistan or Somali? If I look at this list, I see nothing that is even remotely as good as western nation states. Although, they have obvious flaws.
The nation state does not exist because it describes the places where different ethnic groups live.
The nation state does not exist to circumscribe natural regions of trade.
The nation state does not exist because someone's gods decreed it.
If it's not learned, then how exactly do you think the notion of the nation state came to be?
Is your problem that it's defined by powerful cabals via force? Is that your complaint? That we can't "unlearn" the point of someone else's gun?
In that case, I suppose I agree.
It comes very close a lot of the time, or decays to that. See the 92% Han China, or the split of Czecho-Slovakia and Yugoslavia along ethnic lines. A split of you're lucky, genocide if you're not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history
And your implication that before WWI, different ethnic groups coexisting peacefully in shared states was the norm, couldn't be more wrong. Even in antiquity, there's examples of one ethnic group banding together to vanquish another, such as the ancient Hebrew genocides of Amalekites [1] and Canaanites [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalek#Amalekites_in_the_Hebre...
Open a map and see just how many borders both historically and today were mountain ranges, rivers and other terrain that served as a natural border.
>The nation state does not exist because it describes the places where different ethnic groups live.
For the most part it very much does. The few exceptions were this didn’t happen and the nation failed to develop a new national ethnic identity those experiments ended up in disaster, see Lebanon, The Balkans etc.
>The nation state does not exist to circumscribe natural regions of trade.
Historically this is very much how city states and later on nation states came to be, even during the imperial age this trade was a key factor in how administrative and autonomous regions came to be.
Plenty of peaceful countries do have a "a shared identity or values" even across the conservative/liberal spectrum.
Even Canada
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/canada-political-c...
The US w/ Trump may have its extremes, but this pattern is playing out in a lot of places.
It is there because they want it to be there and to get rid of it, you need to create something more powerful to overcome that other thing. This historically is possible but just turns into its own state.
Power vacuums are a very real thing though intangible.
But simply having the subjects of a state lose faith in it is not itself sufficient to topple it. I mean look at current congressional approval ratings in the US. They are approaching single digits but it means nothing because there is no real structure in place to challenge it.
I apologize if the initial post was condescending. It's a well written article but I still perceive it as naive to the larger structures which hold this stuff in place.
There's a great YouTube video (imo) on the topic of state level power dynamics if you are interested https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
[edit] First comment on HN and thought I should add more context so it doesn’t sound like a rhetorical question. I’m asking because one of the values you refer to in the article is diversity and how it can be a uniting value among those who espouse it. I understand that to mean valuing differences among people, so I’m asking sincerely if the fact that we coexist with people of all varieties of identities and values fulfills one of the objectives of diversity. If I’m misunderstanding something, happy to be corrected.
But it does seem to be on the wane somehow. The standard issue modern nation state is an imperfect fit with the global economic order that has evolved in the last few decades. Something will have to change. It's not necessarily good news though.
If the nation state dissolves, what kind of power and institutions will replace it? A cyberpunk corporate state? Green anarchist collectives? This is worth thinking about rather than just passively "unlearning" (adapting to the new conditions).
Nation-states exist because we humans are monkeys who need to organize ourselves, and are hardwired to do so with familial and tribal affiliations, etc. The demands of modern, global civilization mean we must scale beyond the tribal level, so we create abstract, virtual tribes consisting of everyone within a certain geographical area administered by the same government. Like the file, it's only a convention we adopt for convenience, and yet that convenience adds up to so much friction we don't have to deal with that, for now, we daren't switch to anything else.
A lot of this article is also the elucidation of 'The Davos Man' and their supreme desire to usurp the borders of nations in the pursuit of capital
As someone who identifies increasingly with the hinterland, we’re not mad that the educated cosmopolitans exist. We’re mad that they keep trying to rule over us. If you would keep to yourselves, that would be fine. People want to govern themselves. It’s called the right to self-determination. People in Iowa don’t really care about the cosmopolitan elite in DC or New York. But they’re forced to care when the media is entirely run by people in New York, and cosmopolitan bureaucrats living in DC are trying to nationalize the education system, etc. When cosmopolitan elites start demanding we “rename, relocate, or contextualize” the few shared things we have left, like monuments to the founders, they’re forced to care.
Also, if we’re evolving toward a borderless “multicultural knowledge economy” why do the cosmopolitan elites care so much about enabling immigration?
You overestimate how much Iowans think about politics day to day. But to the extent they care about “owning the libs” it’s because the cosmopolitan elite have spent decades intruding into local governance.
Were this true, there should be very strong support for local media among conservatives, but in reality local journalists are attacked with the same fervor as national ones, and conservatives cheer when newsrooms shut down and the journalists are thrown out of work, eg the recent restructuring at Gannett newspapers. As for nationalizing the education system, that was a complaint I heard a lot about common core, but that was a state-led iaitive that the federal government agreed to back. And it's odd that you would put the blame on DC and NY for centralization of education policy when Texas, being the largest single market for school textbooks, has set the agenda for the rest of the country for many years.
Also, if we’re evolving toward a borderless “multicultural knowledge economy” why do the cosmopolitan elites care so much about enabling immigration?
This is (no doubt unintentionally) tilting toward the 'great replacement' theory put about about by certain fringe political actors. While they may be very happy to have you articulate it on their behalf, behind your back I'm pretty sure they regard you as part of the problem.
I think folks rationally understand that media is consolidated in the coasts for the same reason everything else is (tech, etc.). Fighting that seems to be tilting at windmills.
My point is slightly different: people might be resigned to big consolidated media entities in New York, but that’s different from accepting how the media puts an unabashedly coastal elitist gloss on everything. This is relatively recent. It wasn’t like that in the 1980s and 1990s. It was the coverage of the 2000 election that catapulted Fox News to the top. (CNN had existed for two decades at that point.)
> This is (no doubt unintentionally) tilting toward the 'great replacement' theory put about about by certain fringe political actors. While they may be very happy to have you articulate it on their behalf, behind your back I'm pretty sure they regard you as part of the problem.
Not at all. People have completely lost the plot about where the center is when it comes to immigration. Globally, almost nobody regards as controversial the idea of controlling immigration to preserve a country’s culture, either by limiting it to allow assimilation, or even preventing it entirely. Countries like Japan are a bit far out in being very resistant to immigration to preserve their unique culture, but it’s their country. Countries like the United States are historically more liberal in that front, but again it’s entirely okay to advocate for maintaining the status quo.
I’m an immigrant to the United States. My mom told me that we were coming to someone else’s country so we had to “do like the Romans do.” And things have been peachy! But I don’t think I had any entitlement or human right to come here, or that there was anything wrong with people expecting me to adopt the local culture rather than trying to change it. That’s completely absurd, and almost nobody in the world thinks that way.
In the country I come from, people would completely flip out if there was as much immigration, especially illegal immigration, as is happening in the United States. And if Bangladeshis were on the verge of becoming an ethnic minority in Bangladesh, political cataclysm would result. (Heck, the country exists because they were sick and tired of being ruled from a far-away capital.) China, Japan, pretty much any country in Africa. Nobody would treat that as anything less than a monumental event. The idea that Europeans are supposed to just be okay with it is some sort of evil gaslighting. (The United States is a bit differently situated, given its history. But say Germany is 80% ethnic German, just like Bangladesh is 95% ethnic Bangladeshi.)
I happen to support moderate immigration into the United States because I think we have had success with it and are really good at assimilating immigrants. (And Latin America is culturally similar enough where the impedance mismatch is not high.) But the left has completely lost its marbles in treating any opposition to immigration (or even total opposition to immigration) as an illegitimate fringe idea as opposed to a policy option. That completely fails to understand what a country is.
But the left has completely lost its marbles in treating any opposition to immigration (or even total opposition to immigration) as an illegitimate fringe idea as opposed to a policy option. That completely fails to understand what a country is.
But you're relying on a definition of 'country' that's rooted in ethnic essentialism, something very different from the nominal values o which the US was founded. I get that you're* arguing in favor of a cultural rather than ethnic identity, which is a very nice idea; but it overlooks the fact that the more hardline someone's 'cultural identitarian' position, the more likely it is to be a proxy for European ethnic identity that turns out to exclude non-white (eg ask a European identitarian about Romani people and see what sort of reaction you get).
It seems to me that there are some glaring contradictions in the broad conservative ruralism which you're articulating which don't stand up well to closer examination.
That’s not a difference. Like many (most?) countries, Bangladesh is the product of multiple waves of colonization. There are a small number of indigenous people in Bangladesh (mainly Buddhists living in the hill tracts). This is true of say England as well.
> Far right opposition to immigration is rooted in a concept of native identity that requires the conceptual erasure of prior indigenous populations to a safe historical distance.
Opposition to immigration isn’t a “far right” concept. Bangladeshis don’t consider themselves less entitled to their country just because a thousand years ago their ancestors replaced some other people who used to live there. The country that exists today—its language, political institutions, etc.—is almost entirely the product of the colonizers. (By that I mean the waves of people who replaced the original inhabitants of Bangladesh.) I’m pretty sure the Japanese and Chinese feel the same way.
> But you're relying on a definition of 'country' that's rooted in ethnic essentialism, something very different from the nominal values o which the US was founded.
As I observed above, the US is a special case, because of its very recent immigration history. But I took your point about “fringe” views to sweep more broadly than the United States. What about say Germany, which even today is 80% ethnic German. Why are they entitled to a country of their own any less than Bangladeshis? There may be good reasons for them to accept immigration as a policy matter. And if they do accept immigrants, they should try to integrate them and treat them respectfully, etc. But it’s a perfectly valid position to say they want to preserve the essential character of the country as German. If you tried to argue otherwise to a typical Bangladeshi, or Chinese or Japanese, or Korean person, most would look at you like you’ve grown a second head.
> I get that you're* arguing in favor of a cultural rather than ethnic identity, which is a very nice idea; but it overlooks the fact that the more hardline someone's 'cultural identitarian' position, the more likely it is to be a proxy for European ethnic identity that turns out to exclude non-white (eg ask a European identitarian about Romani people and see what sort of reaction you get).
I think in most countries, at least in Asia or Africa, nobody sees anything wrong with maintaining a country along ethnic identity lines, insofar as they would strongly oppose becoming ethnic minorities in their own countries. Most European countries are homogenous enough where it doesn’t seem illegitimate to me if they felt the same way.
The United States is an odd duck, because no ethnicity makes up more than about 10-15% of the population. But that’s why populism in the US is happening more along rural/urban divides.
To turn around and say the real Bangledeshis only remain in the hill tracts so contradicts your previous argument that I see little point in reading further; I'm not going to waste time on sophistry. I'm really disappointed in the direction of this conversation.
Actually, Germany is a great example of how much the technocrats here have overreached. From federalism to teaching religion in schools to abortion, the cosmopolitan elite in the US have imposed their views nationally in a way that’s unusual even in Western Europe.
Pot, meet kettle [not you specifically, but what you refer to as hinterland-dwellers]. Backing up Thomas's point, in another comment, about Illinois regulating handguns: Here in Texas, the rural-dominated (GOP) state government is all about "local control" — until it comes to our big cities' doing things that they don't like, such as enacting plastic-bag bans, installing red-light cameras, banning fracking within city limits, or, most recently, imposing COVID-19-related mandates. The attitude seems to be, "You're not the boss of us — but we get to tell you what to do whenever we wish."
I submit that Dunbar's Number[1] is a real thing, and that it informs the cognitive limitations of the human mind that inform nation-states.
This limitation also informs the popularity of Agile methodologies, if not their success.
And so perhaps the road to Lennon's "Imagine" is attained through an Agile mindset.
If the Iron Law of Oligarchy[2] doesn't win out first.
Do you mind if I quote this attributed to you?
Cheers, mate.
> Dunbar's number looks to me as something you can apply to village life, or bands of cavemen, but not any national structure from the past few hundred years.
I'd extend your few centuries to all of human history and argue that:
1) humans scale poorly
2) all efforts to scale them tend toward Towers of Babel
The counter-example is a military, where healthy young people can be coordinated at scale in an authoriterian system with a significant external threat.
The higher the center of gravity of the bureaucratic/aristocratic structure, and look at what the US has become in the last century, the greater the Tower of Babel risk.
The losers of the last Presidential election have declared a soft civil war.
Streamlined, simpler systems with higher-frequency, term-limited office-holders, can move toward Nirvana: redistributing power, not wealth.