City state island nation

October 27, 2017 3:03 AM

Reports of its death were greatly exaggerated, and the end-of-the-nation-state theory itself died at the turn of the millennium. But now it’s back, and this time it might be right.
posted by infini (35 comments total)

Couple of counterpoints. Dani Rodrik: In Defence of the Nation-State. Lexit Network: Against Supranationalism.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 4:13 AM on October 27, 2017 [4 favorites]

Modern technology tends in the opposite direction: it’s distributed, decentralised and uncontrollable. If our political arrangements are a mirror of the modes of production and assumptions of the time, the future doesn’t look rosy for this 19th-century relic.

I remember believing this. Now an AWS glitch will mean you can't turn your smart lightbulb off.
posted by Space Coyote at 4:33 AM on October 27, 2017 [17 favorites]

‘We don’t care if sea levels rise,’ he told me.

Sure, your glorified barge will be a system onto itself, not even noticing the massive upheavals climate change will impose on the world at large. /s
posted by Harald74 at 4:45 AM on October 27, 2017 [7 favorites]

This theory has a huge, China-shaped hole running smack-dab through the middle of it.
posted by turbowombat at 5:49 AM on October 27, 2017 [7 favorites]

There was a Chinese empire before Westphalia, there'll be a Chinese empire after Westphalia.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 5:52 AM on October 27, 2017 [15 favorites]

I think we're looking at the article as the be all and end all of the theory rather than the first in a long forthcoming line of debate and discussion.

Then again, I just flew from Finland (5.5 mln ppl, remote arctic nation, landborder with Russia) to Singapore (5.4 mln ppl - city state, island nation) and this theme caught my attention - both are highly educated, highly technophiliac societies, with lots of noise and attention to "smart" stuff and whatnot.

Who is to say that these emergent examples cannot co-exist with the behemoths of yore - since both of them have learnt to dance with their own giant bear and dragon?
posted by infini at 5:55 AM on October 27, 2017 [5 favorites]

Conflating the increasing political power of cities because of population dynamics with the return of city states because, what, Bitcoin and libertarian billionaire wank-fantasies? It's a bad handwavy Gibson-esque TED talk at best.
posted by kjs3 at 6:11 AM on October 27, 2017 [4 favorites]

Some diverse explorations

Why Cities, And Not Nation States, Are Likely To Script The Next Age

Catalunya and beyond: what’s after the nation-state?

From nation states to global cities, what is the future of urbanism?

The fear fear fear hold tightly version sprinkled with the Clockwork orange

“Cities, rather than nation states, ‘are the future,'” says Barcelona’s mayor
posted by infini at 6:20 AM on October 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

I thought nation-states were going to be subsumed by global megacorporations.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:36 AM on October 27, 2017

I thought nation-states were going to be subsumed by global megacorporations.

Megacorps it turns out have little interest in actually providing the services of a nation-state.
posted by srboisvert at 6:38 AM on October 27, 2017 [18 favorites]

John Perry Barlow’s ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ (1996) sums it up well: the internet is a technology built on libertarian principles.

Yeah you're kinda coopting the idea of the internet to boost your pet ideology's cred, and you're not the first but it's getting a little tiresome. But I'll give you that libertarianism in practice would look an awful lot like some parts of the internet! The screeching void of Twitter trolls and Russian bots, for one. Ooh and abusive terms of service with arbitration clauses for everyone, in every aspect of life!

Also this idea, like Calexit, is basically saying "hey good luck with that" to minorities in MAGAhat areas, with an added bonus of a super easy path to rule for every budding kleptocrat who wants a fiefdom, so maybe fuck this idea.
posted by jason_steakums at 6:43 AM on October 27, 2017 [9 favorites]

Richard Florida recently argued for progressive cities to withdraw from non-progressive nations.
posted by doctornemo at 7:12 AM on October 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

The idea that city states are the future reminds me so much of anti-vaxer logic. The Anti-vaxers talk about how most of the diseases that are being vaccinated for are so rare that they're not willing to take the risk of vaccination, as if their choices won't lead to those diseases coming roaring back. The city-staters take a look at the international system of commerce and trade that's developed between nation-states and say 'we're can participate in that by ourselves without any of the drawbacks that come with being part of a larger political entity', as if destroying all of the developed nation states (and that's what the project would require) won't have knock on effects.

Also, anyone who thinks city-states are a good idea should think about 6 things: Fuel, electricity, fresh water, food, garbage, and human excrement. Where do these things come from, where do they go to? If the sources and destinations are not in your fantasy city state, what happens when it gets into a conflict, or someone just decides to grab one of them and squeeze until money comes out?
posted by Grimgrin at 7:18 AM on October 27, 2017 [9 favorites]

The problem, of course, with city-states is that, historically, they tend to inevitably expand themselves into nation-states, usually through the mechanism of war. Lather, rinse, repeat.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:18 AM on October 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

If only we could get back to the age of Peace and Harmony that the Greek City-States embodied! Sure they went to war with each other every third week or so, but they never burned the olive groves....
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:32 AM on October 27, 2017 [10 favorites]

...the next new cities won’t be built on land at all. They will be floating in international waters, beyond the reach of the nation-state and its armies.

That bit seems to sum up the naivety of the article. You think there are islands which are beyond the reach of the armies of nation-states? I've got an aircraft carrier and an ICBM to sell you, great price, gently used.

It is armies which create and destroy nation states. Even when a nation state is created peacefully - hello from Canada! - there's an army in the back (hello British Empire!) ready to enforce its borders.

Yes, Rome did collapse quickly, but before Rome collapsed, the armies had become quasi-independent of the formal state. The armies chose the Emperor; clashing armies decided between clashing Emperors. Once city-states start getting their own armies, it'll be time to start predicting that they'll take over from the nation-state.

I did enjoy the first part of the article, though. It's good to think about the fact that the nation and the state are different things, and can be separated, and that lots of other arrangements are possible. And if there are hundreds of millions of climate change refugees, that'll put pressure on the system that it hasn't seen since WWII, and nobody knows the outcome of that. (If anything, I expect that it'll strengthen the nation-state in the areas which are doing well - harder borders, more nativism - and be replaced by some sort of feudal/mafioso/welcome-to-Somalia arrangement in areas which are suffering. That's my guess, but who knows, really?)
posted by clawsoon at 8:17 AM on October 27, 2017 [8 favorites]

...the next new cities won’t be built on land at all. They will be floating in international waters, beyond the reach of the nation-state and its armies.

Now cities can literally drown because of debt without torturing the meaning of the word literally.
posted by srboisvert at 8:56 AM on October 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

When this fucking guy starts his whole article by failing a basic math problem that he himself set up, I suspected that it probably wasn't worth the battery life it would drain to read, and the comments here are doing nothing to dissuade me from my conclusion.

If I was born 1500 years ago, I would have been born in 517, forty-one years after date of the fall of the Roman empire that you go on to provide three sentences later, so no, I probably wouldn't have believed the Roman empire would last forever. Even if I'd been born 1500 years before I was actually born, that would have been 483, so I still would have missed it by a few years.

If you can't take the time and thought to make sure there's not basic factual errors in the opening paragraph of your article, I don't know why I should believe you've done any actual quality thinking on the subject of the article?
posted by Caduceus at 8:58 AM on October 27, 2017 [4 favorites]

There were only tens of millions of people online in 1995 when the nation-state was last declared dead. In 2015, that number had grown to around 3 billion; by 2020, it will be more than 4 billion. (And more than 20 billion internet-connected devices.) Digital technology doesn’t really like the nation-state. John Perry Barlow’s ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ (1996) sums it up well: the internet is a technology built on libertarian principles. Censorship-free, decentralised and borderless. And now ubiquitous.

This is an enormous pain for the nation-state in all sorts of ways. It’s now possible for the British National Health Service to be targeted by ransomware launched in North Korea, and there are few ways to stop it or bring perpetrators to justice. App technology such as Uber and Deliveroo has helped to produce a sudden surge in the gig economy, which is reckoned to cost the government £3.5 billion a year by 2020-1. There are already millions of people using bitcoin and blockchain technologies, explicitly designed to wrestle control of the money supply from central banks and governments, and their number will continue to grow. It’s also infusing us with new values, ones that are not always national in nature: a growing number of people see themselves as ‘global’ citizens.

it's funny to watch reddit or hackernews material migrate into pseudo-academic thought, this time via a British thinktank. There's just so much "saying it makes it so" going on just these two paragraphs that it's hard to try to unpack all of the rest. If it were a reddit post you would just click past it but apparently the author got paid to produce this. For an article about the fall of the nation-state, jhe uses the phrase "United States" or "America" just once... but is the US a nation-state or an empire? can a nation-state be an empire? he can't seem to make up his mind in the first part anyway.

but the fact that he can conclude with an interview with a "Seasteading" wannabe tech lord of the high seas without pointing and laughing indicates pretty clearly what sorts are signing the author's checks.
posted by I hate nature. at 9:07 AM on October 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

This is like a New York Times Style piece but for political science.
posted by dmh at 9:30 AM on October 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

The other crazy part of the seasteading argument is that naval surface ships are already ridiculously vulnerable and pretty much obsolete. If you can't realistically keep 5000 highly trained and motivated sailors in an aircraft carrier surrounded by a protective fleet safe from a small submarine firing torpedoes then a floating city of tens of thousands of untrained civilians is only going to be far more vulnerable.

The last major naval battle was during the Falklands war and a puny poorly trained and equiped military sank 3 ships from the third largest military in the world.

At best any sea-state should be considered a temporarily floating city with an unspecified but inevitable sinking date.
posted by srboisvert at 9:32 AM on October 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

Oh wow; it's talking about Liberland (previously) as an example of a non-nation-state:

Liberland, which is uninhabited but has more than 100,000 online citizens ready to move if Croatia stops blocking inward access, already has the trappings of a city-state. A currency, a constitution, a president and even a football team. Everything has been designed to maximise individual liberty. For a start, anyone can join and leave as they wish. It would be the first state in the world where nothing would be compulsory, where you can do whatever the hell you like, as long as it doesn’t physically harm someone else. ‘It’s a tax heaven, not a tax haven,’ Jedlicka told me recently when I interviewed him for my book Radicals Chasing Utopia (2017). Schools, hospitals, pensions, roads, sewage works, rubbish collection and the rest will be provided by the market, if people decide that’s what they want and stump up the money.

AHAHAH HAH AHHAHH Right. I can understand the concept of, "hm, the whole nation thing is having problems, both with cultural diversity within that clashes with the overall structure, and with cross-national activity that has no managers." But bringing up an example of a pack of white dudes declaring, "we will have guns and no taxes!!!" as their example of a different kind of government... riiiiiight. Okay, I now know how seriously to take this article.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 9:48 AM on October 27, 2017 [5 favorites]

City state island nation

yup, I've been thinking this for a long time -- we need way more City States and their more focused, immediate, identifiable survival concerns, fewer nation states, which tend to play one region off against another ...
posted by philip-random at 10:27 AM on October 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

Also: Waterworld was not an aspirational future.
posted by Space Coyote at 10:48 AM on October 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

Richard Florida recently argued for progressive cities to withdraw from non-progressive nations.

That doesn't always work.
posted by lagomorphius at 11:29 AM on October 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

Yes, Rome did collapse quickly

Er, no, it didn't? The Republic lasted 500 years, the Empire lasted 1500 (or 500 for the western part).
posted by Sangermaine at 2:16 PM on October 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

you can do whatever the hell you like, as long as it doesn’t physically harm someone else

...and who's going to stop me?

I really don't know anything about this kind of stuff, but I look at it more like a form of internal colonialism. I live in BC, where you have half the population in Vancouver and Victoria, and the other half scattered around a vast, resource-rich "hinterland" which functions essentially as a colony for the cities. The people who live and work in rural areas doing resource extraction live with a lot of economic uncertainty because there but for the grace of capital go they. They think of themselves as nominally Canadian, as do the city dwellers, but the cultural similarities pretty much end there.

What I can see happening as things get worse for the "hewers of wood" (and they will) is that the cities, that is, corporations and governments working as one, will exercise more and more direct control over people who live in the colony and the conceit that is "the nation" will be revealed for what it is.
posted by klanawa at 3:40 PM on October 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

Athens eventually did scale and out of spite for itself.
posted by marycatherine at 5:38 PM on October 27, 2017

From TFA:

His particular idea is for nations to work together, like China and the UK over Hong Kong.

That's a... charitable interpretation of the Opium Wars, unequal treaties and the "century of humiliation".
posted by kersplunk at 5:59 AM on October 28, 2017 [2 favorites]

It goes along with the optimistic handwaving around rebuilding relationships across the Indo pacific what?
posted by infini at 9:02 AM on October 28, 2017

If only we could get back to the age of Peace and Harmony that the Greek City-States embodied! Sure they went to war with each other every third week or so, but they never burned the olive groves.....

They didn't teach me in school that something like half of the people fighting for the Persians against Athens were Greeks, tired of the domination of the Athenian commercial empire. No, it was all the sacred bearers of Democracy against the swarthy hordes, in history class.
posted by thelonius at 9:14 AM on October 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

Maybe they didn't teach me that because it isn't true, but I read it somewhere once......
posted by thelonius at 9:17 AM on October 28, 2017

The people who live and work in rural areas doing resource extraction live with a lot of economic uncertainty because there but for the grace of capital go they.

The uncertainty's the same in the cities, except the rent is 4 times as much. It's just if one place goes out of business, there's a few more options to choose from. But that's why a lot of people end up having to move towards the cities anyway.

But the rural problems and the city problems are two sides of the exact same coin. The concentration of wealth in the cities is bad for everyone who isn't in the capital owning class. In rural areas, it's getting harder and harder to get a job, and in the city, it's getting harder and harder to make rent with the job that you have. The wealth and economic activity needs to be spread out, but of course the people with the capital don't want that because the rise of rent and land prices and the ease of centralizing their operations and all of that make them rich.

That's why politicians in the US and Canada are trying so hard to play up the urban vs. rural cultural divide. But living in the Northwest, looking around at people I know - it's largely nonsense. People move in to the cities and back out again to where they can get jobs and afford housing. Most people live in the suburbs, and whether you are "city" or "country" is mainly determined by which way you head on your days off.

I mean in Seattle, there's kind of an increasing bubble of isolated "tech people" who moved here from out of state, but that's more a "from around here" and "not from around here" divide than "urban" vs. "rural" as much as it's convenient to all these media narratives to frame it as the latter.
posted by Zalzidrax at 2:27 PM on October 28, 2017 [4 favorites]

Metafilter: A bad handwavy Gibson-esque TED talk at best.

Sorry.
posted by quinndexter at 12:51 AM on October 29, 2017 [1 favorite]

As the battle over Catalonia raged this week, secessionism is challenging the constructs of democracy. Around the world, we see one person’s quest for sovereignty can cost the integrity of another’s state. Here’s the best of our comment and analysis - The Financial Times
posted by infini at 5:37 AM on November 4, 2017