Are you glad that the world is organised into nation states and how might a different paradigm work?

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I guess I don't want it to be like this anymore.

― N. (nickdastoor), Friday, 20 February 2004 03:14 (twenty-two years ago)

yeah, it is a bit boring.

― RJG (RJG), Friday, 20 February 2004 03:18 (twenty-two years ago)

The only alternative I can think of is to have people organized under racial kinda lines. and we all know how those kinds of experiments end up.

i suppose we could all go communist. then you know.. end of nation state, history, etc.

― bill stevens (bscrubbins), Friday, 20 February 2004 03:32 (twenty-two years ago)

oh, don't worry, we'll be in a system of corporate states within 30 years...

― Kingfish Beatbox (Kingfish), Friday, 20 February 2004 03:33 (twenty-two years ago)

I would prefer government to be as local as possible, though I suppose larger bodies are needed to form some kind of "national" defense since if we all lived in small municipalities there would be nothing to stop one "tribe" from invading the territories of others.

― D Aziz (esquire1983), Friday, 20 February 2004 03:54 (twenty-two years ago)

in google directory there is a section called Society > Politics > Global Governance
but!
Baudelaire said dandysm can only exist between ages; the exhaustion of a time and the birth of another.His period was the disapearance of aristocracy of the particular and the arrival of democratic egalitarism, I would agree with the opinion that it's happening again nowadays with the end of national cultures and the emergence of gregarious planetary consumerist practices. So now is the time for style, theories of elegant life: Nietzsche said that a man who doesn't have 2/3 of his time for his own usage isn't a free man.

― Sébastien Chikara (Sébastien Chikara), Friday, 20 February 2004 04:13 (twenty-two years ago)

have you had a Momus transplant, Sébastien? :-)

it should be noted that nation-states are relatively new things, at least as far as europe goes. an improvement over being a bunch of petty fiefdoms run by the whim of the lord, i suppose.

― Eisbär (llamasfur), Friday, 20 February 2004 04:52 (twenty-two years ago)

at least as far as europe goes

Hey, we invented them, didn't we?

― N. (nickdastoor), Friday, 20 February 2004 11:12 (twenty-two years ago)

Imagine there's no countries.
It isn't hard to do.
dum de de dum de de dum
and no religion too.

― mark grout (mark grout), Friday, 20 February 2004 11:16 (twenty-two years ago)

it's extremely hard to do, since nations replaced religions as the mystical organizing factor of peoples' identity. that's an exaggeration maybe - not ALL the functions of religion have been handed off to nationhood, but a whole lot of them have --> a generational sense of belonging to "a people," who were here before you and will continue after you die; you may die defending or fighting for it, but crucially not for you but for an idea outside of you, something larger. etc.

there are lots of extremely pragmatic non-mystical functions of the nation-state, too, but N. your question may not be answerable until we can conceive of an alternative. imagine asking a Greek citizen: "are you glad that the world is presided over by gods and how might a different paradigm work?" it's not until the category of "gods" makes no sense that one can even formulate an answer. like "witches" - now we can say ha ha silly salemites, witches don't exist. but they killed people for it. i'm afraid i can't imagine the implications of saying "nations don't exist." we would have to have something to replace their particular power for organizing identity. pokemon maybe.

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Friday, 20 February 2004 11:27 (twenty-two years ago)

Friendster groups.

― Andrew Farrell (afarrell), Friday, 20 February 2004 11:35 (twenty-two years ago)

anyone interested in the origins of nations/nationalism should take a look at benedict andersons 'imagined communities'

― Guy Incognito, Friday, 20 February 2004 12:00 (twenty-two years ago)

Isn't the key issue here about terrioriality; we live in geographically specific araes; we need things from a state-type body; that state-type body needs to know where it's writ starts and where another's writ ends; without being too whiggish, it seems to me that the overall trend has been for the araes where writs run to be getting bigger and bigger, and the logical step is some shakedown and shakeup - the idea of subsidiarity is a case in point, and one I like a lot.

Will this shaking lead to the decline of the nation state as a locus of identification - dunno. Langauge is clearly a big thing here, and so is 'history' (ie, the perception, not a realistic assessment'.

Thinking that the Clockwork Organge is going to become the Subway, because that's what it was called before it became the Underground and no-one ever bothered - these memories take time to erode, and if the name of a boring and non-city wide public transport system can exist over the generations, then I think predictions of the decline of the nation state are a little premature.

― Dave B (daveb), Friday, 20 February 2004 12:04 (twenty-two years ago)

I don't know if the problem is the concept of nation states themselves so much as the fact that most of the world's "nation states" were drawn up rather sloppily by mutton-chopped Europeans 100 years ago. And the anti-colonial wave of the 50's and 60's didn't change the fact that nations' borders were still just randomly based on, say, which river looked like a good line between French and British ivory trading interests in the 1830's (or oil interests in the 1910's). So good portions of the world are ungovernable messes today.

― yossarian, Friday, 20 February 2004 16:34 (twenty-two years ago)

The next mystical organizing factors of peoples' identity will be sports teams, musical groups, and computer operating systems. This will end wars, but increase random mayhem.

― Aimless (Aimless), Friday, 20 February 2004 16:43 (twenty-two years ago)

"DIE YOU CORNY INDIE FUXORS IN INDIEFUXORLAND!"

― Eisbär (llamasfur), Friday, 20 February 2004 22:05 (twenty-two years ago)

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