Why Don't We Live in a World of Four Hundred Nation-States?

Those who have actually read the work of theoreticians of the information age like Alvin Toffler may remember its view that the centralized, sovereign, nation-state was an entity befitting the supposedly passing industrial age, which would prove itself exceedingly ineffective and irrelevant in the information age, a lumbering dinosaur (with the dinosaur the more lumbering the bigger it is), as other actors took a larger part in political, economic, social life--international organizations, and non-governmental organizations, and multinational corporations to name the more obvious. Indeed, those who trafficked in such visions commonly expected that many of the states of the time, including such developed, affluent, stable Western states like Canada, Britain, Spain and Italy would be torn into smaller pieces by secessionist movements, and the stripped-down city-state would make something of a comeback as thriving urban centers relieved themselves of burdensome ties to their hinterlands, giving us a very different-looking map of the world, with the list of nation-states it presents drastically increased, perhaps risen to four hundred, perhaps much more than that.

Of course, this is not what happened--and in spite of an era of endless crisis managed with extreme incompetence by those who hold power. Rather what has been at issue has been a profound overestimation of the information age's "dynamism," and the associated fantasy that location, natural resources, territorial control, scale, were ceasing to matter in a world where the small but agile, and the flexibly networked, were fitter to survive than old-fashioned government, a belief that was partly a matter of technological hype, but also, given the trend of that theorizing, the libertarian contempt for government.

After all, consider what has been, rather than what the proponents of the information age imagined would be. As far as international organizations go perhaps none has been more powerful than the European Union--and its limitations have only grown more evident all the time. While on paper it represented an economic space of comparable affluence to the United States, and had infringed on the sovereignty of its member states in ways that have made it deeply popular, actually faced with financial crisis in 2007 that entity, absolutely unequipped to rescue its portion of the trans-Atlantic banking system, had no choice but to turn to America's Federal Reserve for $10 trillion in short-term loans. Meanwhile those who imagined that the organizations of "civil society" could replace the welfare state or the regulatory state have learned otherwise in an era of mounting social and ecological stress, such that those who are serious about redressing such problems, contrary to the foolishness of Third Way-peddling pseudo-social democrats and corporate claqueurs such as Thomas Friedman, still look to the public sector for solution precisely because it has means, and because it can command. And multinational corporations show themselves at every turn hopelessly dependent on not just the public goods but the outright subsidies supplied by those states out of other people's taxes, which they could not afford themselves--as that aforementioned financial crisis reminded everyone--while the mania for privatization has proven to have distinct limits. (Given the choice between paying a private military company to fight the next oil war, or having the tax-paying working people living under friendly governments foot the bill, which do you think the occupants of the executive suites prefer? Meanwhile it's no coincidence that much as it may have outsourced America still has its Defense Department, rather than "Admiral Bob's Global Defense.")

Indeed, consider those predictions of Canadian, British, Spanish, Italian breakup. All four of those countries remain entirely intact, the splitting away of Quebec and Scotland and Catalonia and Padania seeming no closer now than it did a half century ago--with the same going for the rest of the world, with the anomaly of Eastern Europe notably connected with the nomenklatura of its governments having decided to dismantle their own countries for the sake of stealing whatever they could from their publics (very successfully), with the process pretty much running its course in a not quite two year period extending over 1991-1992. Contrary to what many a Western analyst predicted over the following decades, no Russian break-up followed the Soviet one--all as the list of genuine city-states has not grown at all. Back then we had Singapore and Monaco and Vatican City, and now we still have . . . Singapore and Monaco and Vatican City.

The result is that with only a very few marginal exceptions (East Timor, the last act of the Yugoslav break-up in the independence of Montenegro, the formation of South Sudan) the map of the world in 2025 looks pretty much like the one of 1995, with this, again, less different from that of 1975 than the hawkers of information age had many anticipating, which throws into sharp relief just how much its champions got wrong. Meanwhile, if the world order appears anything but stable it is not because of signs of late realization of what such theorists predicted, but because of the old industrial age rules, and what they mean for the largest and most powerful states especially. Motivated by the same old concerns of elites for their narrow economic interests, and the power of the states on which they rely, pursuing their "national interests" in a world where location, resources, control, scale still matter, they are not above fighting to redivide the world in ways which would change the lines on the maps--and as the horrors in Ukraine show, doing it through the same old industrial warfare that fashionable military theoreticians not so long ago told us had become passé.