Are Nations Going Extinct?

When I was a young philosophy student, my Marxist fellows discussed the 'withering away of the state' with an almost rapture-like awe. We would all, they assured me, be hunters in the morning, fishers in the afternoon, and poets in the evening.

Today, the nation state is clearly withering. But where Marx saw this as the logical result of a workers' utopia and the perfection of humankind, it is precisely the failure to manifest that utopia and perfection that is both a primary driver, and a primary symptom, of the state’s demise.

This withering has profound implications for foreign policy. Counterinsurgency and nation building doctrines are based on enhancing the legitimacy of the state. If the state as a functional structure is circling the drain, then so are these policies – which might help us understand why nothing seems to work in Afghanistan. The basic assumption of creating a viable state is itself nonviable.

Complexity science heads don’t do – or even believe in – prediction. The world is too fluid and emergent for that. But we do track behaviors over time and play with scenarios, probabilities and trajectories. So let me climb out on my favorite limb with my trusty chainsaw and suggest that the nation state, as we know it, will go extinct over the next few decades.

There are several reasons for this. Most important is that the world is just too big, too fast and too interconnected / interdependent for states to effectively respond to emergent events. Their timelines are too long. They have to recognize the issue, consider the political benefits and pitfalls, decide on a course of action, draft and argue out legislation, fight over appropriations, determine the spin, brief the players . . . Meantime, the world has moved on and new crises have appeared, perhaps driven by the actions or inactions of the state(s) in question.  

States also suffer terribly from ‘over prescribed’ structure. They have literally millions of rules, regulations, check and balances, as well as parallel layers of administration that often compete with and obstruct each other. Multiplied together, this induces paralysis.

Meanwhile, the world is continuously manifesting ‘butterfly effects’ – events that trigger something, which then triggers something else, which then triggers a whole cascade of effects. It’s iterative and emergent, and bureaucrats can do little but run in circles screaming and tearing their hair, while trying desperately to blame someone / something else for the fallout.

Another key factor is that states no longer have a monopoly on violence. We live in an open source world, and states can neither exclusively apply, nor effectively contain, violence as a policy tool. The loss of that control equates to a loss of prestige, which also means a loss of deterrence.

As state structures dissipate, they will be replaced by a variety of ‘post national’ entities. In the near term, these may be primarily parasitic – such as hybridized gangs, militias and crime syndicates – profiteering on the chaos of a governance vacuum. In the longer term, however, these emergent entities will likely become the new centers of innovation that define, design, prototype and ‘infect’ through their success the future shape of civilization.

There is no agreed upon language for this kind of emerging entity. I like the term, ‘Other Guys’ (OGs). They’re not government, not an NGO, not a political party. They’re just self-organizing networks of . . . other guys.

OGs stand outside the dominant system, even as they navigate and exploit it. They follow Bucky Fuller’s advice not to fight the existing reality – except as necessary to maintain freedom of action – but to build new models that make the old ones obsolete.