Some observations about democracy and the state

This is clipped from the middle of a longish post by E. Glen Wyle, The Political Philosophy of RadicalxChange. It may be a bit obscure without more context (e.g. AP = Actual Polity, NP = Natural Polity – but what do those mean?).

The experience of the twentieth century with nation-states, and the hope that democratic but exclusionary forms within them will lead through a process of bureaucratization and democratic dialog towards justice, is an unhappy one. Zionists who escaped (originally democratically-elected) Nazi terror hoped to establish a Jewish democratic state. That state excluded from political influence most of the Arab people whose ancestral lands it occupies. Every year of the boisterous democratic debate in Israel, more vital than anywhere in the world, seems to be leading Hatikvah bat shnot ‘alpayim (the hope of two thousand years) ever more in the direction of oppressive and exclusionary ethno-nationalism. This is clearly not a result of insufficiently active democracy or an incompetent civil service; quite the reverse. It seems quite clearly a result of an exclusionary construction of the polity. And with increasing returns phenomena that cross the borders of APs, we have new levels of exclusion to contemplate. Given the tremendous effects each nation has on others—e.g. through global warming and the War on Drugs—any policy focused on empowering current nation-states simply deepens the problem of APs dominating NPs whose members they exclude.

Still, we needn’t abandon the concept of democracy, just its tight connection to the existing nation-state framework. In contrast, to majoritarian democratic nation-states that have perfected the politics of exclusion, a specific set of nations and regions have made progress in developing democratic and civil service cultures of the “progressive” sort that proactively seek inclusion and alignment of actual polities with natural polities. Despite their differing individual political histories, Singapore, Scandinavia, and Taiwan were all deeply influenced by the Liberal Radical tradition and by ideas about decentralization of power. Henry George and other Radical political economists were central to the cannon shaping thought in these locations in a way they were not to the same extent anywhere else in the world.

These countries and regions have exceptionally efficient bureaucracies, use market mechanisms of an enlightened community-oriented variety extensively, have (except for Singapore) among the best democratic cultures and most vital civil societies in the world, etc. This suggests that the same types of institutions that effectively decentralize power may also be conducive to, in other less clear and formal ways, improving democracy and governance. Importantly, we will see below in the final section on imagining alternatives, mechanisms for governance by decentralization need not be limited in their function to geographies that align with nation-state boundaries. Instead, these mechanisms can be deployed for use across the public sphere created by NPs.

Successful exercises of state power have co-evolved tightly with detailed governance structures that help align actual polities and natural polities through checks and balances. While such systems are described by extreme capitalists as “statist” or “central planning” they are not statist in the sense here: they involve simple, transparent, widely understood legal or quasi-legal regimes that decentralize power, in a way that is quite different from and much more effective than simple capitalism. They constrain the discretionary power of the democratic state, as well as that of private wealth. There are also international equivalents, such as restraints on nuclear weapons, rules of war and trade barriers, that try to deal with NP>AP and NPAP cases; while these have been relatively ineffective, there are increasing experiments with creative new means of international cooperation, such as blockchains and open source software collaborations. Such systems are precisely what we need to build.

The important point, coming out of the Georgist tradition, is that social institutions need to be worthy of the trust we place in them to deliver good governance while protecting freedom roughly in parallel to our entrusting them with powers based on that trust. We should not entrust power to social institutions that have proven themselves unworthy of our trust, or where no work has been done to assess their trustworthiness from the point of view of governance and results. Trust can be earned based on clear arguments about why power is appropriately distributed, by good empirical performance on average, by clearly visible experiments, and so forth.

Who they are and what these folks are up to:

The RadicalxChange (RxC) movement is a community of artists, researchers, entrepreneurs and activists working to imagine, design, experiment with, and execute political changes based on radically innovative political economies and social technologies that are truer to the richness of our diversely shared lives. The diversity that the movement aspires to, and has begun to instantiate, requires it to frequently code switch, expressing ideas in the idioms and values of a range of social groups and holding itself accountable to those value systems. For all its attitudinal differences from analytical political philosophy at a broad level, this is one of the many languages it must speak to be effective.

And why: Increasing returns:

The possibility that many people, working together, can achieve more than the total of what each could achieve separately is what economists call the phenomenon of “increasing returns”. The greatest chance of enabling broad human flourishing lies in understanding increasing returns and structuring markets and governance to unleash their shared value to humanity while avoiding the ills they can provoke—monopoly, opportunity hoarding, majoritarian exclusions, tragedies of the commons. A central goal of any effort to build a new political philosophy or fresh paradigm for political economy should be to lay out approaches to markets, governance, and community that capture the benefits of increasing returns without falling into the traps that increasing returns phenomena can generate.

A historical name for this philosophy is Liberal Radicalism, though the RxC neologism may be more appropriate given the misunderstandings that crop up around the word “Liberal” in the US. Liberal Radicalism was a philosophical tradition that took “radical” critiques of liberalism’s limits seriously and sought to design a liberalism that can work in a fundamentally diverse, but social, world. It attempted, wherever possible, to combine the flexibility and dynamism of capitalism with democracy’s public spirit and inclination towards the common good. Classical liberalism was instantiated by capitalism and the one-person-one-vote concept, but no equally simple, formal institutional ideas have as of yet instantiated Liberal Radicalism. A core goal of the RxC movement is to develop such institutions.

This manifesto begins by laying out why increasing returns are so important and explains how classical liberalism, or reigning paradigms of capitalism, statism, nationalism, and technocracy, fail to deliver on the value for human well-being of increasing returns, while also generating a range of problems – from failures of freedom to poor economic outcomes—from their mode of handling the increasing returns problem. Finally, it ends with an attempt to articulate a set of principles to guide the alternative to institutional design that we advocate.

Is the nation-state an obsolete form of governance and social organization?

I’ve been blogging on the topic for awhile now – see posts collected under the label “nation-state”. It looks like my first post on the topic went up on October 4, 2014, Where's the World Headed & the Rise of Cities, a Quickie. My most recent one (except for this) went up yesterday, Reading The Human Swarm 8: What about the USA? After I’d posted that I read an article in the NYTimes, In Era of Hardening Identities, Trump Order on Jews Kindles Questions Old and New. The title didn’t say anything about the nation-state, but that’s where it went. Why? Because the nation-state is about identity. And so I appended some passages from that article to my post about The Human Swarm.

Now, that’s the first time I can remember reading something in the NYTimes that pointed out, quite explicitly and distinctly, both that the nation-state is a relatively recent socio-political invention, AND that somehow moving beyond the nation-state is the political problem of the day:

The world, unable to unwind a global order built on national identity, sought to manage its worst tendencies by promoting cultural pluralism, international integration and protections for minorities and migrants. These values did not so much replace national identity as sit uneasily alongside it, eventually leading to a backlash.

I have no particular reason to believe that that is the first time the idea has been broached in that paper – though there always is a first time – which is why I emphasized “remember”. But the topic certainly hasn’t been a regular feature in the opinion section. It should be.

Now, that article goes on to say:

Mr. Trump’s order [targeting anti-Semitic and anti-Israel speech on campuses] raises anew a question that has faced Jews throughout the 200-year era of national identity: whether such identities offer them security or only peril. It is an echo of late 19th-century debates, when some urged embracing national identity and forming a state, while others argued for casting it off and integrating into multicultural democracies instead.

The wider democratic world asked itself this same question in the wake of World War II. It declared old-style national identity a curse and pluralistic democracy the only path to peace, but the argument has raged off and on ever since — as it has, in parallel, for Jews.

That last paragraph suggests that the issue of national identity has been explicitly on the table since the end of the Second World War.

Just how explicit? I’m not at all sure. What I think is that, regardless of what has been said and done – the establishment of the United Nations, all the various treaties, trade agreements and so forth – that the nation-state state has in fact been tacitly assumed as the fundamental framework of political organization. 

It’s like the geocentric model of the solar system. You add new cycles and epicycles to make the whole thing work, but don’t really abandon your central conception. As a last desperate gesture to keep the whole thing tottering along Tycho Brahe suggests a drastic modification: keep the earth in the center as always, so the sun revolves around the earth, but then let all the other planets revolve around the sun. Geocentrism is saved while the mathematics is a bit simplified. It didn’t work.

So, I argue, it has been in our geopolitical thought and action. The United Nations, globalization, all of it, it’s all a Tychoesque Rube Goldberg attempt to keep the old nation-state pumping. It’s not working.

What’s next?

P.S. You might want to take a look at the collection of Thomas Naylor essays Charlie Keil and I have put together, Thomas Naylor's Paths to Peace: Small Is Necessary (Local Paths to Peace Today, Vol. 2). We offer no answers, only things to think about.

Innovative governance, side-slipping the nation-state

Mark Lutter, Local Governments Are Changing the World, Cato Unbound, July 11, 2018.

The innovative governance movement is interested in improving governance via the creation of new jurisdictions with significant degrees of autonomy. These new jurisdictions could import successful institutions to create the conditions for catch up growth. Or the new jurisdictions could experiment with new forms of governance, to push the frontier. The overarching thesis of innovative governance is that the existing equilibrium of political units is overly resistant to change, and small, new jurisdictions, particularly on greenfield sites, are an effective mechanism to institutional improvements.

The modern innovative governance movement was launched ten years ago when Patri Friedman and Wayne Gramlich created the Seasteading Institute. Critical of the lack of success of traditional libertarian attempts at social change, the Seasteading Institute argued that new societies, “seasteads,” could be created in international waters. Seasteads would provide a blank slate for institutional innovation and experimentation. Successful models of governance could attract new residents, while unsuccessful ones would fail. This iterative, evolutionary process of governance improvements could help push the frontier of the optimal type of government. [...]

Historically, the innovative governance movement has been heavily influenced, and arguably led, by techno-libertarians, with Romer being the obvious exception. This is beginning to change. However, while the techno-libertarian attitude was arguably important for the vision, it hampered the development of more practical capacities necessary for the creation of charter cities. [...]

Luckily, things are changing, making charter cities more viable than they were ten years ago. A handful of influential groups are beginning to think about charter cities. That said, they’re coming at it from different angles, and few have the full vision. However, with proper coordination, it’s possible to rapidly, within 2 to 3 years, create the environment within which several charter city projects can be launched. Let’s consider some of the perspectives at hand.

Economists: Most development economists are sympathetic to charter cities. While some are strongly critical, there is nevertheless a general sense that charter cities are an idea worth trying. The downside is that economists don’t get career points for discussing charter cities. For example, Romer, who is frequently listed as a contender for the Nobel Prize, gave a TED talk on charter cities rather than publishing an academic article.

Silicon Valley: Silicon Valley is interested in cities. YCombinator made a big splash about building a city, though it was later toned down to research. Seasteading is big enough to be made fun of on HBO’s Silicon Valley. Multiple unicorn founders have told me they are building up a war chest such that they can build a city when they exit.

Humanitarians: While the refugee crisis has dropped out of the news recently, there remains interest in improving refugee camps via special economic zones and creating charter cities as a mechanism for economic development to lower the demand for emigration. The Jordan Compact gives aid and favorable grants to Jordan in exchange for work rights for refugees and increasing refugee participation in special economic zones. Kilian Kleinschmidt, who formerly ran the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan and is on the Board of Advisers of my nonprofit, the Center for Innovative Governance Research, argues for special development zones for migrants. And of course, there is the aforementioned nonprofit Refugee Cities. Michael Castle-Miller is developing the legal and institutional frameworks for these charter cities via his teams at Politas Consulting.

New-city projects: There are dozens of new city projects around the world. These new city projects are real estate plays, building satellite cities of 50,000 or more residents. Investments in these new cities is rarely under $1 billion. Nkwashi, a new city project in Zambia, is one of my favorite examples. Mwiya Musokotwane, the CEO, is on the Board of Advisers for the Center for Innovative Governance Research.

Some of the new city projects are beginning to think about governance, which is a natural path as their revenues are based on land values.

A final interesting development, which is hard to place or categorize, is that Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Prime Minister of Denmark and former Secretary General of NATO, also has an interest in charter cities and special economic zones. He recently launched a new foundation, the Alliance of Democracies Foundation. One of the key initiatives of the Foundation is Expeditionary Economics, which is focusing, as previously mentioned, on charter cities and special economic zones.

The demise of the nation state

I've been reading about this for several years now. Rana Dasguta has an article of that title in The Guardian for April 5, 2018. Here's some excerpts:

The most momentous development of our era, precisely, is the waning of the nation state: its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstance. National political authority is in decline, and, since we do not know any other sort, it feels like the end of the world. This is why a strange brand of apocalyptic nationalism is so widely in vogue. But the current appeal of machismo as political style, the wall-building and xenophobia, the mythology and race theory, the fantastical promises of national restoration – these are not cures, but symptoms of what is slowly revealing itself to all: nation states everywhere are in an advanced state of political and moral decay from which they cannot individually extricate themselves.

Why is this happening? In brief, 20th-century political structures are drowning in a 21st-century ocean of deregulated finance, autonomous technology, religious militancy and great-power rivalry. Meanwhile, the suppressed consequences of 20th-century recklessness in the once-colonised world are erupting, cracking nations into fragments and forcing populations into post-national solidarities: roving tribal militias, ethnic and religious sub-states and super-states. Finally, the old superpowers’ demolition of old ideas of international society – ideas of the “society of nations” that were essential to the way the new world order was envisioned after 1918 – has turned the nation-state system into a lawless gangland; and this is now producing a nihilistic backlash from the ones who have been most terrorised and despoiled.

Once upon a time...

The reason the nation state was able to deliver what achievements it did – and in some places they were spectacular – was that there was, for much of the 20th century, an authentic “fit” between politics, economy and information, all of which were organised at a national scale. National governments possessed actual powers to manage modern economic and ideological energies, and to turn them towards human – sometimes almost utopian – ends. But that era is over. After so many decades of globalisation, economics and information have successfully grown beyond the authority of national governments. Today, the distribution of planetary wealth and resources is largely uncontested by any political mechanism.

But to acknowledge this is to acknowledge the end of politics itself. And if we continue to think the administrative system we inherited from our ancestors allows for no innovation, we condemn ourselves to a long period of dwindling political and moral hope. Half a century has been spent building the global system on which we all now depend, and it is here to stay. Without political innovation, global capital and technology will rule us without any kind of democratic consultation, as naturally and indubitably as the rising oceans.

Can we change?

It will be objected, inevitably, that any alternative to the nation-state system is a utopian impossibility. But even the technological accomplishments of the last few decades seemed implausible before they arrived, and there are good reasons to be suspicious of those incumbent authorities who tell us that human beings are incapable of similar grandeur in the political realm. In fact, there have been many moments in history when politics was suddenly expanded to a new, previously inconceivable scale – including the creation of the nation state itself. And – as is becoming clearer every day – the real delusion is the belief that things can carry on as they are.

The first step will be ceasing to pretend that there is no alternative. So let us begin by considering the scale of the current crisis.

Dasgupta then recounts how we got here, starting with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, moving through the 19th century, to the decolonization that followed WWII, leaving us with:

There is every reason to believe that the next stage of the techno-financial revolution will be even more disastrous for national political authority. This will arise as the natural continuation of existing technological processes, which promise new, algorithmic kinds of governance to further undermine the political variety.[...] Governments controlled by outside forces and possessing only partial influence over national affairs: this has always been so in the world’s poorest countries. But in the west, it feels like a terrifying return to primitive vulnerability. The assault on political authority is not a merely “economic” or “technological” event. It is an epochal upheaval, which leaves western populations shattered and bereft. There are outbreaks of irrational rage, especially against immigrants, the appointed scapegoats for much deeper forms of national contamination. The idea of the western nation as a universal home collapses, and transnational tribal identities grow up as a refuge: white supremacists and radical Islamists alike take up arms against contamination and corruption.
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The stakes could not be higher. So it is easy to see why western governments are so desperate to prove what everyone doubts: that they are still in control. It is not merely Donald Trump’s personality that causes him to act like a sociopathic CEO. The era of globalisation has seen consistent attempts by US presidents to enhance the authority of the executive, but they are never enough. Trump’s office can never have the level of mastery over American life that Kennedy’s did, so he is obliged to fake it.

Is America too large and diverse for effective governance?

Ross Douthat in the NYTimes, "The Baker and the Empire":

The United States has the rules of a democratic republic but, increasingly, the cultural divisions of a sprawling Old World empire. We are governed by a Constitution, by the power of national majorities (or minorities with good luck in the Electoral College), and our laws are basically uniform across the land. But the scale and diversity of our country is vast and wild, encompassing immigrants from every part of the world and a native population riven by racial divisions, ideological wars, and a widening religious chasm.

Democratic life requires accepting that your own faction may be out of power roughly half the time. But in a culture this diverse and divided we trust our fellow citizens less, we share less with them, and we fear that any political defeat will leave our communities at their mercy, that if we lose power we will be routed and destroyed.

Meanwhile because we are so distant from our rivals, we cannot recognize that they share the same fears about what will happen if power is in our hands — or else we dismiss those fears as the pleadings of a wicked claque whose destruction is entirely merited.

As a conservative Catholic who works in a liberal milieu, I watched this happen after Obergefell v. Hodges. For its opponents, the same-sex marriage ruling was less frightening for what it did than for what they feared might follow: not just legal same-sex nuptials, but a sweeping legal campaign against the sexual revolution’s dissidents, in which conservative believers would be prodded out of various occupations, while their schools and hospitals and charities would be fined and taxes and regulated and de-accredited to death.

And liberals who felt ascendant in the Obama years simply couldn’t accept this fear as something to be managed and assuaged; to them, it was either ridiculous alarmism or a cloak for bigotry. [...]

This kind of cycle of incomprehension and aggression tends to destroy republics if it isn’t broken, if leaders can’t compromise ideological principles to maintain civic peace, if partisans can’t imagine how the world looks in communities vastly different from their own.

The city-state redux

Jamie Bartlett, in Aeon:

Until the mid-19th century, most of the world was a sprawl of empires, unclaimed land, city-states and principalities, which travellers crossed without checks or passports. As industrialisation made societies more complex, large centralised bureaucracies grew up to manage them. Those governments best able to unify their regions, store records, and coordinate action (especially war) grew more powerful vis-à-vis their neighbours. Revolutions – especially in the United States (1776) and France (1789) – helped to create the idea of a commonly defined ‘national interest’, while improved communications unified language, culture and identity. Imperialistic expansion spread the nation-state model worldwide, and by the middle of the 20th century it was the only game in town. There are now 193 nation-states ruling the world.

But the nation-state with its borders, centralised governments, common people and sovereign authority is increasingly out of step with the world.

Maybe Trump was right"

On 17 September 2016, the then presidential candidate Donald Trump tweeted: ‘A nation without borders is not a nation at all. We WILL Make America Safe Again!’ The outcry obscured the fact that Trump was right (in the first half, anyway). Borders determine who’s in and who’s out, who’s a citizen and who’s not, who puts in and who takes from the common pot. If a nation cannot defend its border, it ceases to exist in any meaningful way, both as a going concern and as the agreed-upon myth that it is.

Trump’s tweet was set against the German chancellor Angela Merkel’s offer, one year earlier, of asylum for Syrians. The subsequent movement of people across Europe – EU member states received 1.2 million first-time asylum applications in 2015 – sparked a political and humanitarian crisis, the ramifications of which are still unfolding. It certainly contributed to the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the EU. But 1.2 million people is a trickle compared to what’s coming. Exact numbers are hard to come by, and notoriously broad, but according to some estimates as many as 200 million people could be climate-change refugees by the middle of the century.

Tough, of course, The Donald doesn't believe in climate change.

Bleg: Beyond/Beneath the Nation-State

This stuff is much on my mind these days. If anyone has any suggestions, please pass them on.

Back in September, 2012, I put up a post in which I asserted, by the time-honored method of pulling it out of my arse, that

in the long run, more and more political action which shift to cities and thereby ‘hollow out’ the increasingly sclerotic system of nation states which governs the earth and the global level. In a century the nation states will be husks of what they are now and most of the world’s civic business will be conducted by shifting coalitions of cities and regions.

I’m interested in exploring that notion.

Very.

Anyone have ideas, suggestions for things to check out, etc.? Any relevant science fiction?

* * * * *

In that post I cited, as examples,

• the Second Vermont Republic, a group of citizens who want Vermont to secede from the USofA,
• the Transition Town movement, folks who are adamantly apolitical but who, in anticipation of peak oil, are working toward local self-sufficiency in food and energy and all that that implies, and
• Mayors of Peace, an international organization of cities seeking to end nuclear weapons by 2020.

What else is there like that, where “like that” is interpreted generously?

Do sister cities programs belong here? The Wikipedia definition:

Twin towns or sister cities are cooperative agreements between towns, cities, and even counties in geographically and politically distinct areas to promote cultural and commercial ties.

And the charter cities movement? Again, the good old Wikipedia:

A charter city is a city in which the governing system is defined by the city's own charter document rather than by state, provincial, regional or national laws. In locations where city charters are allowed by law, a city can adopt or modify its organizing charter by decision of its administration by the way established in the charter. These cities may be administered predominantly by citizens or through a third-party management structure, because a charter gives a city the flexibility to choose novel types of government structure. Charter cities are similar in administrative structure to special administrative regions.

Special administrative regions:

A special administrative region (SAR) is a provincial-level administrative division of the People's Republic of China, for which creation is provided by Article 31 of the 1982 Constitution of the People's Republic of China (while the administrative divisions are provided by Article 30 of the Constitution.) Article 31 reads "The state may establish special administrative regions when necessary. The systems to be instituted in special administrative regions shall be prescribed by law enacted by the National People's Congress in the light of the specific conditions".

At present, there are two special administrative regions, namely Hong Kong and Macau, which were former British and Portuguese territories respectively. Neither of them is part of any other administrative division.

Beyond that, will China be able to sit on Tibet forever? What about the Uyghurs in Zingjiang?

And then we have the curious legal status of Native American peoples within the United States:

Tribal sovereignty in the United States refers to the inherent authority of indigenous tribes to govern themselves within the borders of the United States of America. The federal government recognizes tribal nations as "domestic dependent nations" and has established a number of laws attempting to clarify the relationship between the federal, state, and tribal governments. The Constitution and later federal laws grant local sovereignty to tribal nations, yet do not grant full sovereignty equivalent to foreign nations, hence the term "domestic dependent nations".

The conventional money, of course, says that those are all just curious exceptions to the rule of the nation-state, which is here to stay. And perhaps it is. I note, however, that cities didn’t disappear when nations rose up around them. The nations may well stick around, but in somewhat reduced form.

The imaginative money notes several things. In the first place, many existing nation states are colonial constructions cobbled out of disparate peoples who have little more in common than they fact that they lived in contiguous territories ruled by colonial powers. Secondly, while many things no doubt contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, with economic stress perhaps chief among them, it never really was a unified nation in the sense that America has been. Three, Vermont is by no means the only contemporary secession movement in the USofA. Indeed, the world is riddled with secession movements. Four, the European Union is looking mighty shaky. Will it hold, or break up?

Perhaps the biggest threat to national sovereignty comes from the large multi-national corporations, who can, among other things, deprive nation states of tax revenue by moving money around internally. Who rules the USofA anyhow, the citizens through their elected representatives, or the large corporations through their influence on the electoral process? One could make an argument that 100 years from now, or less, the international order will be dominated by these corporations rather than by nation-states.

Not a happy prospect.

Finally, over the long historical haul things change, radically and fundamentall so. The nation-state is a relatively new form of government, less than a millennium old. Why should it be eternal? Is there any reason to believe that humankind has run out of political imagination? I see none.

And so I see the possibility of radical change in the future, but based on principles and mechanisms not yet articulated.

Cities are breaking free ... on climate change (I hope)

From the Stanley Foundation:

"I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” President Donald Trump declared at the White House in Washington, DC, on June 1, 2017, after announcing he would pull the United States out of the Paris climate change agreement. Within minutes, Pittsburgh’s mayor, Bill Peduto, was responding to the president on Twitter.

“The United States joins Syria, Nicaragua & Russia in deciding not to participate with world’s Paris Agreement. It’s now up to cities to lead,” Peduto tweeted. “As the Mayor of Pittsburgh, I can assure you that we will follow the guidelines of the Paris Agreement for our people, our economy & future.”

Friction among state and substate actors is nothing new. But climate change is one issue where the role of urban leaders is growing in importance, according to Ian Klaus, a former senior adviser for global cities at the US Department of State and deputy US negotiator for Habitat III, the 2016 UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development.

In a phone interview with the Stanley Foundation in June, Klaus said the decision of hundreds of American city leaders to diverge from the president’s official stance on the Paris Agreement was a “remarkable moment in diplomacy.” But it also highlighted the necessity of other multilateral players, such as civil society and nonstate actors, to help cities implement climate action. Scores of university and business leaders also have declared their support for the Paris Agreement, along with networks such as the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy, and organizations such as Bloomberg Philanthropies have pledged financial assistance.

The world's population is increasingly urban:

According to the 2016 World Cities Report from UN Habitat, by the year 2030, more than 60 percent of the world’s population will be living in urban environments.

“Some of the key global macro trends are making cities and the voice of mayors and city hall more important than ever before,” Klaus said. “As an example, if you are in the innovation economy and you’re thinking about ridesharing or apartment sharing, state governments, provincial governments, and city governments often are the regulatory keys. And so we have a shift in a lot of issues, from climate to the nature of economic growth, that I think is making cities also more important. You have this convergence of population, demographics with other trends in the economy, and security and climate.”

The relationship that citizens have with their cities also often diverges from their view of national government, Klaus said, and differs “all over the world.”

Substate diplomacy is growing:

Klaus anticipates that substate diplomacy will only grow in the coming years. In fact, US cities aren’t the only ones increasingly engaging with foreign nation-states. After President Trump announced the US departure from the Paris Agreement, California Governor Jerry Brown announced the formation of the US Climate Alliance, journeyed to China for multilateral discussions, and announced a 2018 global climate summit in San Francisco. Also, the New York Times reported that Canada has begun engaging with US cities on climate action.

“I think we’re increasingly seeing that cities and states and counties, and provinces in other countries, can take action. And, obviously, because of the pressure they are under from their own citizens, because of the moral calling to deal with an issue such as climate change, I think we’ll see more action than ever for sure,” Klaus said. “It’s a tremendous moment.”

Bill McKibben on the new nation-states

Writing in The New Republic:

But the Paris decision may also reshape the world for the better, or at least the very different. Consider: A few days after Trump’s Rose Garden reveal, California Governor Jerry Brown was in China, conducting what looked a lot like an official state visit. He posed with pandas, attended banquets—and sat down for a one-on-one meeting with President Xi Jinping, which produced a series of agreements on climate cooperation between China and California. (Trump’s secretary of energy, Rick Perry, was in Beijing the same week: no pandas, no sit-down with Xi.) It was almost as if California were another country. Call it a nation-state—a nation-state that has talked about launching its own satellites to monitor melting polar ice. A nation-state that has joined New York and a dozen others in a climate alliance to announce they will meet the targets set in the Paris accord on their own. A nation-state that already holds joint auctions with Quebec in its carbon cap-and-trade program. A nation-state that is convening hundreds of other “subnational actors” from around the world next year to pledge to keep the rise in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius.

Subnationalism:

It’s ironic that global warming might be the wedge issue for the rise of “subnationalism.” After all, if you ever wanted an argument for world government, climate change provides it. But the United Nations has been trying to stop global warming since the days when we called it the greenhouse effect. And national governments, hijacked by the fossil fuel industry, have intervened again and again to obstruct any progress: The Kyoto treaty more or less collapsed, as did the Copenhagen talks. Paris “succeeded,” but only if you squint: The world’s nations vowed to keep the planet’s temperature increase to under 2 degrees Celsius, but their promises actually add up to a world that will grow 3.5 degrees hotter. The real hope was that the accord would spur private investment in renewable energy: And as the price of solar panels plummeted, in fact, China and India started to exceed their pledges.

Even that modest progress alarmed what energy expert Michael Klare calls the Big Three carbon powers: the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. (Trump’s foreign policy looks more coherent, by the way, when viewed through this prism.) The United States has now pulled out of Paris, and an aide to Vladimir Putin has said the withdrawal makes it “perfectly evident” the pact is now “unworkable.”

So what’s a state like California to do? It can’t ignore climate change, which threatens its very existence. [...]

If you want to know who is serious about forging a new path on global warming, ignore all the airy proclamations about meeting the Paris targets—and instead pay attention to the cities and states making the very real and measurable pledge to go 100 percent renewable. California’s senate just passed such a commitment by a 2–1 margin. More dramatically, the day after Trump said he had been elected to serve “Pittsburgh, not Paris,” Mayor Bill Peduto announced that Pittsburgh will run entirely on clean energy by 2035. “If you are a mayor and not preparing for the impacts of climate change,” Peduto said, “you aren’t doing your job.” All told, 27 cities in 17 states have pledged to go 100 percent renewable—a move that puts them at direct odds with federal policy. Call them “climate sanctuaries.” San Francisco, Boulder, and Burlington won’t surprise you—but Atlanta and Salt Lake City and San Diego have done the same.

If you want to know who is serious about forging a new path on global warming, ignore all the airy proclamations about meeting the Paris targets—and instead pay attention to the cities and states making the very real and measurable pledge to go 100 percent renewable. California’s senate just passed such a commitment by a 2–1 margin. More dramatically, the day after Trump said he had been elected to serve “Pittsburgh, not Paris,” Mayor Bill Peduto announced that Pittsburgh will run entirely on clean energy by 2035. “If you are a mayor and not preparing for the impacts of climate change,” Peduto said, “you aren’t doing your job.” All told, 27 cities in 17 states have pledged to go 100 percent renewable—a move that puts them at direct odds with federal policy. Call them “climate sanctuaries.” San Francisco, Boulder, and Burlington won’t surprise you—but Atlanta and Salt Lake City and San Diego have done the same.

The State is in Question: What's happening to the idea of state sovereignty?

J. Dana Stuster, writing at Lawfare:

In these polarized times, it came as a surprise to me that the authors of three of the most interesting books on international relations of the past year agree on at least one thing. Each argues that the global order is entering a crisis that calls into question the concept of state sovereignty, a foundational principle of the international system as it has existed for nearly four centuries. In the past half-century—as globalization has interwoven the international community more densely and closely than ever, multilateral institutions have proliferated, new doctrines on human rights and counterterrorism have gained credence, and transnational threats have emerged—the definition of sovereignty has come unmoored from its traditions. These diverse authors agree that this will have consequential effects on the world, but diverge over how we reached this point and what should happen next.

The books: Rosa Brooks’ How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, Richard Haass’ A World in Disarray, and David Kennedy’s A World of Struggle.

A bit of history:

Each author identifies to the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 as a critical point of reference. To Haass, it is the foundation of the modern world order, establishing the basic principles of international relations as they are understood today. At the heart of this framework is the concept of sovereignty: the right of governments to manage their affairs of state within their borders without foreign interference. Sovereignty has always been an artificial concept, and states have never abided by it perfectly. The Treaty of Westphalia failed to prevent various upheavals across Europe, but it succeeded in establishing a framework that would persist through revisions after the Napoleonic Wars and World War I.

Brooks places Westphalia in the context of the development of the law of armed conflict and, later, human rights law. “Even after this symbolic starting point,” she writes, “it took centuries of conquest and many more wars before anything truly resembling today’s state system.” While Haass tracks the integration of relations between states, notably the consultative structure of the Concert of Europe and economic ties that served as a check against aggression, Brooks follows the development of legal traditions for conflict, from their origins in antiquity through the Lieber Code, the first Geneva Convention, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

Haass and Brooks’ histories intersect again at the point when the global order diverged from its Westphalian traditions. The cataclysm of World War II prompted the development of new innovations in law and multilateral institutions that have undermined that fundamental concept of sovereignty. The reasons for this were well-intentioned: The founders of the United Nations sincerely wanted to prevent repeating the atrocities of the war they had just witnessed. But by setting down principles barring certain conduct by governments against their own citizens, they opened the door to all manner of justifications for foreign intervention. This has been exacerbated by globalization and the accompanying devolution of power that has allowed small states, corporations, terrorist groups, humanitarian organizations, and individuals to influence events across borders. Both Brooks and Haass argue that now, seventy years later, sovereignty is eroding to its breaking point.

Kennedy, like Brooks, focuses on legal developments, but he approaches this history differently as a constructivist. “[O]rigin myths are as important for world building as they are for religions, families, or cultures,” he writes. Nonetheless, he reaches a similar conclusion: “This proliferation of legally framed activity has made war and sovereign power into legal institutions even as the experience of legal pluralism and fluidity has unhinged the idea of a law which, out there, somehow distinguishes.” The basic tenets of the Westphalian order “have become far too spongy to permit clear resolution—or became [sic] spongy enough to undergird the experience of self-confident outrage by parties on all sides of a conflict.”

The nation-state, after all, is not given in the nature of things. It is a contingent form of social organization, arising in certain historical to serve certain ends. The contemporary world is very different from the Europe of the 17th century.

"The nation-state is a failing institution"

That line is from a long post that Tim Burke has recently written, The Anatomy of Anti-Trumpism: Ten Thoughts and Reconsiderations. That's in the 9th of his ten thought, “What is uniquely wrong with America?”. All ten thoughts are worth reading, but that ninth one is something of a hobby-horse of mine, so I'm going to quote it in full:

There’s some elements of legitimate American exceptionalism littered in the last year’s events, but American progressives are not going to really understand what’s going on nor effectively react to it unless or until they grasp how much of this is a global story. The deeper story is that the nation-state is a failing institution. It cannot deliver what people all around the planet believe it has promised to deliver, not in its present form. Progressive or liberal political parties all around the globe gave up on delivering social democracy in a sustained way except in a handful of northern European nation-states during the 1980s and 1990s, and generally now run on the premise that they would be better-trained managers of systems that they have no desire to fundamentally reform or change. All over the globe that has become an unconvincing, pallid electoral strategy that generally appeals only to people who see themselves as better-trained managers of their own institutions, and to the people who are their social clients and dependents. Conservative or reactionary parties have gained ground because they offer some grander vision, because they promise (however transparently falsely) to radically reform or abolish failed systems, because they cross social boundaries that progressives no longer cross. I think this is very similar to how Islamist parties made inroads in cases like the coup-cancelled 1992 election in Algeria–not necessarily because people were drawn in positive terms to their message, but because they were the only viable reformist alternatives to business as usual.

A global perspective could help progressives to understand why they are losing ground everywhere. It is not, a la Jonathan Haidt, because conservatism is cognitively natural to human beings. It is that late 19th Century institutions are not working well for 21st Century humanity. If you want to gain political ground, you have to stop incrementalist tinkering around the edges of those institutions. Progressives everywhere stick to that, even people fairly far to the left, because they are the major remaining beneficiaries of those poorly functioning institutions. We need a new set of political aspirations that take us beyond our limitations.

Has the nation-state become obsolete?

Nation states cause some of our biggest problems, from civil war to climate inaction. Science suggests there are better ways to run a planet

So argues Debora MacKenzie in The New Scientist:

Try, for a moment, to envisage a world without countries. Imagine a map not divided into neat, coloured patches, each with clear borders, governments, laws. Try to describe anything our society does – trade, travel, science, sport, maintaining peace and security – without mentioning countries. Try to describe yourself: you have a right to at least one nationality, and the right to change it, but not the right to have none.

Those coloured patches on the map may be democracies, dictatorships or too chaotic to be either, but virtually all claim to be one thing: a nation state, the sovereign territory of a “people” or nation who are entitled to self-determination within a self-governing state. So says the United Nations, which now numbers 193 of them.

And more and more peoples want their own state, from Scots voting for independence to jihadis declaring a new state in the Middle East. Many of the big news stories of the day, from conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine to rows over immigration and membership of the European Union, are linked to nation states in some way.

Even as our economies globalise, nation states remain the planet’s premier political institution. Large votes for nationalist parties in this year’s EU elections prove nationalism remains alive – even as the EU tries to transcend it.

Yet there is a growing feeling among economists, political scientists and even national governments that the nation state is not necessarily the best scale on which to run our affairs. We must manage vital matters like food supply and climate on a global scale, yet national agendas repeatedly trump the global good. At a smaller scale, city and regional administrations often seem to serve people better than national governments.

How, then, should we organise ourselves? Is the nation state a natural, inevitable institution? Or is it a dangerous anachronism in a globalised world?

These are not normally scientific questions – but that is changing. Complexity theorists, social scientists and historians are addressing them using new techniques, and the answers are not always what you might expect. Far from timeless, the nation state is a recent phenomenon. And as complexity keeps rising, it is already mutating into novel political structures. Get set for neo-medievalism.

The demise of the nation-state

At the moment the nation-state seems to be the right and natural way for humans to govern themselves, and yet we know that it was a historical invention cobbled together and refined over decades and centuries initially in Europe and then elsewhere. Will the nation-state be the dominant form of large-scale governance by the end of this century? I think not. Writing in Eurozine, Robert Menasse sketches a case:

I have looked through the telescope and I have seen: nation-states will die. We now arrive at our topic: the European Union must inevitably lead to the extinction of nation-states. And rightly so. I won't be able to convince the current political elites of this, nor the columnists of the national press and all the other high priests of national identity and the defence of national interests. Nor will I be able to convince them of the basic reasonableness of a post-national world-view. I may not be able to convince you either. Still, let me tell you: the sooner you understand and accept this fact, and arrange your life accordingly, the better for you and your children. That's not an opinion. An opinion, as Hegel rightly said, is mine and is something I can just as well keep to myself. No, it is a fact. To be on the safe side, let me say in advance that I don't believe that history has a goal, nor do I believe that it has a meaning. Historical processes, on the other hand, do exist; human life on this planet can only be conceived as the production of history, just as individual life is the production of biography, and only biography can fully determine who an individual is. To think historically and perspectivally is to establish meaning in the meaningless, to give form to the processes of life, rather than just to undergo them. In the world-view of the overwhelming majority of people today, the belief in the idea of the "nation", the belief in its rational basis, the belief in the almost ontological and hence inextinguishable longing of human beings for "national identity", has taken on an almost religious character. The tendencies and movements towards renationalization that we are currently seeing belong to the conflicts of faith and wars of religion that are erupting globally. Despite the historical experience of National Socialism and its bloody trail of death and destruction, the fact that countless people literally believed in it has not yet permanently shaken the faith in the idea of "nation".

Nations, markets, aggressors:

The formation of nations was merely a historical step made in order to unite provinces and regions, to extend common law jurisdictions and above all to create bigger markets. However, nations have systematically proven to be aggressors, to be a reoccurring threat to peace and human rights – through the violent seizure of land and random drawing of boundaries through cultural spaces that have evolved over time, and above all through the constitution of communities able to define themselves only in terms of their difference to others. In these differences alone, in the construction of the idea of "national identity", there lies an eternally smouldering potential for aggression, which in times of crises finds an outlet as hatred towards others and the persecution of supposed scapegoats. However dramatically one judges it, it is clear that the formation of nations cannot be the end of the story – as Victor Hugo realized in 1850: "A day will come when you France, you Russia, you Italy, you England, you Germany, you all, nations of the continent, without losing your distinct qualities and your glorious individuality, will be merged closely within a superior unit and you will form a European brotherhood, just as Normandy, Brittany, Burgundy, Lorraine, Alsace, all our provinces are merged together in France." Victor Hugo was ridiculed back then, but the Franco-German war turned out to be not quite so funny, and when the people of Europe set upon one another in 1914, national arrogance turned into a multi-national tragedy, and Stefan Zweig wrote: "Nationalism has destroyed European civilization".

The Rise of Secession in the Current World: more and smaller nations

Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore write:

Since the end of the Second World War, the number of independent states has nearly tripled. In the last thirty years, over thirty new states have become members of the United Nations. Separatist movements routinely receive strong support in regional and national elections. For example, in Catalonia pro-independence parties won a majority of seats in the local parliamentary elections last September. After Scotland narrowly voted against independence in September 2014, the Scottish National Party won 56 of the 59 Scottish seats in the British general elections this May. A breakup of the UK remains in the political agenda, while the British voters are considering whether to exit the European Union. At the same time, contentious issues about sovereignty and national boundaries affect the debate on how to address the current refugees’ crisis. All over the world, from Ukraine and the Middle East to India and the Philippines, borders and secessions continue to be at the center of heated debates and conflicts.

Three causes of secession. The first:

In the past, monarchs and dictators could ignore the preferences of their populations and maintain centralized states and vast colonial empires with the use of force. But in a more democratic world it becomes more difficult to suppress the preferences of ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities. Consequently, central governments are obliged to grant greater autonomy or even independence.

Second, in comparison with the world prior to, say, 1950, we live in a relatively peaceful world:

The political and economic situation has dramatically improved after World War II in many parts of the world, largely as a consequence of increasingly free trade, and international agreements and institutions that fostered peace and economic integration. In Europe, NATO has reduced the cost of national self-defense, while the EU has removed many trade barriers among its members, creating a common market. In fact, such common market and European-level governance have also eroded the importance of domestic markets.

And so:

This is the third reason why small countries can prosper: precisely because international openness and common market reduce the importance of large domestic markets. Even a small country can trade freely with the rest of the world. In this sense, the EU increases the attractiveness of regional secessions. The Spanish government is less useful to Catalonia if many of the prerogatives of Madrid are devolved to Brussels.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Where's the World Headed & the Rise of Cities, a Quickie

Scotland recently came close to pulling out of Great Britain. What’s that about? As the day of the vote drew near I’d see stories on the theme: If Scotland goes, what next? Catalonia? Quebec? Vermont? Is the world falling apart?

Maybe?

Is that good or bad?

Interesting question. Perhaps large nation states like the USA, China, India are too be to succeed and too big to fail. At the Federal Level America is approaching a stalemate. If the nation is ungovernable, what happens to national politics? Does is devolve to mere divide and plunder? Is the nation state obsolete? If so, what’s next?

I’ve been seeing books about cities, most prominently Benjamin Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities. Has anyone read it? Here’s the blurb:

In the face of the most perilous challenges of our time—climate change, terrorism, poverty, and trafficking of drugs, guns, and people—the nations of the world seem paralyzed. The problems are too big, too interdependent, too divisive for the nation-state. Is the nation-state, once democracy's best hope, today democratically dysfunctional? Obsolete? The answer, says Benjamin Barber in this highly provocative and original book, is yes. Cities and the mayors who run them can do and are doing a better job.

Barber cites the unique qualities cities worldwide share: pragmatism, civic trust, participation, indifference to borders and sovereignty, and a democratic penchant for networking, creativity, innovation, and cooperation. He demonstrates how city mayors, singly and jointly, are responding to transnational problems more effectively than nation-states mired in ideological infighting and sovereign rivalries. Featuring profiles of a dozen mayors around the world—courageous, eccentric, or both at once—If Mayors Ruled the World presents a compelling new vision of governance for the coming century. Barber makes a persuasive case that the city is democracy’s best hope in a globalizing world, and great mayors are already proving that this is so.

Sounds good, but is it valid?

Meanwhile I’ve been reading Christopher Goto-Jones, Modern Japan: A Very Short Introduction (2009). Though I know a bit about manga and anime, I’m certainly no expert about Japan; so I can’t judge the book against current scholarly literature. But, taking the book at face value, it tells a fascinating story (I’ve only read 2+ of 5 chapters). I’ve just been through the second chapter, “Imperial revolution: embracing modernity,” which is about the Meiji Restoration. What’s interesting, and compelling, is how drastically Japan was able to remake itself within a generation or two.

When Admiral Perry landed in 1853 the country was ruled by the samurai class. By 1880 the samurai class had dissolved, though The Samurai and its bushidô (way of the warrior) creed had become enshrined as a national myth.To be sure, this was no popular democratic uprising, nothing like it, but still, the change was dramatic. And it was not imposed from the outside (that wouldn’t happen until the late 1940s).

Could something that drastic happen in the United States? Inquiring minds want to know.