Nerdshit

There are three basic positions among progressives on global governance and the nation-state: A. Build on the existing infrastructure, UN etc., toward world government. B. Forget the existing infrastructure as hopelessly compromised, and work towards a real democratic transnational order. C. Forget global institutions – they’ll never be democratic. Smash the nation-state and the UN, and build local power.


I’m in camp A. But whichever camp you are in the erosion of the sacrosanct nature of the idea of national sovereignty is generally a good thing. A nice article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (requires subscription) points out that in many debates

sovereignty propels international armies and costs untold lives. As a historical concept within political philosophy—roughly defined by one scholar as “supreme authority within a territory”...(sovereignty is a conceptual) a mongrel: born in “divine right” theology and circumstance, barely coherent at best, terminally ambiguous at worst, preternaturally dangerous.

(Carlin Romano “Violating ‘Sovereignty’: Questioning a Concept’s Long Reign” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 10, 2004)

Kofi Annan’s 2000 speech on the need to transcend national sovereignity in order to move on to UN-sanctioned(!) inteventionism to protect human rights and enforce world law, stands out as a landmark in this debate for me.

Also note transhumanist Nigel Jett’s recent comments on globalization and sovereignty

The contemporary system of Nation-States prefigured by the concept of sovereignty does not seem to be in “decline” so much as it seems to be transforming into something different. A new system of global governance is evolving, one in which the simplicity of discrete territorial units is but a one aspect of something more complex and interwoven.

From Cyborg Democracy