I want to begin with a provocation.
The country you were born in — the specific rectangle of territory — has determined more about the conditions of your life than almost any other factor. More than your intelligence, more than your effort, more than your character. Where you were born determines your access to education, healthcare, safety, opportunity, legal protection and economic mobility.
You did not choose this. You cannot change it. It is a lottery at birth, with consequences that last a lifetime.
This seems like the kind of thing worth thinking about.
Nations Are Not Natural
The nation-state, as a political form, is a relatively recent invention. For most of human history, people organised themselves into much smaller units — tribes, city-states, small kingdoms — or into very large, loosely held empires that made no claim to representing a coherent national identity.
The modern nation-state — with fixed borders, a centralised government claiming sovereignty over a territory, a single legal system, and the idea that the citizens of the state share a common identity — emerged primarily in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
This does not make nations illegitimate. Things can be recent and still valuable. But it does mean that the permanence we feel when we think about the nation — the sense that it is simply the natural unit of human organisation — is an illusion produced by familiarity rather than by any deep structural necessity.
What Nations Do Well
I am not arguing that nations have produced nothing of value. I think they have produced a great deal.
Nations enabled the kind of large-scale coordination that built modern infrastructure, legal systems, public education, healthcare systems and scientific research. The state creates a shared framework within which large numbers of people can cooperate with strangers — paying taxes, obeying laws, trusting that contracts will be enforced and that institutions will function predictably.
This is genuinely valuable. Coordination at scale is not easy, and the nation-state has been a reasonably effective mechanism for achieving it.
Nations have also provided, at their best, a framework for democratic accountability. The idea that citizens can, through political participation, influence the rules that govern them is one of the most important political ideas ever developed.
What Nations Do Poorly
But nations also produce costs that we often accept as inevitable when they are not.
Wars. The most catastrophic consequence of the nation-state system is its tendency to produce wars between nations. When the world is divided into territorial units with independent militaries and competing interests, conflict is a predictable consequence. The twentieth century’s wars — which killed somewhere between 100 and 200 million people — were largely products of the nation-state system’s internal logic.
Arbitrary restriction of movement. The current system severely restricts the freedom of people to live and work where they wish. A highly skilled worker in a poor country who wishes to move to a richer country faces legal barriers that a skilled worker born in the richer country never faces. This produces massive economic inefficiency and enormous human suffering.
Competitive undermining of shared challenges. Climate change, pandemic preparedness, financial contagion, and the governance of powerful technologies are all problems that cannot be solved by individual nations acting alone. The nation-state system makes global cooperation on these issues structurally difficult.
Identity-based violence. When national identity becomes associated with ethnic, religious or cultural identity, the nation-state becomes an instrument of exclusion and persecution. The history of the twentieth century contains many examples of what happens when national identity is mobilised this way.
Imagining Something Different
I am not proposing a specific alternative. I am not sure there is one obvious alternative, and I am sceptical of anyone who claims to have the blueprint for a better world order.
But I find it useful to imagine what a different system might value.
What if political boundaries were permeable to movement? What if human beings could live and work where they chose, the way goods and capital now largely move freely?
What if there were more robust mechanisms for addressing challenges that cross national borders — not just in rhetoric, but with real authority and resources?
What if political identity were based less on territory and birth and more on voluntary association with a set of shared values or institutions?
These are not new ideas. Various forms of cosmopolitanism have been argued for by philosophers for centuries. The European Union, despite its difficulties, represents a serious attempt to move beyond the pure nation-state model within a region.
But the ideas remain marginal in mainstream political discourse, in part because the people who benefit most from the current system — those born into prosperous, stable nations with strong legal protections — tend to dominate that discourse.
The Limits of This Thinking
I am aware of the objections.
Human beings form strong attachments to particular places, cultures, languages and communities. The nation-state, at its best, provides a framework for protecting and nurturing these attachments. Any replacement would need to take them seriously.
Large-scale coordination without the nation-state is genuinely hard. We do not have good models for global democratic accountability. What exists — the United Nations, international courts, multilateral agreements — works poorly and commands little genuine loyalty.
And there are serious risks in moving too quickly away from existing structures. Stability, even imperfect stability, has value. The periods when nation-states have collapsed or been violently reorganised have generally been terrible for the people living through them.
Why I Think About This
I am a technologist, not a political scientist. I am not in a position to design alternative world orders, and I am not sure I would trust anyone who claimed to be.
But I think there is value in asking the question: what do we assume is permanent because we grew up with it, and what would we think about it if we encountered it for the first time?
The nation-state is one of those things. It is not eternal. It did not always exist in its current form. It has costs as well as benefits. And there are, at least conceptually, other ways of organising collective human life.
I do not know what those ways are. But I think asking the question is worth doing — especially now, when the challenges that face humanity most urgently are ones that individual nations cannot solve on their own.
This essay is part of my Beyond Common Sense series — essays on ideas that challenge assumptions I find it useful to examine. I am not proposing political programmes. I am trying to think clearly about things that are often treated as beyond question.