My own position on the national question

 

I've written before about the history of the "national question," without putting forward my own viewpoint.  So what is it? 

I am an anti-nationalist.  As I've written before, I think nationalism is a scam.  An "imagined community."

But that's just a negative assertion.  What positive proposal do I make, as opposed to nationalism?

Am I saying that the nation-state is too small?  Or that it's too big?  Am I pushing for larger scale organization, or smaller?

The answer, of course, is both.  

First, let me say, very clearly, as I've said before, I oppose one world government.  Totally.

But apart from that, a wide variety of forms of organization are possible.  And different forms are desirable for different purposes.

But I would say that, for the most part, today, in the early 21st century, the nation-state is too big.  Certainly, in the case of the United States, not to mention China or India, the nation-state is way too big.  Like Bell Telephone in the 80s, these gigantic nation-states should be broken up into much smaller parts. 

I'm a fan of subsidiarity: the principle that power ought to reside at the lowest feasible level.

What is feasible?  It depends.  Different kinds of decisions can be made at different levels.

I think most decisions can be made on a small, local level.  Perhaps very small.  I'm fascinated with Dunbar's number, which is often estimated to be somewhere around 150.  For thousands of years - perhaps hundreds of thousands of years - bands of nomadic humans migrated around the world in groups somewhere around this size, or a bit larger.  So long as social organization was this small, it was possible for all members to know each other personally, and to interact on this level.  It seems feasible for a wide variety of human endeavors to return to this level, and in fact, a lot of decision making is on this level.  As human communities grew larger, there was a tendency to "chunk" people, so that eventually what was going on at the socio-cognitive level probably might have been more like a Dunbar's number of families, or clans, rather than of individuals.  This dovetails with my contention that the family is the original hierarchy, and the source and sustainer of all the others.  As society continued to develop, class systems, such as the up-river and down-river people, began to emerge - and the state became necessary.  I like to imagine that many decisions can be made at the level of local government - and more importantly, outside of government altogether.  

I loosely tend to estimate in terms of orders of magnitude - unless and until we can get more precise numbers, through evidence and experiment.  It seems plausible to me that most decision-making can be made in cultures 100 times or perhaps even 1000 times larger than Dunbar's number while retaining some meaningful sense of democracy.  I'm fond of the people at Occupy Wall Street in 2011 who tried to draft a new constitution based on workers' councils and consumers' councils representing groups of 15,000 people based on this idea.  Maybe I could imagine a representative government of some kind that would deserve the trust of 150,000 people, or even 1,500,000?  But the next orders of magnitude - 15,000,000 or 150,000,000 seem practically unfeasible, and 1,500,000,000 seems utterly preposterous.  The power or capacity of any individual's decision making would be negligible to nonexistent.  Again, these numbers are rough estimates, and I could be wrong.  Only evidence can determine what the actual bounds of feasibility would be.  

That being said, we live in a world of billions of people, and I hope the human population will live and grow sustainably.  Inevitably, there will be certain very specific issues that require larger scale agreements.  Some obvious issues that come to mind are AI and global climate change.  I do not believe that even these issues require world government.  Treaties and agreements seem perfectly capable of dealing with these issues.  A great example is the Montreal Protocol, which banned the atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons that were damaging the Ozone Layer.

The problem with international treaties is that they are treaties between nations.  A problem with the United Nations is that it is made out of nations.  (A comparable problem is the US Senate, which counts every state equally, to the benefit of small-population states and to the detriment of large-population states - not to mention the District of Columbia, or territories such as Puerto Rico, that get no vote at all.)  


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