A nation is defined as "a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory." "Culture" here can include religion, myth or ideology which can trump all the other features. There are times, centuries, areas of the world, where the definition and reality of Nations still makes or has made sense in the very recent past. For me to suggest that the whole concept is obsolete seems ridiculous on the face of it. We may have world agencies and currency, we may try to coordinate a climate agreement worldwide or have a set of rules for world trade, but when it comes to serious matters such as national wealth, a pandemic or a war, we fall back on sovereign states and national interests. Try telling the Chinese or the French or the Thais or the Brazilians or the Egyptians or a hundred more distinct groups of millions that nations belong to the past, and such a suggestion will be brushed aside. For that matter, try telling that to most Americans.
So we are a tribal species, and nations remain the most potent form of tribe, at least on the larger scale. That this scale is under stress is obvious - one the one hand, the world seems to be dividing into larger entities, with the major players China, the US, the EU and possible conglomerates emerging in Africa, East and South Asia, South America and the Middle East, although this is hardly a coherent or progressively successful movement at present. Nasser's Egypt had aspirations to form a united Pan-Arab nation, the Andean nations played with the idea, there has been brave talk of a United States of Africa. On the other hand, within even long-established national unions, groups such as the Catalans and the Basques,the Kurds and the Scots wish to become smaller nations within a framework that no longer makes sense to their conception of who they are, if it ever did. These contrary currents show, I suggest, that the national scale is often wrong for reasons more powerful than those that created the nations in the first place.
One problem concerning generalizing about nations is how much they vary. Take one element of the definition: "large". Territorial size differences often make sense, but the fall of the boundaries can be as arbitrary as the lines across the desert dawn by junior British officers carving up the ancient worlds of history at the end of yet another empire.
So what about the "large" in the definition ? Population? Tuvalu is a nation of ten thousand people about to disappear into the rising Pacific Ocean. China and India both have populations about 130,000 times as large as Tuvalu. The United Nations - a title which is really a contradiction in terms - has just under 200 members, and while there are still a few nations such as the Kurds who have no unified territory and fragments of empire aspiring to join the club such as Greenland, most of us currently belong to globally recognised nations. like it or not.
So, what is the harm? Why cannot supra-national organizations gradually ramify and evolve, while the two hundred current uneven divisions remain accidents of history that will gradually decay ? I would submit that there is an important psychological reason why we need to move on from our little parochial fortresses to a collective guardianship of the whole Earth. This resides in the need for a no-scapegoat rule - that we cannot in the end blame others for the mess we are in, or be distracted from facing the nature of our species' collective responsibility and, yes, guilt. The obverse of this coin is very important too - we need to recognise the tremendous collective resources and talents of the whole species, including the range of cultures, to employ in our fight for survival. If the US and China are locked in a struggle for supremacy, for example, there will be a multi-layered distraction from solving the world's problems. Those two countries on their own could vaccinate the world and abolish many of the toxic disparities of wealth and opportunity. If you laugh at the very idea of such deep cooperation with all its implications, you prove my point about our being trapped in nationistic modes of thinking. Imagine the reallocation of resources from the US Afghan war cost of at least 2 trillion dollars, or the major portion of the gigantic arms expenditure of these two countries alone. That's just the start, the low-hanging fruit. With annual world GDP, a concept I have problems with and do not accept at face value but which is a useful approximation, at about 100 trillion dollars, the redirection and savings of rationalization of even five trillion a year could save us. That figure will soon rise to ten trillion, mark my words. So, sorry to all of you in the US who are rosy with rising optimism with a new administration - I have to talk bigger and bolder than Joe Biden.
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Richard Posner
