by ormondotvos
Fri Mar 2nd, 2007 at 10:06:36 AM EST
Nation States were invented as a truce between empires. There was too much interference in each others' affairs, so a cynical bargain was struck: we won't interfere in your internal affairs, if you won't interfere in ours.
This was supposed to apply to all areas of life: territory, commerce, colonies, and the embassies that were set up. But it also included non-interference in human rights administration, or lack of it.
Thus slavery, torture, theft of property, child labor, and the subjugation of women were solely the domain of the nation state, and other nation states weren't supposed to interfere. Sort of like multiculturalism on a global scale, without an overarching law.
From the diaries -- whataboutbob
But then came the Enlightenment's discovery of human rights, the weird idea that every human, no matter their age, sex, color, religion, or place of birth, was entitled to things they'd never been entitled to before. International law was offered up, but seems to be more a sop to complainers than real control of nation states.
And the United States of America, the former colonies of the British Empire, became infected with this meme of human rights, a very powerful one.
But as the USA gained in power, it became a slave to its own corporations, which it foolishly allowed those same rights as a human person. Gradually, the corporations are destroying the government based on human rights, which have become submitted to corporation assumed rights to all surplus labor.
Now the USA is coming into conflict with the entire world, or the part that now believes in human rights, and is also coming into conflict with a spreading theocracy that submits the individual's rights to those of the state. Submission is the English word for this theocracy. You may know it as Islam.
How do you see this coming battle between the fundamentalist segment of Islam, Humanist Europe, and the schizophrenic USA, torn between Christian Fundamentalism (no more interested in the dominance of individual rights than Islam) and its founding documents, now being rapidly destroyed by corporate golems acting as overseers for a self-centered oligarchy?
Will liberal humanist citizen be able to educate and motivate a large enough majority of voters to stem the tide? Or has the die been cast; the government broken, the ideals no longer capable of breaking through to the consumer addled minds of its slaves?
Will the United Nations be recast by the desperate First World to contain the United States and the Muslim Crescent, somewhere down the road?
"
Jean-Marie Guehenno "End of the Nation State" has some parallel arguments.