As Nation States Fall, and City States Rise , What of the Micro - Nation?

Today, just 40 city-regions account for two thirds of the world economy and 90 percent of its innovation. The mighty Hanseatic League, a constellation of well-armed North and Baltic Sea trading hubs in the late Middle Ages, will be reborn as cities such as Hamburg and Dubai form commercial alliances and operate “free zones” across Africa like the ones Dubai Ports World is building. Add in sovereign wealth funds and private military contractors, and you have the agile geopolitical units of a neomedieval world. _ForeignPolicy_via_LATNB

The new blog: "Let a Thousand Nations Bloom" is dedicated to the idea of the micronation. One form of micronation that is already familiar to Al Fin readers is the seastead. But micronations could occur in other forms such as sea-floor habitats, polar colonies, artificial islands, orbiting colonies, perpetually floating or flying atmospheric colonies, and so on. Most of the desirable real estate on Earth may be taken, but imaginative and creative persons can often take the undesirable and make it desirable. But can they protect it once it is made valuable?

The current issue of the WFS Futurist magazine looks at the issue here and here (via LATNB). A more comprehensive look at the issue can be found at seasteading.org.

For several convergent reasons, many nation states are in danger of collapsing. Nation states within tribal lands were often poorly conceived at the start, and increasingly expensive to maintain. Without massive aid from the developed world, many third world quasi-tribal nations would have long since collapsed.

Other nations in the developed world are in danger of collapse from demographic implosion: the failure to breed. Nations such as Germany and Japan that were under such a compulsion in the 1930s to expand at the cost of world war, are now finding themselves shrinking every year. The same story can be told in Spain, Italy, Greece, Eastern Europe -- and especially Russia. Demographic collapse, at varying rates. The transformation from one type of world to the other is apt to be tumultuous.

The election of Barak Obama in the US may well prove to be the catalyst in this transformation. As the economic, military, and moral standing of the US steadily falls, the subsequent vacuum will be felt worldwide. The threads of the world fabric may unravel far more quickly than anyone believed possible, without the strong moderating presence of a world hegemon with America's pedigree. A world that has China as its hegemon would be a far different world than the one we know.

Power and importance will be relegated to the region and city-state, over the nation state, as central governments face the limits of government action head on.

It is important not to dwell on the incompetence of the Obamas and the Putins overly much, although they seem to have the talent for doing almost everything exactly wrong. The key focus should be on mitigation, and on laying the foundations for better prospects in the intermediate term. That can only be done with a realistic assessment of the current situation. Such an assessment must swing wide of most conventional wisdom, and consider the unthinkable.