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worst case scenario
Computer(mathematically) model all the countries of the Earth suddenly losing sovereign boundaries. | |
Just wondering how chaotic the chaos would be.
Like with most things, I am guessing a bit energetic then a gravitation to a single steady state.
People being people, I don't think a local area would lose it's local societal difference, if the local people stay in support.
Of course there is
always a business opportunity in a fire sale.
Wondering if the mathematical modelling up to the complexity. Maybe some human minds, a think tank?
In computing terms, there would be an array for each earth citizen with a set of variables, like dungeons and dragons( what these variables are I'll leave to more learned folk) + human nature component. The simulation would have the variable set run for current Nations as a current state. Each country would affect citizens and they would be free to choose another country or stay put as the modelling dictated. Or we could ask those in the know which countries would have the runs, which would be stable and which would sink( if there were enough travelers which I doubt)
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Say such a function exists, I wonder what parameters would be fed into that function to determine the location
of a
boundary? |
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Natural geography would of course play a role, so many of the existing borders along coastlines, rivers and
mountain ranges
would likely look the same. |
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The rest would evolve over time depending on the relative comfort of the people, and the availability of
military/arms and
personnel. If you fight wars with clubs, spears and arrows, the boundaries between spheres of control are going
to look
different to boundaries established using a different war-time set of technologies like petrol-powered planes,
cars and other
industrially-produced armaments. People who's bellies are full are less likely to risk their lives to control the
means of food
production, while those who are lucky enough to find themselves sitting on rich and fertile soil might be faster
to join
together and pool their resources into protecting their assets from outsiders. |
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This idea runs immediately into the general problem of
counterfactual history. Given that everything is in some sense
connected to everything else, you have to find a way to change
one variable without (a) imposing your own preconceptions of
why things are the way they are (including the actual value of
that variable) or (b) unraveling the whole sweater. |
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Yes, there is a somewhat lack of mechanism how this //losing sovereign boundaries// might be implemented. Presumably there would be some kind of conference a bit like the climate thing, where heads of state would agree a legal text to proclaim and sign as an international treaty, except they would also probably all have to go home and also enact it in domestic legislation. Some countries probably include definition of their boundaries and territories in their constitutions, and would probably require a referendum to approve such a constitutional change. The legal text would have to be carefully worded to avoid ambiguities and loopholes, as there would for sure be legal challenges, both by people seeking to profit from those ambiguities and also from citizen campaign groups who are more and more now turning to legal action as a way to influence government and policy. |
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Not to mention that there are more boundaries than sovereign boundaries; there are also administrative and customary boundaries. A lot of the legal arguments may centre around whether a certain boundary is primarily sovereign or administrative, or to what extent certain features of that particular boundary have sovereign and/or administrative aspects. |
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I would imagine these legal cases would take years and so the process of //losing sovereign boundaries// would be far from sudden - in fact it may never happen. |
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Baked, already 'modelled' in the real world, the end result
was separate countries with national borders. |
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... except it's a little premature to call it an end result - it's more
of a provisional result. On a history- of- civilisation timescale,
the Treaty of Westphalia was quite recent and very parochial,
and the number of countries has fluctuated quite a lot just in my
lifetime. |
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Not really premature [pert] the actual position of the
borders
are relatively fluid over time but the fact of borders is not,
humans organise themselves & that naturally results in
'what's
ours' & 'what's yours', just because they change location a
little
now & again says nothing about the fact of borders not
being
an immutable feature of human society, as it most likely
is. |
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In other words, just because something moved doesn't
mean it doesn't still exist, because it does, it couldn't move
if it didn't, your logic here (they changed a lot in my
lifetime so that means they don't need to exist) is flawed
because it means (or at least is no evidence for) no such
thing. |
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"Borders", yes. "National", not so much. And actually, even
borders are somewhat contingent on population density and
land use intensity. When Greece was city- states, you wouldn't
see a sign, or cross a line, saying "You are now leaving Boeotia",
"You are now entering Attica". |
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Where a particular agricultural region was subdivided there were
boundary stones, IIRC, but these would separate the holdings of
individuals, not of "nations". |
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Nation is just the word we use to name the groupings that
are the proximate cause of the borders we currently have,
you can change the name (if you really must) but it will still
be
the same thing by any other name, again I have to tell you
(I think) your logic is failing
you [pert] :) |
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On the contrary, logic always has problems where set-
cardinalities are poorly defined, as they are in this case. |
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We could postulate a Russell Empire, that governed all the
states that didn't govern themselves. |
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Be sure and include a model of the countries whose borders
will no longer exist as they are entirely under water. |
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Russell Empire seems like it would be a more muscular UN. |
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//Emperor Brand?// more Bertrand in this case Skewed. |
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Nationality is largely a recent concept - few nations have
a heritage much older than 2 or 3 hundred years or so. |
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Prior to that, there might have been Duchies, or
Principalities and such. And people pretty much supported
their local Feudal Lord/Church with tithes and tributes
for fear of them sending the boys round. |
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Even post nationalism, with the feudal tax collecting
systems more administratively brutal (rather than being
explicitly so) there certainly weren't any border controls
or policing. If the memoirs of Stefan Zweig are to be
believed, most of that is still only 100 years or so old and
a result of more recent totalitarian governments rising in
Europe in the early to mid twentieth century after the
various financial crashes and crises of the period. In terms
of the status quo, in evolutionary or civilisation terms, it's
fairly new. |
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Forts, land ownership and geographic power would of course have existed, but if
someone turned up and started tilling some unclaimed fallow field, they'd probably be left alone,
until it was time to pay up to whichever local Baron was most enthusiastic in
offering their "protection". |
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//Nationality is largely a recent concept// |
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Nice little buzz phrase that, commonly used, & completely
untrue in the impression it strives to give, it's a recent name
for an old thing but the thing has always been there, there
have always been groupings of people, sure they're larger now
than they used to be but the essential thing is still the same. |
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//the essential thing is still the same// |
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There have always been identity groups, but they have often
been subsets or supersets of other identity groups, and each
such group may or may not overlap with other groups. |
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To understand this, you need to spend some time reading
primary sources written before the nineteenth century. |
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For example, in Latin, the word "gens", which is sometimes
translated as "nation", can also refer to a family, or a tribe, or
any size grouping in between, and it carries with it no
assumption of sovereignty, or military autonomy, or diplomatic
status, or defined frontiers. |
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Or suppose you lived on Samos in, say, 460 BC. Your cultural
identity was Greek, which, for example, entitled you to take part
in the Olympic Games, but your citizenship was Samian (so you
only had a vote on Samos), your dialect was Ionian, which you
shared with many other islands, and you depended for military
security on the Delian League. You could travel to any of these
places without a passport because ... what's a passport? So,
was your nationality Greek, or Ionian, or Samian, or Delian?
Answer: none of the above, because the concept was not
applicable. |
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Or consider Von Eschenbach's Europe, c. 1200 AD; the knights
in his story come from all over the place - Portugal, Wales,
Thuringia, etc. - and they do a lot of traveling. But they never
cross a border. That's because there are no borders. They
communicate with other knights in bad French (the "lingua
franca") and the main law governing their lives is the Law of
Chivalry, which was a real thing, and was actually enforced by
courts. |
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A hundred years later, young William of Ockham was talent-
spotted in Oxford and offered a teaching job at the Sorbonne
before he'd even graduated. There was no paperwork required
to work in France because, for most purposes, there was no
France. All the characters in that story communicated in bad
Latin, and their lives were governed mostly by Canon Law, which
was largely indifferent to which side of the Channel you were on. |
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Are you getting this yet? |
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//the word "gens", which is sometimes translated as
"nation", can also refer to a family, or a tribe, or any size
grouping in between// |
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That's right, & that's probably because they understood that
besides scale all those things are essentially the same thing
(in simplest terms, groups of people) with a few more or
less bells & whistles. Your other examples are equally silly
in the context of this
discussion, members shared by multiple groups &
individuals changing groups has always happened & still
happens now so no change there then, & no
change means no evidence for something new. just because
borders weren't policed as tightly they are now doesn't
mean they didn't exist, they did, kings fought
wars over
them even in the 1200s & before, you appear to be arguing
from the conviction of doctrine you've been fed or read
rather than a position of intellect. |
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And I can't help but feel you've confused the not
infrequently used statement that patriotism among
common people is a relatively new phenomena as being a
statement that countries are somehow a new concept
which is not what that one's about at all, that you've read a
few headlines & not really understood them
& this is where your argument is coming from. |
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Hell, even chimp troops, wolf packs, lion prides (to name
just three) & other animals have territories with borders so
the idea that these things haven't always been with us since
before
we were even human is simply silly, as is the notion a
nation is somehow not
the same thing simply extended in scale in an even more
social species
that organises in much larger groups. |
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//Are you getting this yet?// |
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I got it a long time ago, seems to me you haven't, but I
have
every confidence in you, that you'll continue
to not get it, don't let me down :) |
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//you've read a few headlines// |
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No, I've read primary source documents from previous
centuries. I suggest you do the same. |
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[Claps hands together joyfully] |
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Well done! with the not letting me down ;D |
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OK, we might need some definitional clarification here. |
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Groups are inevitable. I think we can agree on that. |
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If you then define "country" or "nation state" as nothing but a
synonym of "group", it follows that countries are inevitable. |
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However, that's not what is usually understood by "country". |
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A functioning "country" is usually taken to supply all, or at least
most, of the following unities:
1. Strategic unity (one army, not at war with itself)
2. Diplomatic unity (one voice in negotiation with other
countries)
3. Cultural unity (one identity, with which group members can
identify, notwithstanding that sub- identities can co- exist within
it)
4. Legal unity (one ultimate jurisdiction, within which internal
disputes can be resolved)
5. Linguistic unity (which is an important enabler of the other
functions)
6. Monetary unity (a single recognised currency in which taxes
can be raised to fund #1, and compensations can be awarded as
part of #4) |
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If a group does only a small fraction of this, do you still call it a
country? |
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But we forgot to include the truly worst case of
all: we’re
forced to watch the Star Wars Holiday Special. |
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[pertinax];
//3. Cultural unity...//
I would question this one, especially in these days of
international migration (er, Covid notwithstanding...), with
most places being "melting pots" of multiple cultures. |
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It's true, there has been a trend away from monocultural states.
However, it could be argued that this is part of a trend away
from nation states. Opinions vary about whether this is a good
thing. |
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//when you would say definitional clarification instead of just
"definitions."// |
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IIRC, "definition" is originally a metaphor from the placing of
agricultural boundary stones, while "clarification" is the act of
making something better known. |
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So, if we paddle the semantic canoe upstream through the
mists of time, we find a place where I put a large stone to mean
"This is where my field starts", and that's definition, but there's no
clarification until I tell someone I've done so. |
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We might stop here for a picnic, if it weren't so misty. |
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My question was, what would the world be like if a citizen of the earth can vote with their feet, with the globes current level of education and moral codes. Most people would want to stay with what they know and if a government was losing it's people, I am sure it would adapt. |
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Everyone still governs, just can't block leaving and entry unless local valid law broken. Isn't border work laws just national protectionism, anti global capitalism. |
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As long as the travelers live by the rules of the region/entity they are got to, why should there be a barrier. There will always be the self centred, that deviation in the distribution, anywhere. |
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Stimulus for idea: Seeing a country block entry of a minuscule group of people because the problem would be theirs rather than it being a global shared problem. |
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I thought this idea was going to be about some people's
habit of eating pungent German sausage and then you
having to smell their rank, sausagey breath as they
embrace you. Oh no, hang on - that's the Wurst Kiss
Scenario |
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The kiss wouldn't be mutual then would it. Else it's just a glimmer of life experience. |
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There was an opera about an evil delicatessen. My favourite bit was the wurst käse sin aria. |
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