The world today is falling apart in the face of escalating crises including climate change, inequality, refugee migration, and the resurgent threat of nuclear war. We are also failing to maximize economic opportunity for everyone.
Our collective failure to address each of these global challenges results directly from the artificial and archaic division of humanity into separate countries.
The defining attribute of a country is accountability to nobody beyond its own borders. Today, it is painfully clear that our continued reliance on the broken model of separate countries threatens human survival.
Separate countries have been the basic building blocks of international order since the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. At that time, they were the best we could do to limit warfare and establish peace and stability. But the world has changed a great deal since then, through advances such as Newton’s articulation of the laws of physics, domesticated electricity, motorized transportation, telecommunications & the internet, and now blockchains. It’s now both absurd and tragic that our governance systems remain stuck 350 years in the past, as we face urgent needs for global cooperation.
Here’s a brief review of how separate countries are structurally central to our failure to resolve the five major issues cited above.
1. Climate change: Every day brings fresh news of this rapidly intensifying threat to human survival: hurricanes, wildfires, ice caps and permafrost melting, coral reefs dying, tropical diseases spreading, droughts impacting food supplies, thereby driving waves of refugees and wars. Obviously, climate change is a global problem: carbon emissions do not respect borders. So we can only solve it together, as a global community. If any major country or bloc of countries opts out, the whole world is cooked.
2. Economic inequality: In addition to gross international disparities in wealth, domestic economic inequality is shredding the social fabric within countries everywhere, leading to the election of despotic strongmen such as Trump, fomenting mistrust of global cooperation by elites, and driving the dissolution of our our most promising international institutions in cases such as “Brexit”. Economic inequality, too, is an inescapably global problem, though less obviously so than climate change:
As leaders including German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, former Pope Benedict, and Thomas Piketty have pointed out, the only way truly to address inequality is via a global tax system. Otherwise, ultra-wealthy individuals will continue to hide money in Panama, the Cayman Islands, etc., while the most prosperous corporations locate fictitious “headquarters” in low-tax countries such as Ireland, to shirk their fair share of redistributive taxation.
3. Refugee migration: Huge waves of refugees are being driven from their homes by economic and political desperation, resulting both from droughts and lack of food, i.e. climate change, and from inequality under corrupt national governments. They’re destabilizing other countries, leading to disintegrating pressures on the EU, and contributing to the rise of reactionary, right-wing politicians everywhere.
Refugee migration highlights the need for a global system that includes and protects everyone. Many political refugees could stay home if human rights were truly guaranteed globally. Economic migration would just be called “relocating” if borders were open and people could move freely, as we all may do within our home countries today.
4. Nuclear war is suddenly a real risk again, as North Korea flaunts its developing missile and nuclear capabilities, while the US president threatens North Korea with annihilation. Nuclear-armed China implicitly stands behind North Korea, while also making plays for regional military dominance and global economic primacy, which the US frames as a threat. And longstanding tensions between the US and Russia, between India and Pakistan, and in the Middle East simmer on as ever. Here again, the link to separate countries is obvious. Our present structure threatens everyone’s survival.
5. Economic opportunity: We are also sacrificing a major economic upside for the sake of separate countries, equal to the entire world’s current output. Billions of smart, capable people are stuck in countries where they can not make full use of their intelligence and talents. For example, think of a would-be physicist in Bangladesh. Economists affiliated with the Cato Institute have calculated that if we open all the world’s borders and let people move freely to wherever they can earn the most, the resulting economic growth would double the world’s GDP. That’s tens of trillions of dollars in foregone prosperity, which would make a vast difference toward eliminating poverty.
These are just five of the biggest ways separate countries are failing us. There are many more: human trafficking (victims lose their rights when whisked across borders, contributing to their captivity); disease response (poor international coordination has been blamed for 10,000 Ebola deaths); the list goes on.