Quotes About Nation-states

The new digital money of the Information Age will return control over the medium of exchange to the owners of wealth, who wish to preserve it, rather than to nation-states that wish to spirit it away.

For this reason, it is to be expected that one or more nation-states will undertake covert action to subvert the appeal of transience. Travel could be effectively discouraged by biological warfare, such as the outbreak of a deadly epidemic. This could not only discourage the desire to travel, it could also give jurisdictions throughout the globe an excuse to seal their borders and limit immigration.

Advanced nation-states are now using cyber power for unrestricted economic warfare and national security-motivated espionage, as well as a force multiplier and signaling instrument in conflicts.

American elections should be for Americans. And the idea that we would have foreign nation-states coming into the American electoral process, or the information surrounding an election, is really, really bad.

If I were to share with you the number of attacks that come into the Duke network every day, you would be astounded. And it's not from people working out of their garage; it's from nation-states that are trying to penetrate systems.

Minorities within nation-states frayed by global capitalism are naturally more resentful of hollowed-out but still heavily centralised systems of political and economic domination.

in practical terms there are surprisingly few differences between Shiite Iran, Sunni Saudi Arabia, and Jewish Israel. All are bureaucratic nation-states, all pursue more or less capitalist policies, all vaccinate kids against polio, and all rely on chemists and physicists to make bombs. There is no such thing as Shiite bureaucracy, Sunni capitalism, or Jewish physics. So how do we make people feel loyal to one human tribe and hostile to another?

We live in an industrial world with a globalized capitalist economy organized politically around nation-states . Finding a willing audience for even a mild critique of any of these foundational systems is not easy; suggesting that all three systems should be rethought in fundamental ways seems crazy.

Human survival requires that nation-states give up the institution of war and replace it with a cooperatively-functioning global peace system - for the well-being and security of all people everywhere.

Before 1492, Europe suffered from scarcity and famine. After 1492, the vast wealth carried to Europe from the Americas and extracted by the forced labor of Africans granted governments new powers that contributed to the rise of nation-states.

Countries that managed to rebuild commanding state structures after popular nationalist revolutions - such as China, Vietnam, and Iran - look stable and cohesive when compared with a traditional monarchy such as Thailand or wholly artificial nation-states like Iraq and Syria.

The United States is not unique among nations in forging an origin myth, but most of its citizens believe it to be exceptional among nation-states, and this exceptionalist ideology has been used to justify appropriation of the continent and then domination of the rest of the world.

The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism.

The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism.

Because there are little to no consequences for conducting cyberattacks, criminals and nation-states are becoming bolder in their threats and behavior. Russia, China, North Korea and Iran are increasingly hacking into U.S. companies and government networks for espionage purposes or financial gain.

Nation-states can think in terms of megadeaths, but it's all the average person can do to harbor fantasies of murdering his own boss.

If the real human environment in developed countries today is third-growth monocultured "forests," tar-sand petroleum, cow-burnt grasslands, and smog-like clouds of microplastics floating in oceans where fish once thrived, then human cultures need to distinguish between sentimentality about loss and the imperative to survive. They need to establish a more relevant politics than the competitive politics of nation-states. And to found economies built not on profit but on conservation.

Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states. The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.

It's unwise to say nation-states wanting to retain their national identity in Europe should be dissuaded or stopped from doing so. Nationalism can go wrong, sure - but everything can go wrong.

if the mixing of peoples was the order of empires and the 'unmixing of peoples' the order of nation-states, what's on the horizon?

The value today of philosophy to physics seems to me to be something like the value of early nation-states to their peoples. It is only a small exaggeration to say that, until the introduction of the post office, the chief service of nation-states was to protect their peoples from other nation-states. The insights of philosophers have occasionally benefited physicists, but generally in a negative fashion—by protecting them from the preconceptions of other philosophers.

The goal of Seasteading is for wealthy people to eventually secede into fully independent nation-states, floating in the open ocean—protected from sea-level rise and fully self-sufficient.

The Turkish, Arab and Chinese nationalists who built new nation-states out of the ruins of old empires scorned their old, decrepit rulers as much as they did the foreign imperialists who imposed free trade through gunboats.

In a pre-Internet world, sovereignty over our physical freedoms, or lack thereof, was controlled almost entirely by nation-states.