Bitarch, Ancap-tyan
The title looks very strange, doesn’t it? One would think that the idea of national sovereignty originates from the Peace of Westphalia, when after the Thirty Years’ War it was decided that each ruler is sovereign in their own territory and manages their own internal affairs, and neighbors should have nothing to do with it. It was the Peace of Westphalia that gave birth to the modern type of state with its territorial monopoly.
However, by the nineteenth century, the idea of the ruler’s sovereignty evolved into the idea of the nation’s sovereignty, as the power of rulers was no longer associated with divine right and was forced to justify itself through the will of the people. For the sake of the nation’s greatness, it became convenient to wage wars far bloodier than some unfortunate Thirty Years’ War. God fought on the side of the larger battalions; nation-states diligently expanded, acquired colonies—and the world, in general, was moving toward being divided among a handful of countries, which were then to clash in a final and decisive battle, where a global hegemon would be determined and a single world power would be formed. At least, if the free market promoted the formation of monopolies, that is exactly what would have happened. But instead, the First World War led to the collapse of four continental empires, and after the Second World War, colonies began to break away from all the other great powers.
The UN has already officially enshrined the equal status of all countries, and the principle of territorial sovereignty was officially supplemented by the directly contradictory principle of a nation’s right to self-determination. In essence, this cheapened the Westphalian principles, and since then, the number of countries in the world has continued to increase. Also, the good old traditions of invasions for the sake of establishing progressive orders have returned to the world stage, replacing the religious wars that are not particularly relevant today.
There are still far more ethnicities in the world than states, so countries may continue to break apart along ethnic lines for quite some time. At the same time, the incentive for people to separate is not ethnic differences as such, but primarily differences in cultures. But there are even more cultural communities than ethnicities; they arise and mutate constantly.
The ease of movement of people, goods, money, and information leads to the fact that any territorial borders are becoming increasingly permeable, and their very existence is becoming less meaningful.
It is not yet clear how soon and as a result of what chain of events the notion of the right of cultures to self-determination will become mainstream, as previously happened with nations. Purely logically, there are no grounds by which a certain group of people, chosen by a more or less arbitrary criterion, has a right to sovereignty, while another group of people or even a single person does not.
This question is discussed in quite some detail in Rothbard’s “The Ethics of Liberty”; I will allow myself a small quote from it:
A more serious question can be asked: does the adherent of the laissez-faire doctrine recognize the right of a region of a country to secede from the country? Is it lawful for West Ruritania to secede from Ruritania? If not, why? And if so, then what could be the logical conclusion of the division of countries? Could not a small district secede, then a city and part of that city, then a residential block, and finally, a specific individual? Recognizing any right to secede in the absence of its logical conclusion, limiting the right to individual secession—which logically limits anarchism—will lead to individuals being able to secede from the state and hire their own protective agencies, and the state will collapse.
Thus, a clear trajectory for the development of social relations emerges: from the sovereignty of personalities over subjects, through the sovereignty of increasingly smaller groups, to the sovereignty of each individual personality, with the complete eradication of the very category of subjecthood. And if once only a few hundred people in the entire world could claim that “I am the state,” then in the foreseeable future, every person will be able to say this of themselves with full right.
Man to man is a nation.
