Undermining the nation state

The Westphalian system of autonomous nation-states guides current governance and international relations. It is named after the Peace of Westphalia, which was signed in 1648 and ended the Thirty Years’ War in Europe. This system enshrines the principle that each state has exclusive sovereignty over its territory and domestic affairs, excluding all external powers, and is a fundamental tenant of international law.

Key Principles of the Westphalian system:

1. Sovereignty: Each state has sovereignty over its territory and domestic affairs, meaning no external power can intervene in its internal affairs.
2. Territorial Integrity: States respect each other’s territorial integrity, meaning that no state can annex or occupy another state’s territory without its consent.
3. Non-Interference: States do not intervene in each other’s internal affairs, allowing each state to manage its own domestic issues independently.
4. Equality: All states, regardless of size, power, or wealth, are equal and have the same rights and responsibilities.The Westphalian system has guided the structure of international relations and international law for centuries, as it established the concept of state sovereignty and the principle of non-interference in domestic affairs. This system has been the foundation of the modern international system of sovereign states and has shaped how states interact.

A wide variety of military and diplomatic “workarounds” have been devised to enable nation-states or groups of aligned nation-states with more size, power, and wealth to exert influence or control over those with less. Various terms of political science have been devised to describe these workarounds. Such terms include colonialism, imperialism, alliances, soft power, and hegemony, among many others. 

Since WW II and accelerating during the latter decades of the 20th century, a trend toward the emergence of financially powerful transnational organizations that are functionally independent of nation-states developed. Examples include quasi-governmental global organizations such as the United Nations (UN), World Health Organization (WHO), International Monetary Foundation (IMF), Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and World Trade Organization (WTO); non-governmental “philanthropic” organizations such as the Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust; “national” banks tied together into a functional cooperative by the Bank of International Settlements; massive global “investment funds” which dwarf the financial resources of most nation-states including Blackrock, State Street, Vanguard, Bank of America and their kin; and a variety of globalist-oriented cabals and corporatist trade organizations such as the Club of Rome, the Atlantic Council, the Bilderberg Meeting group, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies and of course the World Economic Forum.

Fueled by a variety of global 21st-century financial, political, geophysical, and medical “crises,” these transnational think tanks and organizations, together with a handful of major globalized corporations that sponsor much of their activities, have formed alliances that exceed the power, influence and financial resources of most if not all nation-states. Any economics or political science student can attest that such a power imbalance cannot be sustained. We argue that the wide range of current efforts to advance and structure global governance organizations is the logical consequence of these imbalances. Since the most economically dominant of these various transnational entities are intrinsically corporatist, it is self-evident that the emerging global governance organizations are corporatist.