Question 3: “Can we imagine there’s no countries, nothing to kill or die for?”
Fifty years ago, John Lennon urged us to imagine that there were no countries. The nation state is proving incapable of solving civilizational scale problems such as climate, pandemic, arms race, technological overreach. In a recent book, Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman propose a model of planetary and local governance which accepts the nation state but takes away its centrality. Can you imagine a world without or beyond the nation state?
Sir Graham Watson
Adjunct Professor of Munck School of University of Toronto, former Leaders of Alliance for Liberals and Democrats in the European Parliament
For bribe, tribe or family, for faith, belief or nation, or simply in contest over a mating partner; almost uniquely among animal species, we human beings have been ready to kill our own since our specie’s emergence. Often, all it takes is the mobilisation of human weakness in the pursuit of ‘othering’ for mass killing to occur..
The world’s most successful political peace project to date, the supra-national EU, is now better trusted by its citizens as a guarantor of peace than its component states; yet its mortar was laid around the bricks of NATO militarism and populist political movements again threaten its integrity.
As the Greek poet Cavafy notes in his eponymous poem, the barbarians - or at least the threat they are deemed to pose - may serve at times to enhance social cohesion within boundaries. A ‘brotherhood of man’ (itself now by definition exclusive) appears still beyond humankind’s sight. Is an advanced liberal education our only hope of an antidote? It may be a sine qua non but is it a guarantee? Europe’s left wing intellectuals who famously fought the fascists in Spain’s civil war claimed it was ‘not for glory or honour or medals or pay’, but ‘with eyes wide open, for we saw no other way’.
Lennon’s visions of no country, no religion, even no possessions offer a fine flight of fancy. What is sorely needed is a shared sense of community or belonging.
Michael Onyebuchi Eze
Chair of Africana Studies, at California State University, Fresno, and Philosopher of African tradition
Humanity Has Been Bordered: Ubuntu and the Future Beyond the Nation-State
The nation-state, in its Euro-modern imagination, is one of history’s most enduring fictions. It universalized a provincial experience and taught humanity to believe that borders were natural, that sovereignty was sacred, and that belonging could be contained by lines on a map. Beneath its language of citizenship and order lingers the long shadow of empire, together with the old and dangerous seduction that it is noble to kill and die for the nation — the Big Lie.
Still, the human spirit has always exceeded borders.
Rivers cross nations without passports. The atmosphere belongs to no flag. Grief travels freely across oceans. So does hope. The child fleeing war, the stranger seeking refuge, the farmer watching the sky for rain — all remind us that our deepest vulnerabilities are shared long before they become political.
Perhaps the crisis of our century is not merely that we have nations, but that we too often mistake them for the final horizon of human belonging.
Ubuntu offers another way of imagining the world:
I am because you are.
Not because you are identical to me, nor because you speak my language, worship my God, or carry my passport. Your humanity is not a threat to mine. It is one of the conditions through which my own humanity becomes possible.
The future may not require the disappearance of nations, but their humility: a recognition that no country can flourish alone on a wounded planet; that sovereignty without solidarity becomes isolation; that humanity cannot survive as a competition of frightened enclaves.
We do not need a world without difference. We need a world where difference is no longer feared, where the stranger is not first encountered as danger, and where our political imagination becomes large enough to match our shared planetary fate.
Perhaps then we may finally learn that the earth was never meant to be inherited by borders, but shared by human beings.
That is all.
Alejandra López de Alba Gomez
Director General, Mexican Council on Foreign Relations
Yes, but only as an exercise in humility. I can only venture to imagine what a world without the nation state, as we know it, might look like. The Westphalian state organized power through sovereignty, territory, borders, citizenship and a monopoly over legitimate violence. But those concepts are not natural facts. They are the vocabulary of one historical era. The question, then, is more radical than whether countries will disappear. It is what remains of political authority if we strip it of the post-medieval concepts that made the nation state intelligible. Perhaps “sovereignty” itself will lose meaning, or become too narrow to describe power. The next order may not be defined primarily by territory, but by access: access to data, energy, water, compute, mobility, security, credit, health, identity and knowledge. It may be organized through flows, platforms, standards, infrastructures and dependencies rather than borders alone.
In such a world, non-state actors are not peripheral. Corporations that control cloud systems, artificial intelligence, satellites, payment rails, biotechnology or communications infrastructure may wield forms of authority once associated with states. They may not govern by flag, but by protocol; not by conquest, but by architecture; not by law alone, but by the terms of access to the systems through which life is increasingly lived.
This does not mean that corporations are replacing states as the new sovereigns. It means something subtler, and perhaps more consequential: the structures of power have been shifting for a long time away from the prototypical Westphalian order. Authority is no longer exercised only through territory, law, diplomacy or coercion. It is increasingly embedded in systems: standards, platforms, protocols, infrastructures, supply chains, financial channels, data regimes and technological dependencies. Power may still wear the language of the state, but it also operates through the conditions under which individuals, communities and even governments gain access to the networks that make modern life possible.
The unknown is whether this transformation widens human possibility or produces new hierarchies. Will the future be organized by citizenship, identity, income, technological capacity, ecological vulnerability, level of development, or proximity to critical networks? Will asymmetry remain the grammar of power, merely translated from territory into code, infrastructure and access? Or can humanity imagine a more balanced order before the new forms of dependence become as rigid as the old borders? Or before fear, scarcity and technological acceleration harden into a new fatalism?
Political authority is becoming less concentrated in the familiar symbols of sovereignty and more dispersed across the architectures that shape human destiny. Imagining no countries, then, is not imagining no politics. It is asking whether we will act upon dispersion of power before it outruns our political imagination; whether belonging can survive without enmity; and whether authority can be reorganized around shared human destiny rather than seeking new forms of domination in the guise of survival.
Augusto Lopez-Claros
Executive Director, Global Governance Forum
Perhaps the greatest scientific insight of the late twentieth century was not technological but civilizational: the mapping of the human genome revealed with extraordinary clarity that there is only one human race. The tiny fraction of genes that explains differences in skin color or physical appearance is biologically insignificant compared to the overwhelming genetic inheritance we all share. As geneticist Craig Venter observed at the completion of the Human Genome Project, “Race is a social concept, not a scientific one.”
And yet our educational systems, political cultures, and collective imagination have not caught up with this reality. We continue to define ourselves primarily through narrower identities—national, ethnic, religious, or ideological. We remain willing to shed blood in defence of borders that are, in an important sense, artificial constructions of history. As ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the head of the Bahá’í Faith, said in a speech at Stanford University in 1912: “God created no frontiers between France and Germany.”
The tragedy is that the problems now threatening humanity are fundamentally global in nature. Climate change does not stop at borders. Pandemics do not require passports. Nuclear war, ecological collapse, financial instability, and technological disruption spare no nation.
We increasingly inhabit a single interdependent system while continuing to think politically in fragmented and tribal terms. This does not mean that nations, cultures, and local attachments must disappear. Diversity is one of humanity’s great strengths. But the nation-state can no longer be the highest horizon of our political imagination. We must gradually cultivate a broader loyalty: to humanity as a whole and to the planet we collectively inhabit. Such a transformation cannot be imposed by decree. It must begin in consciousness and education. From early childhood, human beings should learn not only the history of their nation, but also the reality of our common origins and shared destiny. These ideas must become part of our mental DNA. Only then will it become possible to imagine institutions and forms of governance that reflect the deeper truth of our interdependence.
We spend our lives defending territories that, in the end, become our tombs. But the earth itself is our common homeland. The challenge before humanity is whether our moral and political imagination can evolve quickly enough to recognize this reality before the crises we face overwhelm our capacity to cooperate.
Janos Pasztor
Former UN Assistant Secretary-General for Climate Change
The concept of the nation state is relatively new in world history – it wasn't always like that. At the same time, history cannot be undone, and we cannot go back to something that has been but is no longer.
However, I believe it is possible to envisage a world without nation states, although at this point I find it difficult to describe such a world, or envision a path to get there, given the fact the Western (originally essentially European) concept and practice of nation states has become the leading way to organize people, the economy and the planet. I can, however, envisage and certainly desire that increasingly some specific responsibilities of the nation state be shifted into global/planetary processes and institutions. We have seen some of this through international treaties, where sovereign nation states collectively agree to give up small parts of their sovereignty for the common good. This approach could be increased, and over time one can imagine the evolution of a world of parallel governance based on subsidiarity: global/planetary institutions for planetary issues and local/national institutions for the rest.
But this brings me to the second, and perhaps more important part of the question. Would there be nothing to kill or die for? Unfortunately, even within existing nation states, religious, economic and political elites have regularly found many reasons to kill and die for. There are plenty of examples of civil wars (e.g., the USA in the 19th century) or other violence within existing nation states (e.g., race-based apartheid in South Africa and the genocide of Jews by the Nazi regime in Germany in the 20th century). Luke Kemp, in his recent book Goliath's Curse, has shown that the concentration of power inherent in hierarchical societies — of which the nation-state is the modern form — drives violence both within and between them, and that the shift from egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups to sedentary, surplus-producing hierarchies substantially increased the reasons to kill and die for. Therefore, if the world could move away from nation states, one could perhaps imagine fewer reasons to kill and die for.
Fundamentally, however, if we wish to drastically reduce, or even try to eliminate the reasons to kill and die for, we need to look much more at how societies and the economy are organized; what fundamental values are taught and experienced; and explore new ways of defining and then practicing human progress in a multi-species world.
Cristina Manzano
Senior Columnist and Director of External Relations at the Ibero-American Secretariat
Two hundred years ago, Simón Bolívar invited the leaders of the newly established Hispanic American republics to Panama to convene the Amphictyonic Congress, named after the ancient Greek term referring to a league of neighboring cities. The aim of the meeting was to form a confederation of nations. They had all the right ingredients: shared values, common principles, a common language, and the aspiration to bring prosperity to their peoples, who only a few years earlier had belonged to the same empire. And yet, the project did not succeed.
When Latin American countries gathered once again in Panama in June, they renewed calls for regional integration, but without a strong commitment to advancing it. The nation-state will continue to prevail over economic, political, or even emotional logic.
No, I do not foresee countries disappearing in the near future, nor being replaced by a new form of global governance, despite the evident need for it. In an increasingly uncertain world, people have turned to identity to feel part of something larger, to find meaning amid chaos. Yet I firmly believe in the importance of continuing to foster connections—bringing people together, creating opportunities for collaboration across borders, whether national, subnational, local, or even imagined. These efforts can help restore a sense of our shared humanity and strengthen our collective responsibility to care for our planet.