Nation-States: To Transcend or Evolve?

By Jon Eden Khan

“In our finest hours, though, the soul of the country manifests itself in an inclination to open our arms rather than to clench our fists…”

― Jon Meacham

A range of visionary proposals now circulate that seek alternatives to the nation-state as the primary unit of governance.

From bioregions to city states to transnational unions such as the EU, to digitally connected network states, these approaches see the current nation-state model as an outcome of capitalistically driven, nature-disconnected humans, with nation-states now being past their use by date and no longer fit for purpose.

These perspectives are grounded in legitimate concerns.

Our world is beset with seemingly intractable problems on local, national, and international scales — from the ecological crisis to the pandemic to trade wars and international conflicts — that our nation-states, at least until now, seem unable to provide lasting solutions for.

These alternative approaches suggest that many of the major issues of our time could be more easily addressed by changing the model to, for example, one of the above-named alternatives.

As much as each of these alternative approaches, and many others, have important strengths, they also have their own significant issues.

Bioregions reconnect humans with respect for the wider ecosystems we are a part of, but often under-account for the deep historical, cultural, and identity bonds that have formed within existing nations, and the social consequences of abruptly dissolving them.

The city states solution is to simply individuate from the struggles of the nation they exist within but offers limited guidance for addressing the systemic international challenges that arise from humanity’s deep global interdependence.

Transnational unions such as the EU have the potential to unite people on wider and wider scales, but unless that process occurs on the foundation of each community and nation’s coherent sense of self, the risk is a form of institutional fusion that can erode cultural distinctiveness and weaken collective meaning if not grounded in a strong sense of national and local identity.

Network states provide the opportunity for values-aligned individuals to escape the conventional world to congregate across geographical distances and form new groups and cultures. However, network states currently offer limited capacity to address large-scale challenges such as ecological protection, security, and infrastructure — and remain structurally dependent on the legal recognition of existing nation-states.

Singularity takes the position that rather than attempting to transcend nation-states, a more effective and realistic approach is to evolve them.

More specifically, this means supporting the emergence of each nation’s deeper purpose, values, and contribution beyond reactive self-interest.

Singularity understands each nation as having a unique expression of the one Earth to share with the wider family of nations. We agree with such great leaders and thinkers as Plato, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo, Rudolf Steiner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Vaclav Havel that at the root, every nation has a unique soul expression that wants to be expressed in service.

And we’d add as a counterpoint to this, that it’s valuable to consider the ways every nation also has its own ego structure, complete with patterns, habits, shadows, and traumas. Approaching international relations through this developmental lens offers powerful insights.

From this perspective, many of the major challenges facing the world can be understood as the unresolved historical patterns, traumas, and shadow dynamics of nations playing out on the global stage, and that switching to an alternative model while not addressing the need for their collective evolution is not going to resolve the issues at hand.

Rather, we believe that what is needed is for wider and wider groups of people in our various nations to start to attune to what unique service and contribution wants to come through their nation as an expression of the one humanity and the one Earth.

Through this process, nations can gradually evolve their participation on the global stage — shifting from reactive self-interest toward service and contribution as expressions of the whole.

This is the basis upon which our different nations can take their place as units of global governance sourced in the Earth as a single living system.

This is why as Singularity builds its global movement, we’re actively supporting the formation of national cells: groups of people dedicated to attuning to, articulating, and embodying the unique contribution their nation can offer in service to the Earth and humanity as a whole.

If you are interested to learn more and to form or connect to one of these national cells, see the Engage page on our website.