The ‘United Nations’ was always a project with no understanding of history. It assumes nations are like the…
The ‘United Nations’ was always a project with no understanding of history. It assumes nations are like the atoms of collective life, the raw material. The word ‘inter-national’ shows it, the idea we create a global community by getting nations to come together and agree. /1 https://t.co/jFuCMCvatN
Historically this is just wrong. Nations were established by a *pre-existing* unity. They were concessions to warring parties within this pre-existing unity. A sop to their demands. Like the granting of land to nobles by Kings before this, to maintain the unity of kingdoms. /2
It’s the same process, one step further along. The Holy Roman Empire, which was that pre-existing ‘international’ (there were no nations really, just various kingdoms) unity, decided to negotiate ceasefires between the warring Protestant and Catholic factions of the empire. /3
The Peace of Westphalia, 1648. That was (many believe) the origin of modern nations. A bunch of concessions to warring parties, to allow them to define their own ‘sovereignty’ to a great degree. It was ‘God’ that was the pre-existing unity, through the Catholic Church. /4
You can’t talk about this today without people immediately evoking all the post-Enlightenment anti-religion war cries. But this isn’t about taking any sides here, saying anything about the Christian God, or the good and bad of the Holy Roman Empire. /5
Just to point out that historically humans of European descent mobilised around a Christian God, as a *universal* measure for social life, through the Church. Well before there were what we call nations. And these nations were created by this same Christian infrastructure. /6
Like Humpty Dumpty, it’s impossible to create that global unity by trying to get nations to agree. The process is backwards, they will always defer to their own beloved sovereignty over all else. Humans will not agree until they again cede that sovereignty to a ‘higher power’. /7
It seems unlikely that will be them re-adopting older notions of divinity, as many modern conservatives hope. It could happen, and most nations seem to be heading towards theocracies more than democracies now. But history rarely actually repeats in that way. My guess? /8
The effects of climate change on the possibility of life itself will create that higher power, which will be those fundamental physical realities of our physical survival on this planet. We won’t so much worship those realities as learn to defer to and negotiate with them. /9
Humans will be forced to coordinate their desires and sovereignties, to survive. As Michel Serres used to say, morality will become objective, in a new way. You follow the requirements of survival of life, or you die. It won’t be a matter of belief or preference. /end