Note
In this extract the authors present their ideas highly in tune with the paradigm of panarchy. While the political world based on state territorial sovereignty is going back to increasingly nationalistic and militaristic attitudes and practices, it is no wonder that many scholars, on the basis of current technological tools and new cultural visions prospect the very real possibility of going beyond the state system that some historians believe to have emerged after the peace of Westphalia (1648). And the number of those scholars is likely to increase while their ideas might become, in the years to come, mainstream aspirations and outlooks.
Source: Jarrad Hope & Peter Ludlow, Farewell to Westfalia, 2024
At many points in this book, we have discussed territorial sovereignty, which on the one hand, could indicate a sovereign that has control over everything within a physical territory but, on the other hand, could indicate very limited sovereignty. We also saw that there may be many communities within a physical territory, each with different kinds of sovereign control. All of this raises the question of what happens when we get to the nitty gritty of people on the ground within the same physical territory.
This brings us back to cases like the Rwandan genocide and, as we write this, the conflict between Israel and Hamas within Gaza. What happens when people of conflicting values occupy the same physical footprint? Is conflict not inevitable? And are nation states not required to ameliorate these conflicts?
However, these questions have things backwards. Perhaps it is our fetish for states and state control and state territorial sovereignty that gives rise to these conflicts and to the human rights abuses that extrude from them. That certainly appears to be the case in the Rwandan genocide, which stemmed from having diverse tribes kettled together within terrestrial borders established by nation states attempting to install the Westphalian order where it had no business being installed.
But how can this possibly work? If people belong to different networks or blockchain communities, they still must come into contact with each other in places like Palestine, so do we not have the same old problems? But upon closer inspection, we really do not have the same problems.
It is true enough that people of diverse values and religious and economic principles will, at times, inhabit the same physical space, but this only becomes a problem if we imagine that control of physical territory gives one warrant to control the values and principles of the individuals who live and do business there.
To illustrate this idea, consider the case of an international hotel in a large city. As you pass through the lobby, you will doubtless see many people with diverse values, religious beliefs, economic ideologies and so on. However, it is exceedingly rare to see conflicts between such groups break out in these spaces because it is not the business of international hotels to impose values or religious beliefs or economic ideologies on their guests. Guests are welcome to stay regardless of their beliefs as long as they pay their bills and do not create trouble for other guests. Each guest must still abide by the principles of their governments and pay their taxes and so forth, but that is no business of the hotel.
Hotels are not the only places where the terrestrial authority is indifferent to the values and beliefs of the people passing through. Airports, for example, ordinarily do not care about your values or the income tax wherever you come from. They just expect you to pass through without causing trouble for others.
Such authorities, whether they be hotels or airports, are not ordinarily considered to be tyrants for the simple reason that their portfolio of demands is very limited: whatever your values, take care of your business and do not create problems for us or other guests.
But now, we want to ask why it is unthinkable to imagine that terrestrial authorities – that is, authorities in charge of maintaining order within a physical location – could have limited portfolios. What if they were not in charge of enforcing religious beliefs or moral codes or raising taxes to provide welfare for others or raising armies? What if they were just in the business of maintaining only enough physical order so that overlapping online community members within the same space can conduct their business?
This vision requires that sovereignty over physical territory – the role of keeping order there – is not the province of any single state but is rather state-indifferent. The parties in charge of maintaining order within a physical space could be recorded on a decentralised global registry, with no one power having authority over the registry. Once there is a decentralised record of territorial control, we can entertain new ideas about the nature of the control itself. A global community might well accept the presence of local policing for reasons of safety but reject attempts to control cultural and ethical values within the territory.
And here, finally, we get to the deep point. Blockchain technologies point the way to strategies for completely decentralised-yet-cooperative ways of organising ourselves, and this can apply to more than just economic cooperation through protocols like Bitcoin and Ethereum. It can apply to the very idea of property control. This leads us to the topic of decentralised property registries.