Nation-States: To Transcend or Evolve?

“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

There are several visionary ideas circulating today that present alternatives to the nation-state model.

From bioregions to city states to transnational unions such as to the EU to digitally connected network state, these models 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.

And they’ve got good reason to believe this.

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 don’t consider the vast history of particular groups and cultures being united across them and the impact switching to bioregions would have on those communities.

The city states’ solution is to simply individuate from the struggles of the nation they exist within but remains agnostic on how to navigate the same international challenges of humanity’s global interconnectivity that nation-states face.

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, what occurs is a fusion that results in the loss of cultural diversity and identity with consequent negative effects on society.

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. But it fails to provide real solutions to the major issues of our world that nation-states are grappling with, and despite their promise to bring real change, they inherently require the blessing of nation-states to even exist.

What I want to offer here is the position that rather than attempting to transcend nation-states, a more effective approach is for us to evolve them.

More specifically: to call in their soul.

In Singularity, we perceive each nation as a collective being, on its own journey of evolution, through which the One Life of the Earth is seeking to express a unique gift in contribution to the whole.

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 that as a counterpoint to this, every nation also has its own ego structure, complete with patterns, habits, shadows and traumas. 

Starting to look at the field of international relations through this lens is powerfully illuminating. Try it out if you haven’t already.

Our sense is that the major issues of our world are expressions of the patterns, historical habits, shadows, and traumas of our different 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 Life of the Earth as a whole.

By doing so, the way our different nations are showing up on the global stage can evolve, from preoccupation with their own self-interests to service and contribution as an expression of the Whole.

This the basis upon which our different nations can take their place as units of global governance sourced in the One Life of the Earth as a whole.

This is why in Singularity part of our work is building cells in different nations of people attuning to the contribution their nation can make in this context.

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.