Crypto Sovereignty and Post-Nation-State Governance

* Book: Farewell to Westphalia. Crypto Sovereignty and Post-Nation-State Governance. By Jarrad Hope and Peter Ludlow.

URL = https://logos.co/farewell-to-westphalia/

"It explores the shortcomings of the nation state, presenting sovereign cyberstates and network states as an alternative order for the post-Westphalian era."

Contents

8 Are Cyberstates the Answer?

8.2 Must blockchain communities have physical territories? 136
8.3 Should blockchain communities aspire to be diplomatically recognised by nation states? . . . . . . . . . . . 141
8.4 Should blockchain communities strive to have national identity?. . . 142
8.5 Network states versus blockchain communities . . . . 145

10 Rethinking Sovereignty

10.5 Decentralised property registries . . . . . . . . . . . 174

11 The Rights and Responsibilities of Blockchain Communities

11.4 On the responsibilities of blockchain communities . . . 185
11.5 Decentralised oversight of blockchain communities . . 190
11.6 On the rights of blockchain communities . . . . . . . 192

15 Conceptual Limits of Blockchain Governance

15.2 Nothing is 100% trustless . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
15.3 Nothing is 100% decentralised . . . . . . . . . . . . 254

17 Values and the Technology Stack

 17.4 Beyond Westphalia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297

Excerpts

Context: The Peace of Westphalia

From the introduction:

"In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia marked the end of the Thirty Years’ War – an event in which Catholics and Protestants had clashed across Northern Europe. The war had certainly been grim business. Precise numbers are difficult to come by, but apart from the two million soldiers that perished, it is estimated that rural areas of what is now Germany lost over 60% of their population due to war, starvation and disease. Cities lost around a third of their populations. An entry written in the margins of a family bible in Swabia recorded, ‘We live like animals, eating bark and grass. . . . No one could have imagined that anything like this would happen to us. Many people say that there is no God.’ By some accounts, the situation in the Rhineland had grown so desperate that people were resorting to cannibalism.

The treaties enshrined in the Peace of Westphalia not only ended the conflict but made sovereign nation states a permanent fixture in our world.

It was a solution in which all parties agreed that what nation states do internally is their own business. The agreements successfully ended the Thirty Years’ War; this cannot be denied. However, in view of the wars and genocide that swept across Europe since the Peace of Westphalia – including the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco–Prussian War and two World Wars in the twentieth century – one has to question how much was accomplished by the invention of the modern nation state. The question gains even more bite when we query the wisdom of European post-Westphalian colonial powers imposing their artificial nation-state boundaries onto territories around the world with complete indifference to previous tribal boundaries and conflicts.

Sovereign nation states are human technologies designed to facilitate the peaceful organisation of human beings, solving for their ideological, political and religious differences. However, they are technologies that are nearly 380 years old and, like all technology of that era, perhaps not the optimal solutions available today. To put things in perspective, the Peace of Westphalia was reached six years after the invention of the mechanical adding machine by Blaise Pascal and eight years before the invention of the pendulum clock by Christiaan Huygens. These are great inventions, to be sure, but we do not consider them to be the end of history. They have been followed by newer and superior versions of those technologies.

Why should our technologies for political organisation be set in stone? Can we not do better? We believe that we can. Our solution will involve a thorough investigation into developments like blockchain technologies and smart contracts and showing how they can be productively applied to the project of cooperative human governance."

2.

"Henry Kissinger echoed this take in his book, World Order:

The Peace of Westphalia became a turning point in the history of nations because the elements it set in place were as uncomplicated as they were sweeping. The state, not the empire, dynasty, or religious confession was affirmed as the building block of European order. The concept of state sovereignty was established. The right of each signatory to choose its own domestic structure and religious orientation free from intervention was affirmed, while novel clauses ensured that minority sects could practice their faith in peace and be free. Beyond the immediate demands of the moment, the principles of a system of ‘international relations’ were taking shape, motivated by the common desire to avoid a recurrence of total war on the Continent."