The nation state as we know it today emerged during the 1800s. Before that, especially in Europe, people didn’t really think of themselves as part of “nations” - they belonged to their local village, their church, or maybe pledged loyalty to a distant monarch. But then came the age of new technologies: mass-printed newspapers, railways connecting distant cities, and later radio and the telegraph. These tools made it possible to imagine a bigger “we” - the nation state was born.
This transformation wasn’t just technological - it was driven by leaders who saw the potential. Giuseppe Mazzini preached Italian unity, while Bismarck forged Germany through “blood and iron.” In France, the revolution had already planted the seeds of national identity, which Napoleon III would later cultivate. These leaders used new communication tools to spread national myths, standardize languages, and create the shared stories that made people feel part of something bigger than their local community.
Ever since John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” in 1996, we’ve seen hints of what might come next. The 21st century brings its own revolutionary technologies: the borderless internet, blockchain, peer-to-peer networks, and global social media. But perhaps the most powerful “technology” of all is the emergence of English as a global lingua franca - for the first time in history, humans across the planet can easily communicate in a shared language. Combine this with instant translation tools, and we’re rapidly breaking down the last remaining barriers to global understanding.
We’re already seeing glimpses of this post-national identity: digital nomads who feel more connected to their online communities than their physical locations, global movements like climate activism that transcend borders, and international collaborations in science and art that ignore national boundaries. The rise of remote work means your closest colleagues might live on different continents.
These aren’t just tools or trends - they’re the building blocks of something bigger. They’re letting us construct an even larger “we” - perhaps the final “we”: humanity itself. This isn’t just idealistic thinking - it’s a practical response to challenges that don’t respect national borders: climate change, pandemics, artificial intelligence, and space exploration all require global cooperation and a species-level perspective.
We’re living through this transformation right now, which makes it hard to see the full picture. Just like a French peasant in 1800 couldn’t imagine identifying with someone hundreds of miles away in Paris, we might struggle to grasp how technology is rewiring our sense of belonging on a global scale.
Sure, there are still many questions to answer about what a post-national world might look like. But perhaps the most compelling argument for moving beyond nationalism is this: throughout history, nothing has been more destructive than wars between nation states - conflicts built on artificial divisions between people who share the same hopes, fears, and dreams. As these old boundaries blur and dissolve in the digital age, maybe we’ll finally see that the deadliest conflicts in human history were fought over lines drawn on maps that never mattered in the first place.
