Westphalian system

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When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Martin Jacques

Admiral Zheng, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, classic study, credit crunch, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Meghnad Desai, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, one-China policy, open economy, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

Life has not been that dissimilar in the era of the single superpower, with most countries enjoying varying degrees of limited sovereignty in their relationship with the United States. Given the profound inequalities in interstate relations, the concept of equality in the Westphalian system is thus legalistic rather than real. In practice, as with the tributary system, it has strong hierarchical features.85 Like the tributary system, the Westphalian system also has an influential cultural component, namely the idea of hegemony or soft power. In other words, the distinction between the tributary and Westphalian systems is not quite as clear-cut as one might think. Seen in these terms, the restoration of elements of the tributary system in a modernized form does not seem so far-fetched.

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ECHOES OF THE PAST In the light of the region’s realignment towards China, we can now return to the question of how East Asia’s relationship with China is likely to evolve and, in particular, to what extent it might bear some of the hallmarks of the tributary system. The tributary system and Westphalian system are often regarded as polar opposites and mutually exclusive, the former involving a hierarchical relationship, the latter based on relations of equality between sovereign nation-states. In fact, as mentioned in Chapter 7, the Westphalian system in practice has never been quite that simple. For most of its history it was largely confined to a group of European states, since until the second half of the twentieth century the great majority of countries in the world did not enjoy independence, let alone equality.84 Even after these countries became sovereign nation-states, in the great majority of cases they were to enjoy nothing like equality with the United States or the West European nations, a situation which was exacerbated during the Cold War, when nation-states experienced what was, in practice, limited sovereignty in their relationship with the superpower to which they owed their allegiance.

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Instead of the world thinking exclusively in terms of nation-states, as has been the case since the end of colonialism, the lexicon of international relations will become more diverse, demanding room be made for competing concepts, different histories and varying sizes. THE RETURN OF THE TRIBUTARY SYSTEM The Westphalian system has dominated international relations ever since the emergence of the modern European nation-state. It has become the universal conceptual language of the international system. As we have seen, however, the Westphalian system has itself metamorphosed over time and enjoyed several different iterations. Even so, it remains what it was, an essentially European-derived concept designed to make the world conform to its imperatives and modalities.

State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century by Francis Fukuyama

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, centre right, corporate governance, demand response, Doha Development Round, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, Hernando de Soto, information asymmetry, liberal world order, Live Aid, Nick Leeson, Pareto efficiency, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system

The experience of Somalia, Haiti, Cambodia, the Balkans, and other places has generated a huge literature on external intervention (see, among others, weak states and international legitimacy 97 Damrosch 1993; Heiberg 1994; Hoffmann 1996; Lugo 1996; Mastanduno and Lyons 1995; Mayall 1996; Murphy 1996; von Lipsey 1997; Weiss and Collins 1996; and Williamson 1998; for a critical view, see Carpenter 1997). In the debates over humanitarian intervention, the case was made that the Westphalian system was no longer an adequate framework for international relations. The Westphalian system was built around a deliberate agnosticism over the question of legitimacy. The end of the Cold War, it was argued, brought about much greater consensus within the world community over the principles of political legitimacy and human rights than before.

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The effort to be more “scientific” than the underlying subject matter permits carries a real cost in blinding us to the real complexities of public administration as it is practiced in different societies. 3 w e a k stat e s a n d i n t e r n at i o n a l legitimacy I n the first two chapters I discuss the problem of weak governance and missing or inadequate institutions at the nation-state level, where it becomes a critical obstacle to the economic development of individual poor countries. It has also become a critical problem at the level of the international system as a whole. Sovereignty and the nation-state, cornerstones of the Westphalian system, have been eroded in fact and attacked in principle because what goes on inside states—in other words, their internal governance—often matters intensely to other members of the international system. But who has the right or the legitimacy to violate another state’s sovereignty, and for what purposes?

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., 110 New Zealand, 13, 35 State Sector Act, 14 Nicaragua, 39 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 116 North, Douglass, 33 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 60 Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 103 Olsen, Johan, 52 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 17 n2, 18 organizational culture, 63 Oslo peace process, 94 Pakistan, 30 Panama, 39 Peel Reforms, 85 Perry, Commodore, 34 Philippines, 39 Pinchot, Gifford, 64 Plaza Accord, 75 Political Order in Changing Societies (Huntington), 26 Polity IV data set, 11 presidentialism, 25 136 index principal-agent relationships, 47–52, 55, 60, 65 Pritchett, Lant, 56, 84 privatization, 18–19, 59 procurement, government, 71 property rights, 21 public administration, 23, 43–44 Public Administration (Simon et. al), 79 public choice theory, 49–50 public education, 58–59 al-Qaida, 93, 95, 105 rational choice political science, 33 Reagan, Ronald, 113 Reaganism, 4 rule of law, 59 Russia, 13, 18 fiscal federalism in, 25 Rwanda, 93 satisficing, 52 Saudi Arabia, 94–95 Schein, Edgar, 79, 81 Schröder, Gerhard 105 scientific management, 62 Scott, James, 82 Sears Roebuck Company, 70–71 Selznick, Philip, 79–80 September 11 attacks, x–xi, 2, 93 Serbia, 97, 116 shirking, 61–62 Sierra Leone, 93 Simon, Herbert, 52–54, 79 Singapore, 38 social capital, 30, 62–63 Somalia, x, 93 Sorensen, Georg, 35 sovereignty, 92, 97–98, 104 Soviet Union, 2, 12–13, 26 Spain, 34 state, definition, 6 European views of, 110 functions, 1 legitimacy, 110 scope, defined, 7 strength, defined, 7 totalitarian, 3 state-building, defined, ix stovepipes, 54, 65 subsidiarity, 67 Suharto, 28, 71–72 Sweden, 4, 34 Taiwan, 30, 35, 37 Taylor, Frederick, 62 Taylorism, 62–63, 78 Tennessee Valley Authority, 79 terrorism, xi, 93, 98 Thailand, 17 n2, 18 Thatcherism, 4 Tilly, Charles, 34 Tollison, Robert 49 Transparency International, 10 Tullock, Gordon, 49 Turkey, 12, 28, 35 Uganda, x United Nations, 98, 109, 115–116 Security Council debate over Iraq, 108 weaknesses of, 115–116 United States, 6 founding of, 31 national identity in, 112–113 post-September 11 foreign policy, 94–96 quality of bureaucracy in, 12 state-building in, 34 unilateralist policies, 105–106 United States Agency for International Development (USAID), 89 n6, 90, 90 n6, 107 van de Walle, Nicholas, 16, 36 Venezuela, 28 Vietnam, Republic of, 39 von Mises, Ludwig, 68 vouchers, 59 index Washington consensus, 5, 15, 17 weapons of mass destruction (WMD), xi, 93, 98, 105, 108 Weber, Max, 6, 67 Weingast, Barry, 33 Westphalian system, 92, 97 Wiley, Harvey, 64 Williamson, Oliver, 46, 52, 79 Wilson, James Q., 79 Wilson, Woodrow, 109 Winthrop, Governor, 113 Wood, Robert, 71 137 Woolcock, Michael, 56, 82, 84 World Bank, 5, 10, 41 World Development Report, 1997 (World Bank), 7 World Trade Organization, 106– 107 Yates, Joanne, 68 zaibatsu, 85 Zaire, 16 Zakaria, Fareed, 26

Capital Without Borders by Brooke Harrington

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, diversified portfolio, emotional labour, equity risk premium, estate planning, eurozone crisis, family office, financial innovation, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, information asymmetry, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, liberal capitalism, mega-rich, mobile money, offshore financial centre, prudent man rule, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, web of trust, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Their work highlights, and often exacerbates, the “lack of existing regulatory capacity at the global level”—that is, the absence of effective institutions to address gaps and conflicts in national laws with regard to global capital flows.4 Examining the relationship between states and wealth managers ties into ongoing debates about the extent and consequences of globalization, known as “one of the most vexed issues in all of social science.”5 On the one hand, there is recognition of a profound change occurring in the configuration of state power. Some view this as the end of the Westphalian system: “A key feature of the current epoch is the supersession of the nation-state as the organizing principle of capitalism.… [T]ransnational or global space is coming to supplant national spaces.”6 But “globalization skeptics” see this as excessively pessimistic about the role of the state.7 In particular, they point to lack of coordination in the international financial system as indicating that the forces of economic globalization pose a weak challenge to the power of the state.

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U.S. consular fees for renunciation have been hiked by 442 percent in recent years (making them twenty times higher than the average for developed countries); if that doesn’t provide a sufficient deterrent, several of those former citizens have been barred from reentering the country.70 At the other extreme, some observers argue that it is better to acquiesce to the crumbling of the Westphalian system by giving up on the notion of citizenship altogether. A recent book of policy scholarship proposes “abolishing borders and transforming all human beings into citizens of the world.”71 The seriousness with which this proposition has been greeted suggests how deeply impaired the centuries-old world system of states, sovereignty, and citizenship has become, partly thanks to the work of wealth managers.

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But the data from this study suggest that the problem has grown to an extent almost unimaginable previously; even in the feudal era, there were still authorities (such as the Roman Catholic Church in Europe) that retained a meaningful power to impose laws on even the wealthiest and most privileged of individuals. Today there no longer seem to be such authorities or such power. The high-net-worth individuals of the world are largely ungoverned, and ungovernable. It is this, even more than the emptying of state coffers, that poses the direst threat to the Westphalian system. This brings us to the third and final contribution of this book to the study of states and political economy: the suggestion that a kind of parallel state system has arisen for the wealthy, a system that operates largely unnoticed except when it throws the world that the rest us inhabit into chaos.

The Virtue of Nationalism by Yoram Hazony

Berlin Wall, British Empire, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, invention of the printing press, Mahatma Gandhi, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, urban planning, Westphalian system

This point is discussed at length by Croxton, who suggests that the interpretation of the treaties as having been responsible for giving birth to a “Westphalian” system of sovereign states goes unnoticed in the international-relations literature until Pierre-Joseph Proudhon points it out in 1863. Derek Croxton, Westphalia (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013 ed.), 339–362. Of course Vattel was already writing about a system of putatively “equal” and “sovereign” states in Europe in 1758, a century after the Westphalia treaties, but Croxton’s point is basically right: What is later called the Westphalian system is hardly the only possible view of the order emerging during the Thirty Years’ War. 27.

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It was this deeply entrenched German-universalist and imperialist tradition that had made it so easy for the preeminent German philosopher of Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, to assert in his Perpetual Peace that the only rational form of government would be one in which the national states of Europe were dismantled in favor of a single government that would eventually be extended to the entire world. In repeating this theory, Kant was merely offering yet another version of the German-led Holy Roman Empire.55 Adenauer’s repeated proposals to restrain Germany by eliminating the Westphalian system of national states did not, for this reason, envision Germans giving up on much that had been historically significant to them. The chancellor was in fact only reiterating a venerable German tradition as to what political arrangements in Europe should look like. Nations that had won their independence from the German emperors at such cost three or four centuries earlier, on the other hand, were being asked to make quite a considerable sacrifice for the sake of the promised peace and prosperity.

Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

British Empire, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, failed state, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, launch on warning, liberation theology, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Westphalian system

The most interesting comment, perhaps, was Henry Kissinger’s, responding to a major address by President Bush at West Point in which he had presented an outline of the National Security Strategy. Kissinger said this “revolutionary” doctrine in international affairs would tear to shreds not only the UN Charter and international law but the whole seventeenth-century Westphalian system of international order. Kissinger approved of the doctrine, though he added one proviso: we have to understand that this can’t be “a universal principle available to every nation.”6 The doctrine is for us, not for anyone else. We will use force whenever we like against anyone we regard as a potential threat, and maybe we will delegate that right to client states, but it’s not for others.

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Congress “unlawful combatant,” Venezuela Vietnam, invasion of Cambodia Vietnam War volunteer army Wall Street Journal war crimes War Crimes Act (1996) War of 1812 wars of aggression Washington, George Washington Post weapons of mass destruction Wedgwood, Ruth welfare West Africa Western expansion Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation Westphalian system Williams, William Appleman Wilson, Richard Wilson, Woodrow Wolfowitz, Paul women’s rights World Social Forum World War 1 World War II Yamashita, Tomoyuki Yeltsin, Boris Yugoslavia, special tribunal for Zinn, Howard Zionism ABOUT THE AUTHORS NOAM CHOMSKY is the author of numerous bestselling political works, from American Power and the New Mandarins in the 1960s to Hegemony or Survival in 2003.

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

From 1618 to 1648, Europe devoured itself in its first demonstration of total war since antiquity. Civilian populations were starved and slaughtered and cities destroyed in ways not seen since the pagans. What ended the desolation was the Peace of Westphalia, from which emerged the modern state system of sovereignty and diplomacy we have had ever since. Under the Westphalian system, states existed within recognized borders. Each state’s sovereignty was recognized by others. Principles of noninterference were agreed. Religious differences between states were tolerated. States might be monarchies or republics. Permanent state interest, or raison d’état, was the organizing principle of international relations.

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Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, France was the threat against which the balance of power was maintained. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Germany and Russia became the primary threats. Great Britain, and later the United States, served as principal counterweights first to French, and then to German and Russian power. The Westphalian system collapsed utterly in the horrors of the First and Second World Wars. The interwar period, 1919–39, saw efforts to build another world order based on multilateral organizations like the League of Nations. These efforts failed due to the legacy of a vindictive 1919 Treaty of Versailles. That treaty made Germany revanchist, and revenge inevitable.

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The United States acted through alliances such as NATO supported by gold, nuclear weapons, and sea power. Russia acted through a land-based empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and proxy states including Cuba, North Korea, and North Vietnam. This postwar condominium included elements of the Westphalian system such as statehood, sovereignty, and diplomacy, now supplemented with more robust versions of the failed multilateral institutions of the interwar period. The United Nations, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and later the G20 were a new multilateral metastructure imposed on the state system to maintain peace, promote growth, and instill monetary stability.

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversification, energy security, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, global village, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, payday loans, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precautionary principle, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yield curve

Bank of England Governor Mervyn King’s dictum that we have global banking in life but national banking in death characterizes the fact that large, complex financial institutions are larger than sovereign nations, ineffectively regulated in compartments at national levels, and not bound by any global laws. Their demise means that national governments have to pay for the global banks’ mistakes, but ultimately the whole world pays in the form of higher inflation, near zero interest rates, increased taxation, and lost jobs. The Westphalian System’s Relevance to Finance Wanes The Westphalian system of national sovereignty and voluntary cooperation is cracking at the seams in this highly interconnected and interdependent world. The G-20 has improved the legitimacy of global governance, but the “What to Do” is confused by turf battles over “Who Bears the Loss” and “Who Will Have the Control”.

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See Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) tar sands industry, xviii tax cuts, xvii; in Canada, xviii; in US, 5 taxes: Canada, 20; consumption-based taxes, 261–263; corporate taxes, 260; energy taxes, 260; excise taxes, 262; income taxes, 6, 260–262; payroll taxes, 261–262; sales taxes, 262; Tobin tax, xxvii, 250–255; turnover tax, 253–255; value-added tax (VAT), xxviii, 6, 43, 262 tax policy, xxvii–xxviii; Canada, 20, 26; Mexico, xix, 42–43; public debt and, 259–260; South Africa, 136; US, 6, 60, 260–261 technology: climate change and, 227; hydrocarbons and, 181–183 telecoms, 26 television, 298 Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF), 277 testosterone, 290 Thailand, 7 Thaler, Richard, 291 Tobin, James, 250 Tobin tax, xxvii, 250–255 “too-big-too-fail” bailouts, 266, 267, 268 total factor productivity (TFP), 87 toxic securities, 238–239 transparency, 280–282 Trichet, Jean-Claude, 237–238 Triffin Dilemma, 252–253 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), 3, 277 turnover tax, 253–255 Tversky, Amos, 289 Uganda, xxii, xxv, 126 unemployment rate, xvi, 4 United Kingdom: climate change policy of, xxvi; domestic demand in, 140; as financial capital, 244–245; fiscal deficit in, 257; fiscal policy of, 59, 71; government debt in, 160–161; Tobin tax and, 251–252 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 184 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 220–222 United States: banking sector in, xxvii, 235–241; Canada and, 13–14, 24; climate change and, xxvi, 224–225; corporate sector in, xvi, 4, 8; economic recovery in, xvi–xvii, 3–11, 13–14, 65–66; as engine of world demand, 96, 140; environmental policies, 5, 27; financial system of, 157; fiscal deficit in, 10–11, 70, 257; fiscal policy of, xvii, 6, 10–11; fiscal stimulus program in, 4; government debt, 160; growth rate in, 5, 13–14; household sector in, 8; housing sector in, 9; industrial production in, 65; monetary policy of, 7–10; partisan politics in, 5–6; politics in, 269–270; productivity gains in, xvi, 4; public policy of, xvi–xvii; stimulus measures in, 4, 13; tax policy of, 6, 63, 260–261 Uribe, Alvaro, 33 Uruguay, 48, 49–50 US consumers, xv US dollar: alternatives to, 158; devaluation of, xvii, 7, 25; gold prices and, 173–174; as reserve currency, xxiv, 153–165; weakening, and commodity prices, 53 US government securities, 160 value-added tax (VAT), xxviii, 6, 43, 262 Van Alstyne, Marshal, 296 Venezuela, 48–49, 50, 51, 183 Volcker Rule, 267, 268 web-based communities, 296 Weber, Alex, 285 welfare expenditures, South Africa, 137–138 Wellink, Nout, 248 West Africa, xxii, 126–127 Westphalian system, 251 World Bank, 119, 154 world economy, 12–14; in 2010–2011, 94–95; recovery of, xv; trends underpinning, 78–80 yen, xxiv, 9, 97, 98, 167 yield curves, 82–83 Yoshida, Shigeru, 105 Zambia, 118, 125 ZANU-PF, 125 Zapatistas, 35 Zedillo, Ernesto, 35 Zimbabwe, xxii, 125 Zoellick, Robert, 169 “zombie” firms, 112 Zuma, Jacob, 125, 128, 134–137

The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-First Century by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, always be closing, California gold rush, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, kremlinology, load shedding, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, one-China policy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, the long tail, trade route, Westphalian system, Yom Kippur War

And my wife, Maria Cabral, remains there with decades’ worth of love and support. 1. The Return of Marco Polo’s World and the U.S. Military Response AS EUROPE DISAPPEARS, EURASIA COHERES. The supercontinent is becoming one fluid, comprehensible unit of trade and conflict, as the Westphalian system of states weakens and older, imperial legacies—Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Turkish—become paramount. Every crisis from Central Europe to the ethnic-Han Chinese heartland is now interlinked. There is one singular battle space. What follows is a historical and geographical guide to it. The Dispersion of the West Never before in history did Western civilization reach such a point of geopolitical concision and raw power as during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath.

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The decline of states in general in inner Asia means a future of more refugees. We will have to become expert at using refugee camps for intelligence gathering, at a time in history when our adversaries try to weaponize refugees. Obviously, diplomacy will be altogether crucial in many of these efforts, in which there will be no victory parades, even as the Westphalian system of modern states weakens and calcifies. Of course, we must maintain robust land forces for the sake of unpredictable contingencies, as well as to demonstrate clearly that we always reserve the right to intervene—even if we don’t, or shouldn’t. The fact is, a robust land force in and of itself affects the power calculations of our adversaries to our advantage.

War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Etonian, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, school choice, side project, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

But when his conversation turns to China, as is inevitable, the topic of borders works its way in as well. As he sees it, borders are central to China’s view of the world and their attempts to dominate it: “What the Chinese have in mind is anti-Westphalian. This is why Olavo and I are exactly on the same page. The Westphalian system is a system of nation-states—individual, independent, robust nation-states where the citizen can get the most value and have the most ability to control his own fate. What the Chinese are doing is a network effect. They’re taking the British East India Company model of predatory capitalism, spreading it out through One Belt One Road and Made in China 2025 initiatives, where they’re going to be an über-EU, which is, you know, whether it’s sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, the United States, Brazil, we’re all just administrative units in a network, right?”

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Spending their money and lives in wars that didn’t directly involve them and their welfare was antithetical to that cause, the reasoning went. America first. But like many of Steve’s principles, the one surrounding nonintervention had layers of justification. Being a nationalist for one’s self must involve, he would tell you, being a nationalist on behalf of others. That is the Westphalian system of governance that he idolizes. It’s about respect for the sovereignty of the nation-state as a transcendent principle. And it’s about respecting the right of other nations to preside over their own affairs: only an anti-nationalist approach would grant one state license to intervene in another’s internal dealings.

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, high net worth, illegal immigration, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, technoutopianism, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

Even after antiquity ended and the “world city” ceased to rule an empire, Latin language, Christian church, and Roman legal codes were the essential common currency of the West. Only when the rupture in Christian unity led to another total war between Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth century did the space open for a new organizing principle: a system of sovereign nation-states, embodied most famously in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The Westphalian system is, for better or worse, the one in which we all live—the one which issues passports and grants equal sovereign rights to France and Kuwait and the Comoro Islands. Since 1945 it has kept the world’s chief powers from another total war. But as history shows, the nation-state system was neither humanity’s first conception of citizenship, nor will it be the last.

The Extreme Centre: A Warning by Tariq Ali

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, deindustrialization, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Great Leap Forward, labour market flexibility, land reform, light touch regulation, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, obamacare, offshore financial centre, popular capitalism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck

Under Madeleine Albright US policy grew progressively more interventionist, and the check that the Powell Doctrine was supposed to be found itself ultimately undercut by Powell’s unbridled enthusiasm for strengthening the military. The limited, ‘humanitarian’ interventions of the nineties helped bury the Powell Doctrine as well as the sanctity of state sovereignty enshrined in the Westphalian system and the UN Charter. From the invasion of Panama in 1989 to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States would participate in nine major campaigns. A blue-ribbon commission appointed by the US government in 1999 reported that ‘since the end of the Cold War, the United States has embarked upon nearly four dozen military interventions … as opposed to only sixteen during the entire period of the Cold War.’

Masters of Mankind by Noam Chomsky

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, failed state, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land bank, land reform, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, nuremberg principles, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system

The NSS was widely criticized among the foreign policy elite, including the article just cited, but on narrow grounds: not that it was wrong, or even new, but that the style and implementation were so extreme that they posed threats to US interests. Henry Kissinger described “The new approach [as] revolutionary,” pointing out that it undermines the seventeenth-century Westphalian system of international order, and of course the UN Charter and international law. He approved of the doctrine but with reservations about style and tactics, and with a crucial qualification: it cannot be “a universal principle available to every nation.” Rather, the right of aggression must be reserved to the US, perhaps delegated to chosen clients.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Mat Honan found out the hard way, as have thousands of others. But what should happen if and when the technological trappings of our modern society—the foundational tools upon which we are utterly dependent—all go away? What is humanity’s backup plan? In fact, none exists. The World Is Flat (and Wide Open) For centuries, the Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states has prevailed in our world. It meant that countries were to be sovereign in their territory, with no role for outside authorities to meddle in a nation’s domestic affairs. The Westphalian structure was preserved through a system of borders, armies, guards, gates, and guns.

…

Chapter 1: Connected, Dependent, and Vulnerable 1 All or most of the information: Mat Honan, “How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking,” Wired, July 6, 2012; Mat Honan, “Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can’t Protect Us Anymore,” Wired, Nov. 15, 2012. 2 Over the past hundred years: Peter Diamandis, “Abundance Is Our Future,” TED Talk, Feb. 2012. 3 And the mobile phone is singularly credited: Deloitte Consulting, Sub-Saharan Africa Mobile Observatory 2012, Feb. 4, 2014. 4 For centuries, the Westphalian system: Marc Goodman, “The Power of Moore’s Law in a World of Geotechnology,” National Interest, Jan./Feb. 2013. 5 Levin, a computer programmer: Amy Harmon, “Hacking Theft of $10 Million from Citibank Revealed,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 19, 1995. 6 One of the very first computer: Jason Kersten, “Going Viral: How Two Pakistani Brothers Created the First PC Virus,” Mental Floss, Nov. 2013. 7 Eventually, Brain had traveled the globe: For a fascinating and entertaining perspective on Amjad and Basit Farooq, and the history of computer malware, see Mikko Hypponen, “Fighting Viruses and Defending the Net,” TED Talk, July 2011. 8 Researchers at Palo Alto Networks: Byron Acohido, “Malware Now Spreads Mostly Through Tainted Websites,” USA Today, May 4, 2013. 9 Many large companies: Brian Fung, “911 for the Texting Generation Is Here,” Washington Post, Aug. 8, 2014. 10 In 2010, the German research institute: Nicole Perlroth, “Outmaneuvered at Their Own Game, Antivirus Makers Struggle to Adapt,” New York Times, Dec. 31, 2012. 11 In the summer of 2013: Kaspersky Lab, Global Corporate IT Security Risks: 2013, May 2013. 12 A survey of its members: “Online Exposure,” Consumer Reports, June 2011. 13 According to a study by the Gartner group: “Gartner Says Worldwide Security Software Market Grew 7.9 Percent in 2012,” Gartner Newsroom, May 30, 2013; Steve Johnson, “Cybersecurity Business Booming in Silicon Valley,” San Jose Mercury News, Sept. 13, 2013. 14 The results: the initial threat-detection rate: Imperva, Hacker Intelligence Initiative, Monthly Trend Report #14, Dec. 2012. 15 Though millions around the world: Tom Simonite, “The Antivirus Era Is Over,” MIT Technology Review, June 11, 2012. 16 The landmark survey: Verizon, 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report. 17 A similar study by Trustwave Holdings: Trustwave, Trustwave 2013 Global Security Report. 18 When businesses do eventually notice: Verizon RISK Team, 2012 Data Breach Investigation Report, 3. 19 From the time an attacker: Ibid., 51. 20 In that case, hackers: Mark Jewell, “T.J.

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

The Peace of Westphalia is a term that refers to the series of treaties signed in May to October 1648 in Osnabrück and Münster, ending the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) in the Holy Roman Empire, and the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) between Spain and the Dutch Republic. As a model of global order, the Westphalian system is underpinned by recognition of the fundamental right of a state to political self-determination, the assumption of states’ legal equality, and the principle that no state should intervene in the internal affairs of another. Territorial money, or national currency, is the analogue of this model.

…

See also First World War; Second World War; Vietnam War; violence war against terror, 43 Warburton, Peter, 199 Warren, Josiah, 342 Warwick, University of, 73n30 waste, 12–13, 151; and the gift, 186; and money, 175, 184, 204; versus utility, 164 Wave and Pay, 377 Weber, Florence, 292 Weber, Max, 109, 247, 276n, 292, 302, 317; on capitalism and religion, 143, 155, 175; on charisma, 247; on Knapp, 103; on money and the modern state, 217; on prices, 109n25; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 156, 175; on taxation, 217 Weimar inflation, 131n57, 142, 224, 387 welfare. See social welfare Wendt, Alexander, 220 Wergild, 24, 302 Western Union, 380n Westphalia. See Peace of Westphalia Westphalian system, 216–27, 238 Where’s George?, 226 Wherry, Frederick, 164n Whuffie, 214, 316, 381 WikiLeaks, 380n Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 390 workers, 59, 72, 73, 74, 75–76, 77, 81, 242, 244, 345, 352; and cooperatives, 84; and consumers, 81, 86, 356; in Proudhon, 353–54; in the public sector, 77, 88, 126.

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder by Sean McFate

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, drone strike, escalation ladder, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, false flag, hive mind, index fund, invisible hand, John Markoff, joint-stock company, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, nuclear taboo, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technoutopianism, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero day, zero-sum game

For example, one of the sons of Muammar Gaddafi received his PhD at the London School of Economics with a dissertation extolling the virtues of democracy.16 Five years later, he joined in his father’s brutal response to the democratic uprising during the Arab Spring. Many of the West’s top schools shamefully admit the children of the global 1 percent in exchange for a bribe.17 Perhaps this corruption cannot be stopped, but it can be weaponized. Diplomacy also matters, but not in the way people think. Diplomatic statecraft evolved with the Westphalian system and is dying with it. Ministries of foreign affairs and the US State Department were designed to talk to other states, but now nonstate actors eclipse many countries in power. The institutions of a state must communicate with all actors of relevance, not just the ones with flags. This includes multinational corporations, terrorist groups, and criminal organizations who exert influence.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

To say nothing of the more or less charted waters of the Dark Net, accessible only through tools like the Tor browser. 19.  But as Jameson notes, it is the irregularity of opposing forces that breaks down the order of the nomos: “With the religious wars, but perhaps also the English dominance of the sea—now leads to the Westphalian system of nation-states, in which, for the first time, the new nomos of state equality and friend-foe emerges. The friend-foe opposition is possible, indeed, only between equals: it includes Hegelian recognition, except that whereas Hegelian struggle aims to produce recognition, Schmitt's version is enabled only after mutual recognition is secured.

…

See also currency money-into-virtuality, 199 monkeys, 222 Monroe, James, 45 Monroe Doctrine, 26, 31–32 Monroe Doctrine of the Cloud, 34–35, 37 Montana East Line Telephone Association, 29 moon, owning, 456n7 Moore Ruble Yudell, 322 Moore's law, 63, 80, 92, 232, 304 More, Thomas, 249, 321 Mori, Bruna, 103 Morphosis, 320, 322–323 Mosaic (browser), 267 Mouffe, Chantal, 379n10 Mountbatten Plan, 85 Mumbai attacks (2008), 17, 242, 247–248, 322, 428n58, 431n70 Musk, Elon, 281 mutual prostheticization, 280 MVRDV exposition pavilion, Hannover 2000, 53 MyLifeBits (Bell) (Microsoft), 261–262, 264 namecoin, 171 namelessness, 447n45 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 88, 300 National Center for Supercomputing Applications, 267 National Security Agency (NSA), 35, 120, 283, 287, 363, 413n75 nation-state Cloud as, 93 interfaces into, 155–156 as jurisdiction, 5, 309–310 Kojève on, 109 modern, 24 non-state actors functioning as, 10–11 socialist, platform in, 59 twentieth-century achievements of, 309, 443n23 Westphalian system of, 14, 397n19 Native Land-Stop Eject (Virilio and Depardon, curators), 265 Negarastani, Rezi, 390n19 Negroponte, Nicholas, 201 nemein, 379n12 neo-Austrian libertarians, 285 neo-feudalism, 17, 186, 306–307 neoliberalism, 20–21, 56, 439n65 Nest (smart thermostat), 134 nested parasitism, 280, 288–289 Netscape, 267 Netwar, 431n70 network city, 172, 421n20 network is the computer (Sun Microsystems), 396n8 networks communication, 132, 153–154, 193–195 defined, 396n8 interior/exterior in, 29 megastructure, 189 of package delivery, 131 peer-to-peer, 205, 215 social reality of, 341 society, 231 space, making and taking, 29 as state, 11, 123 territory produced through, 29 value, 159 vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), 281–282, 438n60 visualization, 266 “New Aesthetic, The,” 225 New Babylon (Constant), 178–179 New Deal, 120 New Digital Age, The (Schmidt and Cohen), 134–136 New Songdo City, South Korea, 179 Niantic Labs (Google), 242 Nicaragua-Costa Rica border conflict, 9, 120, 144 Nicolelis, Michel, 222 nihilism of empty space, overcoming, 380n20 1984 advertisement, 128–129, 402n57 Noguchi, Isamu, 103 nomos breaking down order of, 397n19 defined, 373 derivation, 379n12 drawing and framing sovereign interiors, 246 of friend-foe, 397n19 Modern, 380n13 nomic line, 84 Schmittian, 24–25, 85, 113, 379n12 of The Stack, 24, 229, 235 of state equality, 397n19 nomos of the Cloud defined, 373–374 dividing sovereignty, 19–22 drawing landscape-scale calculable interiors, 211 drivers of, 143 Google Grossraum, 34–40 introduction, 19 land, sea, and air, 28–31 over and under the line, 23–28 platform governance and, 341 topography, 111 Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, The (Schmitt), 25 noncitizen residents in cities, 159, 175, 310, 409n39 noncitizen User, 175 nonhuman-human distinction, 164–165, 268, 275 nonhuman-to-human communication, 137, 171–172, 198 nonhuman User.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

China’s newfound wealth provided the resources not only to suppress opposition at home but to expand the country’s influence abroad. The British journalist Martin Jacques observes that China has long viewed itself not “as a nation-state but rather as a civilization-state.”82 In contrast to the so-called Westphalian system, in which nations treat each other as sovereign, China relates to other countries through the prism of ancient “tributary” relationships, with neighboring states acknowledging the country’s cultural superiority and overwhelming power in exchange for its protection. Even China’s name for itself, “the Middle Kingdom,” conveys this view of a country situated atop the hierarchy, between earth and heaven.83 As its foreign minister bluntly informed his counterparts at a 2010 meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, “China is a big country, and you are small countries.”84 In particular, China’s leaders speak of reversing a “century of humiliation” at the hands of Western powers—the period stretching from Britain’s 1842 defeat of the Chinese in the First Opium War through the Japanese invasion and brutalization of China during World War II.

The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations by Sebastian Mallaby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, capital controls, clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, export processing zone, failed state, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentleman farmer, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, microcredit, oil shock, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, the new new thing, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Yom Kippur War

For the realists, suspicion of moralistic idealism was rooted in the seventeenth century, when religious fervor plunged Europe into the misery of the Thirty Years War—a conflict that ended only when the principles of sovereignty and nonintervention were enshrined in the Treaty of Westphalia. For the idealists, meanwhile, the limitations of the Westphalian system had been exposed by the horrors of the twentieth century; the Holocaust and the Soviet Gulag rendered indifference to the domestic policies of other states morally unacceptable. Sometimes the two sides studied the same centuries and drew opposite lessons. One Telluride alumnus remembers Wolfowitz praising Kissinger’s biography of Metternich during a late-night discussion at Wolfowitz’s home, but Wolfowitz went on to say that Kissinger had picked the wrong hero.

How to Survive a Pandemic by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, double helix, Edward Jenner, friendly fire, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Helicobacter pylori, inventory management, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, New Journalism, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, supply-chain management, the medium is the message, Westphalian system, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zoonotic diseases

“Failure to comply could mean up to six months in jail.”2445 When authorities went to forcibly round up ducks and chickens in the region, they were reportedly met by hostile farmers armed with pitchforks and axes.2446 Part of the problem may be that existing international law on infectious disease control is archaic, formed many decades ago, long before mass global travel. The World Health Organization, for example, can only issue “soft law” recommendations, rather than binding obligations. This outmoded system of international relations in general dates back to the seventeenth-century Peace of Westphalia ending the Thirty Years War. The Westphalian system is built upon the principle of absolute national sovereignty.2447 “Many governments see it [disease prevention] as an internal business,” said the WHO’s director-general. “There is a basic gut feeling that this is my problem, I will deal with it in my way. Now, in a globalized world, any disease is one airplane away.

Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

The group might even achieve these results without a nuclear detonation, by providing proof that it had a nuclear weapon in its possession at a location unknown to its adversaries. The addition on the world stage of powerful non-state actors as the ostensible military equals of (at least some) states would herald the most significant change in international affairs since the advent of the Westphalian system. While one can only speculate about the nature of the resultant international system, one possibility is that 'superproliferation' would occur. In this case every state (and non-state) actor with the wherewithal pursues nuclear weapons, resulting in an extremely multipolar and unstable world order and greater possibility for violent conflict.