Tucked away at the bottom of an Athens News article was this section about the power of nation States being crucial to international stability
“The nation state is leaking power, and it has been for some time,” says Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s former ambassador to the United Nations. “That’s a problem, because it is the basic unit of which our international system is made up, and other institutions — the EU, UN, everything else — draw their legitimacy from nation states.”
There have been some unprecedented and partially successful efforts in the past few years to strengthen international economic cooperation. These include giving the International Monetary Fund a bigger role in monitoring global economic imbalances, and the eurozone’s creation of a massive rescue fund to bail out Greece and other indebted countries.
But Greenstock thinks the weaker nation states mean the world will find it hard to meet challenges from climate change to financial crises to cyber security — and it may take another, as yet unforeseen global shock or conflict to change that.
“If it was to continue indefinitely, you would have collapse and chaos,” he said. “But it won’t. The pendulum will swing back. But I worry we will need a scare to make that happen.”
So to summarise, Greenstock is saying that if nation states don’t keep their power we are all doomed.
Some huge statements are made to here but I think to analyse it you would really have to know how Greenstock defines “power”. From his point of view, what makes a state “powerful”
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