Farewell to Westphalia
Farewell to Westphalia: Crypto Sovereignty and Post-Nation-State Governance is a forthcoming book co-authored by Logos co-founder, Jarrad Hope, and the great Peter Ludlow, author of Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias.
It explores the shortcomings of the nation state, presenting sovereign cyberstates and network states as an alternative order for the post-Westphalian era. Physical and e-reader editions of the book will be available for purchase in early 2025 (preorders coming soon) but also made freely available – because ideas should never be caged behind a paywall.
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A blueprint for a blockchain-based social order
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 settlement not only ended the conflict but made sovereign nation states a permanent fixture in our world. It was a solution in which everyone agreed that what nation states do internally is their own business.
Sovereign nation states are human technologies that were designed to facilitate the peaceful organisation of human beings, solving for their ideological, political, and religious differences. However, they are technologies that are almost 380 years old and, like all technology of that era, perhaps not the optimal solutions available today.
Can we not do better? We believe that we can. Our solution will involve taking a deep dive into developments like blockchain technologies and smart contracts and showing how they can be productively applied to the project of cooperative human governance.
We believe – and the Farewell to Westphalia argues – that decentralised communities and blockchain governance (at every level) are not only feasible but are on the immediate horizon. Furthermore, the seeds have already been planted. Logos' aim is to nurture those embryonic forms of blockchain governance and make its future adoption as frictionless as possible.
When they arrive, they will provide us relief from the failures of the Westphalian order, and they will offer creative alternatives for humans to govern themselves in effective-yet-self-sovereign ways. We should be optimistic about the promise of these new forms of governance. After all, we have nothing to lose but the tyranny of centralised governance, its corruption, and all of its barbed wire fences.
In making the case for blockchain governance,
the authors consider:
- The Cypherpunks, hacktivists, and other ideological forefathers of today’s cyberstate movement.
- How technologies like blockchain, zero-knowledge proofs, and artificial intelligence can lay the foundations of a more just social order.
- Where our vision overlaps with Balaji Srinivasan’s network states and where our ideas diverge.
- How corruption costs society trillions and is an inevitable consequence of centralisation, and how blockchain and crypto are the solution.
- The conceptual limits of blockchain technology.
- The concepts of rights and responsibilities as they relate to blockchain communities.
- Issues surrounding exit and exile from and access to network states and cyberstates.
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Farewell to Westphalia
by Jarrad Hope, Peter Ludlow