Farewell to Westphalia
Crypto Sovereignty and Post-Nation-State Governance
What will come after the 400-year-old nation-state system? What will the transition look like, and who will benefit? Has this revolution already started, coming out of the depths of the internet? Farewell to Westphalia is a visionary exploration of what is likely to succeed nation states, from sovereign cyberstates to parallel societies and internet native movements, backed by the authors’ decades of combined experience on the frontlines.
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Reader perspectives
“Farewell to Westphalia makes crystal clear that the nation state is no longer the best governance system for today's digital society.”
– Dr Bob de Wit, Society 4.0 author
“... nation states had a good run for a few centuries, but may not be able to deal with planetary challenges; so the vital question is what next? This book is a serious attempt at looking at its potential post-geographic successor.”
– Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation founder
“... a good explainer of the tech that will help emergent community models grow.”
– Scott Beyer, Reason Magazine
“... a compelling manifesto on the future of governance…] It's mind boggling how well-researched and multidisciplinary it is.”
– Frederico Ast, Kleros cofounder
About the Authors
Jarrad came to Bitcoin in early 2011 through agorism, countereconomics, and crypto anarchy. Seeing that Bitcoin could operate a monetary policy in a hostile environment, he began to view public blockchains as a voluntary social order, one that did not depend on a monopoly of violence.
From there, he participated in early attempts to generalise the Bitcoin script to advance institutional libertarianism, ultimately becoming an early contributor to Ethereum. While advancing privacy technologies through the development of the end-to-end encrypted and peer-to-peer private messaging client and super app Status, Jarrad realised that privacy technologies are not enough and now advocates for self-sovereign crypto networks and the realisation of a latent cypherpunk dream, the cryptostate. As the co-founder of Logos, Jarrad uses his experience to build censorship-resistant governance infrastructure. On these technical foundations, Logos is building a viable alternative to the nation state that addresses many of the faults of the current system.
Peter Ludlow entered the world of philosophy through a deep interest in linguistics, the philosophy of language and digital technologies. His early work in artificial intelligence and natural language processing showed him the cooperative part of language comprehension – an idea explored in his book, Living Words. This led him to make significant contributions to our understanding of how meaning is a shared, collaborative enterprise.
As a leading voice in the philosophy of mind and language, Peter has authored and contributed to influential works on the intersection of technology and society, including the seminal anthology on how cyberspace is poised to impact human organisation, Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias. His current focus is on the potential for digital platforms to foster self-sovereign communities and new, decentralised-yet-collaborative social orders.
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, designed to facilitate the peaceful organisation of human beings and 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 involves diving deep into developments like blockchain technologies and smart contracts, and showing how they can be productively applied to cooperative human governance.
We believe – and 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 their future adoption as frictionless as possible.
When they arrive, they will provide us relief from the failures of the Westphalian order and 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.
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