I have had similar ideas, and I think they make a lot of sense. Sure, there
is a lot of devils lurking in the details to think of when designing
scenarios like this, and the problem of getting there from here.
As I see it, what is really needed for this to function is a kind of
constitution/operating system for inter-community relations. This is the
area currently called international law, although it is not obvious what
the likely or optimal size of the communities would be and whether current
international or national laws could be extended to them, or if an entirely
new level of the legal system is needed. The proposed system clearly needs
some agreed on rules, but it seems that to make it practical they have to
be as minimalist and simple as possible. Compare this to my earlier
discussions of having a minimalist universal ethics in a society to
guarantee rights, with the ethics of individual put on top of this; in this
case the inter-community constitution would be similar to the minimalist
ethics and mainly deal with guaranteeing the rights of people and
communities, but not prescribing their internal structure - that is left to
their internal rules.
Can this kind of system emerge? I think so. I don't think many states will
voluntarily divide into this kind of system, even if there are some
examples of giving subcultures and ethnicities greater autonomy. A more
likely path of development would be the current increase in the creation of
small states and quasi-independent zones. This way international law can be
used for bootstrapping working relationships, but clearly it won't just
happen by itself: there is a need to create multilateral treaties (and not
just a mess of bilateral ones and wordy biased UN proclamations) that lead
in this direction, a need to counteract the increasing attempts to stop
people from moving freely around, attempts to bind together regions into
firmer superstates (which are the exact opposite of this suggested system -
the EU seems to try to make the member states more similar than trying to
make interfacing between them easier) and of course an understanding that
such a "federation of communities" is a better system than the current
anarchy of states.
There isn't any need to try this across the entire world at once, but it
can be started on a relatively small scale and then develop (both by more
communities/nations joining, and possibly by the creation of smaller
sub-communities if it appears promising locally). There could even be
different approaches to how the "federations" would be constituted, and we
could see what worked best.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat May 11 2002 - 17:44:31 MDT