What Happens To Nation States When Communities Connect Horizontally

The political theory of the nation-state rests on two claims that are both empirically questionable: that nations are natural units of human solidarity, and that sovereign territory is the appropriate container for political authority. Both claims were always contestable; horizontal connectivity makes them increasingly contested in practice.

The Historical Precedent: Pre-National Horizontal Organization

Before the nation-state, the dominant modes of horizontal organization were trade networks, religious communities, and kinship systems — all of which crossed what would become national borders.

The Hanseatic League (1358–1862) was a commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and market towns in northern Europe that operated across what are now Germany, Poland, Russia, the Baltics, Scandinavia, and England. It had no territory, no standing army of its own, and no single government. What it had was a system of shared commercial law, mutual defense obligations, and a common network of trading relationships that made it one of the most powerful economic and political forces in medieval Europe. It dealt with kings as a peer, not a subject.

The medieval Islamic world operated through a network of scholars, merchants, and pilgrims connected by Arabic as a shared learned language and by the infrastructure of the Hajj pilgrimage. A scholar from Andalusia could study in Cairo, correspond with colleagues in Baghdad and Samarkand, and be understood and respected across a territory spanning from Spain to Central Asia — not because of any political authority but because of a horizontal network of shared knowledge and religious practice.

The Catholic Church in medieval Europe was the most powerful horizontal network of its era — connecting communities across hundreds of political jurisdictions through a shared institutional structure, shared language (Latin), shared legal system (canon law), and shared identity. When it wanted to prevent two nobles from going to war, it had mechanisms that crossed national lines in ways that no purely political institution could.

These were not utopias. They had their own hierarchies, exclusions, and coercions. But they demonstrate that horizontal organization at large scale is not a novelty introduced by the internet — it is a human organizational strategy with a long and sophisticated history that the nation-state temporarily suppressed.

How Horizontal Connectivity Actually Undermines State Functions

The nation-state performs a specific bundle of functions: territorial defense, internal law enforcement, economic regulation, provision of public goods, management of a currency, and the construction of collective identity. Horizontal community connections erode several of these functions without necessarily replacing them.

Currency and financial systems: The rise of cryptocurrency is the most obvious example, but it is not the most significant. More consequential is the development of informal remittance networks (hawala and its descendants) and the dominance of dollar-denominated global finance, which means that the financial decisions of the U.S. Federal Reserve affect every country on earth regardless of what those countries' governments want. Financial sovereignty — the ability of a state to independently manage its monetary affairs — is already substantially hollowed out for most countries.

Identity: Diaspora communities maintain dual or plural identities that do not map cleanly onto national citizenship. The estimated 25 million members of the Chinese diaspora maintain varying degrees of identification with China, with their countries of residence, and with a transnational Chinese cultural community that is distinct from both. This is not unique to Chinese diaspora — it characterizes Irish, Jewish, Indian, Lebanese, and many other communities worldwide. The nation-state's claim to be the primary container of political identity is empirically contested by the lived experience of hundreds of millions of people.

Standard-setting: Technical standards — for internet protocols, for product safety, for financial reporting, for pharmaceutical testing — are increasingly set by horizontal networks of technical experts, companies, and international bodies rather than by national governments. The IETF sets internet standards; IASB sets accounting standards; ISO sets product standards. These standards constrain what national regulators can do regardless of national political preferences.

Norm-setting: The most consequential and least studied erosion of state function is in norm-setting. Human rights norms, environmental standards, labor practices, and anti-corruption standards are increasingly set by a global civil society that operates across borders and exerts pressure on states through reputational mechanisms, investor behavior, and consumer choices. A company that violates human rights norms faces pressure not just from its home government but from a global horizontal network of NGOs, investors, journalists, and consumers. This network doesn't have legal authority, but it has genuine power.

Cities as the Most Important Horizontal Actors

The most consequential horizontal connection currently reshaping the nation-state system is not between individuals or civil society organizations but between cities.

Cities are where most humans now live (55% globally, rising to 68% by 2050). They are where economic production concentrates, where cultural innovation originates, and increasingly, where political experimentation happens. And cities — particularly large ones — have interests that diverge from their national governments in systematic ways. Cities tend toward openness, cosmopolitanism, and economic integration with other global cities. National politics often tends toward the opposite.

The C40 Cities network, mentioned above, is the most developed expression of this horizontal city-to-city governance. But it is not the only one. The ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability) network includes over 2,500 local and regional governments in 125 countries. Metropolis, the World Association of Major Metropolises, connects 140 metropolitan governments. These networks allow cities to coordinate climate action, urban planning standards, housing policy, and public health responses across national borders.

This creates a genuinely new layer in the global governance architecture — one that doesn't replace nation-states but operates alongside and sometimes in tension with them. When the Trump administration withdrew from the Paris Agreement, cities and states organized the "We Are Still In" declaration, representing 3,500 American jurisdictions, companies, universities, and civil society organizations. The horizontal network partially substituted for the absent national commitment.

The limit of this model is enforcement. Cities cannot negotiate treaties, deploy militaries, or control borders. Their authority is real but constrained. What they can do is demonstrate that governance commitments survive changes in national political direction, coordinate implementation of shared goals, and create facts on the ground (renewable energy infrastructure, building standards, transit systems) that are difficult for subsequent national governments to reverse.

Benjamin Barber's "If Mayors Ruled the World"

Political theorist Benjamin Barber argued in 2013 that mayors are more pragmatic, less ideological, and more effective than national leaders precisely because they cannot afford ideology — they have to fix potholes. Whatever your politics, trash gets collected or it doesn't. This pragmatic pressure makes city governments more functional and more trustworthy than national governments on average.

Barber proposed a Global Parliament of Mayors as an alternative governance layer for global commons problems. The proposal remains institutionally marginal, but the underlying logic is gaining traction: cities are often better-positioned than nation-states to make and keep governance commitments on climate, housing, and public health, and horizontal city-to-city connections may be more effective than vertical national-to-national agreements on the issues that matter most.

Professional Communities as Horizontal Governance

The scientific community's response to COVID-19 demonstrated the power and the limits of horizontal professional governance. Within weeks of the SARS-CoV-2 genome being sequenced, it was shared globally via open-access platforms. Papers were posted to preprint servers before peer review, allowing rapid global scientific communication. Vaccine designs were shared across labs. The mRNA technology platform had been developed through decades of open scientific exchange across national borders.

At the same time, the failure of horizontal professional governance was equally visible: vaccine nationalism prevented equitable global distribution, the scientific community's communication with the public was mediated and often distorted by national political contexts, and the WHO — the supposed horizontal coordination mechanism for global health — was hamstrung by political conflicts between member states.

The lesson is not that horizontal professional governance doesn't work. It is that it works in specific domains — knowledge creation, technical standard-setting, professional norm maintenance — and fails in others, particularly resource distribution and enforcement. The combination of functional horizontal networks and dysfunctional vertical governance is not unique to COVID; it is the structural condition of the current moment.

The Long Game: What Replaces the Nation-State (If Anything)

The trajectory is not toward the abolition of nation-states. States retain coercive power, and coercive power is not obsolete. But the functional monopoly of nation-states — their claim to be the primary and sufficient organizational unit for human political life — is being empirically disproven by the proliferation of horizontal connections.

What seems to be emerging is a layered system: local communities, cities, regional networks, nation-states, and global horizontal communities all exercising overlapping and sometimes conflicting authority over different domains of life. This is messier than the Westphalian ideal, but it is arguably more robust — it has redundancy, it has competitive pressure, and it has the capacity to route around failures at any single layer.

The political philosophy that fits this emerging reality is not federalism (which remains within a national framework) but polycentricity — the idea, developed by Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom, that complex governance challenges are best addressed through multiple overlapping centers of authority rather than a single hierarchical system. Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for demonstrating that commons governance works best through polycentric, locally-adapted systems rather than either privatization or central state control.

That insight, applied at civilizational scale, suggests that the question is not whether horizontal community connections will challenge nation-states — they already do — but whether we can design the interaction between horizontal and vertical governance in ways that preserve what each does well while enabling the coordination that global challenges require.