Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
Anyway, I don't think "anarchy" is a necessary precondition to te breakdown of nation state sovereignty. Any sub-state (or trans-national organization) can produce a breakdown in national sovereignty and often has. To my mind, it doesn't have to be rioting in the streets per se; it could be the complete de facto rewrite of state economic policy by multi-national corporations or organizations such as GATT and the WTO.
My point about significant anarchy was not to identify when nation states would start to break down. It was rather to identify when we might start to see the pendulum start to move back towards reaggregation of smaller units into regional cooperative organizations or governmental units.

I concur that the world is already witnessing the rise of intranational breakdowns. However it is still trying to manage that with international conglomerations (the EU, NATO, ASEAN, etc.), but even those are now starting to get frayed at the edges, as we see with national lelvel debates over such things as continued involvement in NATO ISAF missions. Gaining international consensus has started to become ever more difficult as the centralizing tendency is questioned even more by those "have nots" who see themselves as bill-payers for the excesses of the "haves."