“Most people, given the choice, will pick order. But order alone doesn’t deliver rights. That depends on the character of the community behind the state—its sense of “we,” its willingness to restrain itself, its capacity to act together rather than fracture into tribes. That civic cohesion is the essence of nationhood, with a shared story and reciprocal obligations strong enough to hold a diverse democracy together.” (Sharp, 2026)
However, cohesion and reciprocal obligation does not require a nation-state, and existence of a nation-state does not guarantee them. The nation-state – “A project meant to speak for people” – increasingly struggles not only to “speak to them”, as Sharp’s comment continues, but now presumes to overtly dictate the terms of the relationship, an inversion of the liberal ideal to which Sharp’s ideology aspires.
Importantly, what the Sharps of the world fail to incorporate into their idealistic distortion of liberalism, a construction that bears more resemblance to conservatism than the program of progress that Sharp’s article openly castigates, is physical reality. As Michael Crichton’s Dr. Ian Malcolm explains in Jurassic Park (Crichton, 1990), and James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis demonstrate (Lovelock & Margulis, 1974), the entire world is a singular system. Activity in any given quarter affects the whole. As fans of the 1993 movie will recall, “A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park, you get rain instead of sunshine”. (Spielberg, 1993)
In the face of such understanding, the nation-state, along with its necessary precursor and product – nationalism, is obviously insufficient to the task. Retrenchment of national sovereignty and its attendant nationalism, fashionable as those terms are among every commentator to the right of progress, are a non-starter for anyone who has listened to the report from every single astronaut who ever returned to Earth. Put best by Ron Garan, astronaut on the International Space Station, “From space, I saw Earth not as a collection of nations, but as a single entity with one destiny.” (Perring, 2023)
The problem lies not with cosmopolitism or universalism, but with elite capture. As Sharp notes, “What began as the modest, civilizational minimum of the 1948 Universal Declaration has grown into an intricate thicket of hundreds of treaty rights—rules drafted far from the publics expected to live under them.” This owes not to a technocratic project aimed at subsuming individual liberties, minimizing the United States’ place in the world order, or realizing some global utopia. It is rooted directly in the neoliberal incursion of elite interests on the rights and resources rightfully belonging to the rest of the world.
The political philosophies of the 18th Century are incompatible with the 21st. For the demos, they are not alignments, they are ideologies, in the Marxian sense of the term. That is to say, they are systems of thought used to rationalize material class relations. There remains, of course, a place for both liberal and conservative policies: tariffs and monopoly objectively run counter to the public good; the accumulated wisdom embedded in institutions and traditional practices contains demonstrable value. But any clarion call espousing a return to liberal or conservative ideals as the cure-all for what ails the world screams “watch out”. Progress and universality hold the only path forward.
Sharp claims that “What the moment requires is not another round of international invention”. In this, he is not incorrect. His observation that progress requires “a recalibration that protects the essential floor of rights while recognizing that the work of building moral and political order happens closer to the ground” is both accurate and useful. Where his logic goes awry, however, is in founding this recalibration in a retrenchment of neoliberalism and the sovereign nation-state.
According to Sharp, “the nation remains the largest form of belonging capable of sustaining the loyalty required to deliver social services, enforce laws, and preserve basic order”. As any observer of history can attest, this is decidedly untrue. The Persian, Roman, and British empires held sway over much greater domains than any nation-state in history. Forms of social organization have evolved throughout history, with the nation-state merely being the most current, and by no means preeminent, example.
It is not known what “the largest form of belonging capable of sustaining the loyalty required to deliver social services, enforce laws, and preserve basic order” might be. Humanity is likely the conceptual limit. What is known is that the nation-state is neither the ideal nor the most effectual formulation. And this current wave of nationalism espoused by the likes of Sharp will no better serve the cause of humanity or progress than any of those that came before it.
References
Sharp, D. (2026, January 16). Why Human Rights Depend on the Nation State. Persuasion. Retrieved February 19, 2026, from https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-human-rights-depend-on-the-nation
Crichton, M. (1990). Jurassic Park. Knopf.
Spielberg, S. (Director). (1993). Jurassic Park [Film]. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/.
Lovelock, J., & Margulis, L. (1974). Atmospheric homeostasis by and for the biosphere: the gaia hypothesis. Tellus. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.2153-3490.1974.tb01946.xPerring, C. (2023, March 27). 10 Astronaut Quotes on the Overview Effect. EarthscapeVR.com. https://www.earthscapevr.com/10-astronaut-quotes-on-the-overview-effect