Hey everyone—
Welcome to The Under Report, your weekly intelligence brief about the stories that move the world without making headlines. Today we're getting weird with a topic near and dear to my heart: statecraft.

I spent a year living in unrecognized countries to find out what a nation was in the first place. In the end, I wrote a travel book called You Are Not Here Travels Through Countries That Don't Exist. I'm currently working on a new project which asks similar questions. Below is a sneak peek.

— Eric

Before 1648 Europe resembled a patchwork quilt of duchies, bishoprics, mercantile leagues, and roaming mercenary bands. It was basically dungeons and dragons. Allegiance flowed to princes, popes, guilds—or whoever could keep you alive that season. The problem was that all the elites were related, or at the very least knew each other. Borders were suggestions; sovereignties overlapped like badly drawn Venn diagrams, and ordinary people paid in blood for elite squabbles.

Westphalia: Because Europe needed to stop killing Europe

The Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ War. It introduced a radical idea to the world territorial sovereignty. States would be equal actors recognized by fixed lines on a map. The treaty did not invent national self-determination (that ideal matures in the 19th century), but it embedded the idea that rulers should keep their swords on their own side of the fence. The result was a new operating system for Europe’s balance-of-power politics. By connecting power to the land and not the lord, it was easier to make peace than reach for the sword (again).

Why did a cartographic solution beat theology or feudalism? Power is always in flux between centralization and decentralization. It leaks out of empires and kingdoms when information and technology changes. The printing press demolished the Church’s information monopoly. Suddenly, no one needed a priest to tell them the word of god. Gutenberg Bibles, vernacular pamphlets, and Luther’s 95 Theses multiplied mutually exclusive “truths,” and when truth fragments, violence follows. As institutions lost control of narrative, a single, territorially anchored authority became the least-bad way to keep the peace. There is no perfect system, history advances when we try to do less harm.

Despite two world wars and a Cold one, Western Europe has enjoyed its longest interval without great-power war—nearly 80 years and counting. This is thanks to economic integration, NATO deterrence, and the EU’s technocratic glue. That stability rests on the nation-state’s ability to channel conflict into law, trade, and diplomacy. But, technology is changing rapidly. Between the internet, social media, digital currencies, and artificial intelligence, we are in the midst of a decentralization explosion.

For some, this leaves them looking at their nation like a subscription service they didn't ask to be born into.

Where Gutenberg freed the word, the browser liberates everything else. Code, crypto, memes, and capital zip across borders in milliseconds, while supply chains loop the globe. Anthropologist David Graeber noted that “borders are imaginary lines backed by not-so-imaginary weapons.” He famously asked, "if they make so much sense, then why do we have to defend them with guns?” The harder we police imaginary lines, the clearer it is that their economic logic is fading.

Cue the billionaire jet-set. With a few million euros, a Maltese “golden passport” buys you Schengen mobility and EU banking; nations from St. Kitts to Greece run similar vending machines for sovereignty. At the lower end of the price spectrum are the so-called passport bros who arbitrage their lifestyles making New York wages while living in Bali or Mexico City. Loyalty now has a price tag and there is a race on for the best tax base.

William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson foresaw this shift in The Sovereign Individual (1997), arguing that digital technology would let wealth exit high-tax jurisdictions and force states to compete for citizens the way startups chase talent.⁵ Twenty-seven years later, decentralized autonomous organizations write bylaws in Solidity, Bitcoin whales self-custody fortunes beyond any capital-controls regime, and Elon Musk crowdsources diplomacy on X. Territory still matters, but it is no longer the only—or even primary—anchor of power.

If geography loses its monopoly on legitimacy, what fills the vacuum? Possibilities include:

None of this will be tidy. Rule by algorithm risks opacity and capture; transnational oligarchies could widen inequality; and states (especially nuclear-armed ones) will not retire gracefully. But history never ends, it only forks.

We’ve left the feudal Middle Ages and may be exiting the Westphalian era. In Part II we’ll sketch how law, security, and identity might function when the map stops matching the territory—and why the demise of the nation-state could be as liberating for some as it is terrifying for others.

Eric Czuleger is a journalist and travel writer who has lived and worked in over 47 countries. He holds a masters degree from the University of Oxford and he is completing a National Security degree from the RAND school of public policy. He's the author of You Are Not Here: Travels Through Countries That Don’t Exist, and host of the “This Is Not a PsyOp” TikTok channel.

📚 Liked today’s brief? Dive deeper—check out my book You Are Not Here: Travels Through Countries That Don't Exist and explore the world’s unrecognized countries.

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