A world composed of city-states

Malone

With all the various ethnic/cultural secessionist movements that still exist in this day and age, it has me thinking maybe people are by nature more drawn to living in smaller autonomous communities, as opposed to being part of larger nation states.

Can anyone think of a scenario where today instead of the 190 odd nations in the world, there exists several hundreds if not thousands of independent city-states?
 

Escape Zeppelin

1. The only remotely feasible situation I can think of is if a weird nobility culture becomes dominant. A leader might unify a territory but it's divided up into separate territories for each descendant to rule and divided again, and again...

Really though there not much chance of this becoming the norm as it would radically rewrite history and be incredibly difficult to maintain. Larger states have too much of an advantage over the smaller. Historically, independent city states have been the exception in a trend toward larger nations even in antiquity.

2. Much more amusing, every town and city has nuclear weapons and are willing to use them to defend their sovereignty. MAD looks even worse when you only have one or two cities.
 

Gurroruo

Malone said:
With all the various ethnic/cultural secessionist movements that still exist in this day and age, it has me thinking maybe people are by nature more drawn to living in smaller autonomous communities, as opposed to being part of larger nation states.

Can anyone think of a scenario where today instead of the 190 odd nations in the world, there exists several hundreds if not thousands of independent city-states?
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WWIII begins in 1946. The Russians pummel and conquer Europe. Britain retains independence though. IN the East the Chinese with a Russian intervention win as Communists and conquer much of Asia. Korea is united under a Communist government. Japan which is still uneasy under the rule of the US rebels and ousts the Americans. Communists rise in the Americas and Africa and the Communist revolution in Greece succeeds. Communist Balkan countries with aid of USSR invade Turkey. So basically Europe goes Communist, Middle East becomes like Afghanistan, Africa is split amongst capitalist and communists, same in the Americas. In the USA, Britain, and Canada they are fine. So with that USA and Britain drop there atom bombs and USSR drops theirs. WIth that the world falls apart and then in the following chaos city states devlop world wide
 

Dathi THorfinnsson

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the world WERE composed of city states. How do you prevent City A from conquering City B, creating the kingdom of AB? Then it goes to war with the kingdom of CD...

Look at Mesopotamia or Egypt. You DID start out with city states, which merged, oneway or another, usually by conquest, into kingdoms and then empires.

How do you set up a system where citystates win out, regularly, and over multiple civilizations?

Heck, even the Hellenic civilization founded on individual citystates separated by geography eventually succumbed to empires. Note that Rome, Epirus and Macedon were borderer, where the geography did not force them into staying citystates, which sealed the doom of Hellenic= citystate.
 
9 Fanged Hummingbird

9 Fanged Hummingbird

I can't think of that many situations IOTL where city states arose at all. You have the early city-state societies in Greece, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, the latter two being unified rather early and Greece falling to empires in its own turn. Then there were the Italian city-states of the medieval period that arose from a collapse of an empire before eventually coalescing back into a more unified state. The Maya contrary to popular belief weren't really organized into city-states and definitely didn't seem to consider themselves as such. So unless there's a slew of other examples I'm missing, you'd have to pretty much change almost the whole world to fit that early system of political organization. Which doesn't seem possible since most people I'm sure didn't live in cities. What are these hypothetical city-states going to do when an equivalent to the nomadic, pastoral Mongols who didn't need urbanization come storming down upon them? Besides dying, of course, which would nix the idea of city-states across the world.
 

Falecius

9 Fanged Hummingbird said:
I can't think of that many situations IOTL where city states arose at all. You have the early city-state societies in Greece, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, the latter two being unified rather early and Greece falling to empires in its own turn. Then there were the Italian city-states of the medieval period that arose from a collapse of an empire before eventually coalescing back into a more unified state. The Maya contrary to popular belief weren't really organized into city-states and definitely didn't seem to consider themselves as such. So unless there's a slew of other examples I'm missing, you'd have to pretty much change almost the whole world to fit that early system of political organization. Which doesn't seem possible since most people I'm sure didn't live in cities. What are these hypothetical city-states going to do when an equivalent to the nomadic, pastoral Mongols who didn't need urbanization come storming down upon them? Besides dying, of course, which would nix the idea of city-states across the world.
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Bronze Age Levant and its Iron Age continuation in Phoenicia are another example, possibly the longest-lasting one, but they too ended up swallowed by larger empires, and indeed the system can be said to have survived so long by being the hegemonic cover of Imperial powers such as Egypt, the Hittites or Mitanni.
 

January First-of-May

Escape Zeppelin said:
2. Much more amusing, every town and city has nuclear weapons and are willing to use them to defend their sovereignty. MAD looks even worse when you only have one or two cities.
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So basically Culvana?
(I wonder if anyone will get that reference...)
Seriously, basically what Dathi said. City-states tended to group into bunches even when they were technically still city-states for a good part of known human history (Arzawa, Delian League, Franconian Circle...)
 
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