An Epic length essay of mine in which I lay out my theory of history and why briefly summarized: The Age of the nation state is almost certainly coming to an end under the corroding forces of decentralizing military technology and institutional decay.
The future will not resemble post French Revolution centralized governments asserting their control over each other, but rather will slowly come to resemble the Greek City states (misnomer) or the Holy roman empire's vast network of thousands of polities and war making entities.
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Notes -
Why are any of these extreme outcomes more likely than say, governments inflating away their obligations like so many have done before?
I encourage you to look up what happened in Weimar. Women being paid out on their husband's life insurance in a some of money that wouldnt buy dinner for 1 night. Mother's prostituting their daughters to afford food, the elderly starving in the street.
"Inflating it away" would be an effective default on all welfare, social security, insurance, and effective theft of all bank account balances.
It would be just as horrifying and violent an imposition it'd just be the elite and government imposing 100% of the cost on the middle class and poor. Most likely it'd result in civil war
Their obligations were denominated in gold marks and hard goods, and were impossible to inflate away with paper marks?
Screwing over our creditors and beneficiaries, and the middle class and the poor in the process (and the rich, too: capital "gains" taxes on purely-nominal gains still takes a bite out of people who can keep less of their savings cash-denominated, and the second-order effects are going to suck for everybody) ... obviously all that wouldn't be a good thing, but it would at least be an option.
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