Yes, let’s abolish federal governments

And replace them with international governments we can join à la carte.

This is my contribution to Post Nation, seven writers exploring a world after nation-states. Support the project by collecting the series as a digital or print pamphlet. 👇🏻

“Canada should join the EU.”

That was the suggestion made by former German foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel when Donald Trump took office in 2025. The idea was quickly backed by former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt. A poll later found nearly 60% of Canadians open to it.

Canada sends 75% of its exports to the US and with the US slapping tariffs on every shipment, the country was staring down a barrel of economic ruin. Joining the EU would give them a favorable alternative—free movement of goods, services, and capital between countries, and the ability to trade and negotiate as a much larger bloc.

The EU’s mutual defense clause is similarly appealing. With the US wavering on NATO, Europe’s version ensures that an attack on any is an attack on all, with countries agreeing to respond “by all means in their power.” That is a much stronger trigger than NATO, where each member country can voluntarily choose what help to send.

As a bilingual country, with a parliamentary system and a social-democratic welfare model, Canada seems like it would be a good fit for the EU.

The only reason it can’t join is because Canada does not qualify as a “European state” under Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union. Morocco was turned away on the same grounds in 1987. But the idea has been floated enough that it’s worth considering whether federal layers like the EU should be open beyond geographic bounds. Or as I prefer: whether countries should be able to join part of a federal layer without joining all of it. Canada, after all, might want to join a tariff-free trade agreement or a national defense clause, but be less enticed to adopt the EURO or place the EU court system above theirs.

Why shouldn’t Canada be able to join some, but not all of the EU?

That is already happening. In 2017, Canada joined CETA, a free trade agreement which nearly eliminates tariffs with the EU. When the EU launched Readiness 2030, a plan for Europe to become militarily autonomous from the US, Canada became the only non-European country to join parts of it, like SAFE, which provides low-interest loans to member states for weapons procurement and allows Canadian companies join EU countries in weapons deals. Japan applied too, and is currently under review. South Korea is expected to follow.

This is new. More than at any time in history, countries are joining federal governments that are not their own.

Europe has been particularly innovative here, where federalism has long been à la carte. Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein participate in European trade through EFTA and EEA agreements without participating in the EU. Twenty-nine European countries participate in the Schengen agreement, allowing free movement of people across borders, without necessarily being part of the EU: Switzerland shares open borders with other European countries without being a member of the EU. Ireland and Cyprus are EU countries that do not share open borders with other Schengen countries.

Europe’s new military plan, Readiness 2030, has been particularly à la carte. No single European country participates in every component—each one chooses the parts that best fit their priorities. All 27 EU members participate in the mutual defense clause, for example, but Ireland, Austria, Cyprus, and Malta—which claim neutrality—get caveats. The Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) is a particularly à la carte framework—it’s basically a menu for defense projects, with countries deciding which ones they want to sign on to, fund, and participate in.

This, I think, is the future of federal governance. We shouldn’t be making the EU bigger; we should be separating it into parts that countries can join à la carte.

We should even create new layers that can expand beyond geographic territories: Like CANZUK, a proposal to share open borders, tariff-free trade, and defense cooperation between Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. It’s basically an intercontinental EU, and it’s incredibly popular: 72% of Canada supports it, as does 70% of the UK, 75% of New Zealand, and 68% of Australia. Under the proposed agreement, a Canadian could move to New Zealand with ease, as could an Australian to the UK.

This structure is highly unique—it’s Europe’s open borders agreement combined with its free trade agreements, and new shared defense strategy—but between several continents, not just one of them.

For the first time in history, we are creating new federal governments that countries around the world can join regardless of location.

And that could allow smaller countries to secede from their heavy national federal governments and join lighter-weight international ones instead.

Norway gives us a good example of what that could look like. The country seceded from Sweden in 1905 and has since assembled, piece by piece, membership in more than 5 different international layers without joining the EU itself. A Norwegian citizen today has open borders with 28 other European countries through Schengen, the right to live and work across 30 countries through EEA, and free trade with more than 30 countries through EFTA and the EEA. All while they retain their sovereignty, keep their own currency, and manage their own foreign policy.

Why shouldn’t more countries do the same? Why shouldn’t a world of small nations join federal governments à la carte, rather than be stuck with the whole menu?

Now, more than ever before in history, we have a way to do that.

We should decouple federal governance from nation-states

In the last 100 years, we’ve established not just the EU, NATO, and the Schengen Zone, but also the Council of Europe, which has produced more than 200 treaties countries can individually opt into. The European Convention on Human Rights, most famously, binds 46 countries to a shared human rights floor even as they have no obligation to share currency, trade policy, military command, or political institutions—even Brexit didn’t pull Britain out of it.

In force since 1953, the treaty protects the right to life, liberty, and a fair trial. It guarantees freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and freedom of assembly. It protects democracy and free elections. Most importantly: it’s enforceable. Citizens in any member state can sue their government at the Court in Strasbourg if they believe their rights have been violated—it receives some 30,000 applications each year and has issued more than 20,000 judgements. Including the forced decriminalization of homosexuality across Europe, accountability for the British when their soldiers in Iraq resulted in civilian deaths, and the reversal of Turkey’s block on Google’s hosting services, which the court ruled a breach of freedom of expression.

The Basel Convention—joined by every country in the world except the United States, East Timor, Fiji, Haiti, San Marino, and South Sudan—ensures hazardous and plastic waste isn’t dumped in the ocean or left on another country’s shores. It achieves this by regulating shipments—the exporting country must notify the importing country in writing, and the importing country must give written consent of the shipment. Even the US, which doesn’t participate, is subject to agreement terms by default. Because no country will accept them, US waste shipments become “criminal traffic as soon as the ships get on the high seas.” And because insurers won’t cover shipments that violate international rules, the regime forces the US to get on board.

I could go on and on: ICAO regulates air travel between all countries—if a country’s safety oversight is below standards, foreign carriers won’t fly there. IMO works similarly for marine shipping regulations, with 176 member states signed on. ITU decides which radio frequencies are used for mobile phones, which for the military, and so on, all agreed upon by the world. ICANN governs the internet—domain names and IP addresses—it began as a California nonprofit before it spun out of the US and became an independent federal layer in 2016.

Each of these governing layers is lightweight, meaning they govern one specific thing: border control, for example, or aviation safety. They are also advantageous to join—a small country could get a lot out of joining NATO where it suddenly has access to a much larger military defense than it would on its own, or by joining the Schengen Zone, which allows small countries to share open borders. By comparison, nation-states as governing bodies are quite heavy—they dictate quite a lot of the lives we live from human rights to the economy, from military to education, from healthcare to immigration. For a big country like the United States to have one federal government managing all of those things is incredibly cumbersome. And so long as you are a US state, you are stuck with the entire menu.

That doesn’t mean Europe gets everything right. It has struggled in a middle ground for years, operating either as every country for itself or all of Europe together—both messy. Before the Euro, there were too many currencies for stability. And independent militaries meant each were doing its own thing—often incompatible with one another. Meanwhile, the EU requires unanimous agreement to move on just about anything, which meant Ireland could veto corporate taxes for their own gain and Hungary could block Russian sanctions or Ukraine aid.

It took geopolitical pressures for Europe to create something better. Motivated by Brexit, Russia’s war on Ukraine, and Donald Trump’s wavering support of NATO, countries throughout the continent decided to form a military bloc that would no longer rely on large supranational bodies like the US. That was the motivation to form PESCO. Countries can opt into the projects that fit their politics and skip the rest. One of the projects might be considered “Schengen for Tanks”—the “military mobility” project creates open borders for militaries. A “cyber rapid response team” is basically NATO for cyber attacks—if one country is attacked, all participating member countries respond to resolve it. The European Patrol Corvette is a cooperative of countries building warships together, the Eurodrone is the same for drones. Twister is a long-range space-based early detection system designed for hypersonic missiles. In each case, member countries sign on, pool funding, build together, and share the IP.

The result is not one big military owned by one state. It’s many militaries, participated in by many states.

This is truly revolutionary. We’re talking about a decentralized military no longer tied to nation-states, mutually funded by and benefiting all participating states.

Think about what that does to power: projects become important and well-funded because nations collectively agree they are important and worth funding. That is the exact opposite of one government deciding on and funding a whole slate of military activities that benefit themselves alone.

That doesn’t mean international bodies always succeed—many fail. Particularly those where enforcement is voluntary, like the Paris Climate Accord. Or where key players are missing from participation, like the International Criminal Court, which is supposed to prosecute genocide and war crimes but, despite 125 participating member countries, doesn’t include the US, China, Russia, India, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea—all the countries doing the war crimes. Artemis similarly tried to set rules for the moon, but terms are favorable to the US and thus missing China and Russia. And then there’s corruption: the same Interpol data good guys use to put away bad guys has been used by authoritarian governments like Turkey, Russia, and China to pursue political dissidents or go after journalists and activists.

But the working case studies are many and worth expanding upon. Instead of having giant superstates that control nearly every aspect of government for the states in their geographic territory, why shouldn’t we offload that power to several more specialized branches? That’s what the political scientist Philippe Schmitter was arguing for when the European Union began consolidating power in the early 2000s. At the time, many wanted the EU to become more like the US—a consolidated European superstate that presided over all European countries—but Schmitter advocated for democratizing those government functions across several jurisdictions.

“Instead of a single Europe with recognized and contiguous boundaries,” he said at the time, “there would be many Europes: a trading Europe, an energy Europe, an environmental Europe, a social welfare Europe, even a defense Europe, and so forth.”

Europe has been steadily creating them, even breaking up the EU to accommodate a more piecemeal approach. As we learned from Brexit: Britain should have been able to opt into the EU’s economic trade and security and defense layers, while opting out of the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy which was disproportionately disadvantageous to Britain. The choice shouldn’t have been all of the EU or none of it. Now, like Norway, the UK is building back those same layers ad hoc—choosing which trade agreements, border controls, and military programs to join. Each layer negotiated separately.

Nations around the world should do the same.

A decade ago, a lot of this would have been impossible. But today we have options.

And those options might allow us to secede from national governments altogether.

We should secede from nation-states and join federal governments à la carte

Large nation-states like the US don’t do a good job at running the country in the best interest of citizens. The US federal government, after all, takes the whole country into debt to pay for things most states don’t even want. The result is high dissatisfaction. Just 22% trust the US federal government to do what’s right. Meanwhile, 61% trust their local governments! This same pattern unfolds internationally—just 33% of EU residents trust their national governments, even as 60% trust their local governments!

If we trust our local governments but not our federal governments, how come federal governments earn the majority of our tax dollars? In the US, 68% of our tax dollars go to the federal government, while only 19% goes to the state, and 13% to local governments. We need to flip that script: our tax dollars should go to the localities we trust to spend it right back on us, not a large federal government that will pilfer it on a wide range of activities we have no wish to fund.

One solution is to allow states and regions to secede from national governments, even as they join new governance layers à la carte. In fact, that should be an enforced part of secession planning—that so long as smaller governments opt into larger layers of governance that enforce human rights, allow them to negotiate as a trade bloc, and participate in military support, they can effectively govern themselves much more.

We already have a textbook example that seceding entities can follow. In 1993, Czechoslovakia peacefully split into two countries. Both were immediately recognized by the UN and quickly joined the Council of Europe. Czechia joined NATO in 1999, Slovakia in 2004. Both joined the EU in 2004, though Slovakia adopted the Euro while Czechia didn’t. Separation, in this case, wasn’t a risk. It was a well-thought-out plan, with economic and military treaties negotiated in advance over a span of many months. They created two new countries, but both immediately belonged to a wealth of international federal layers that would hold them accountable and grant them access to larger trade blocs that would help them be successful.

Similarly, after Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania declared independence from the USSR in 1991, they joined Western layers instead. By 2004, all three had joined the EU, NATO, and the Council of Europe. Later they joined Schengen and the Eurozone. When Montenegro split from Serbia in 2006, it joined the UN and the Council of Europe within a year, followed by NATO and an application to the EU. Before that, Finland peacefully left Russia in 1917, and Norway peacefully seceded from Sweden in 1905. Perhaps most radically, after it seceded from Denmark in 1944, the tiny island of Iceland, with less than 400,000 people, became one of the world’s most heavily layered nations, part of Schengen, EEA, and NATO, even though they never joined the EU.

Iceland is proof even the tiniest countries can become part of a larger à la carte stack, and participate on the world’s stage even as they remain independent!

It’s easy to see what polities could be next. Scotland has long contemplated secession from the UK for the very reason that it wants to pick and choose which governing bodies it participates in. A 2014 whitepaper outlined the country’s desire to no longer fund nuclear projects, even as it wished to remain part of defense campaigns. In 2014 residents voted to stay in the UK by 55%, but after Brexit, secession attempts have been renewed. A 2022 update detailed Scotland’s desire to leave the UK even as they hope to rejoin the EU.

This kind of modular governance should allow countries to leave and join the governments of their choice—some countries, however, don’t allow it. Catalonia, for one, has long desired to secede from Spain, but the country has blocked them at every turn. Catalonia even declared independence in 2017, but Spain called it a rebellion, imprisoned leaders, and vowed to block the region’s entrance into the EU if they tried. As a result, it would be economically ruinous for Catalonia to leave, not to mention violent. For Spain too.

But it could be the opposite.

Why couldn’t both governments negotiate terms of secession that are beneficial to both? Catalonia could leave Spain and become an autonomous country, under the condition that it pays a quota to a new Spanish governing body that provides social services and manages foreign affairs. Spain’s Basque and Navarre regions already work like that—why not bring those terms to a secession movement? A future Spain in which regions formally secede from the country could also see them rejoining a new Spanish layer that provides for the greater whole. At the same time, regions could outsource some of the things the Spanish government currently provides to international bodies like EFTA.

Spain, in this case, would become like a mini EU, but without needing to provide nearly as much.

Interestingly, 49% of Europeans trust the EU. That means they trust the large supranational body more than their own national government. Why? Because it handles only the functions outsourced to it, not the everyday functions of their lives.

In North America, it’s trickier. Quebec has often proposed secession from Canada—in 1995, residents decided against it by less than a 1% margin. Alberta separatist movements have also picked up steam in recent years. But Canada is one sovereign entity and doesn’t yet have all of the separate governance layers Europe has. The same is true of the US, where all federal operations come from one giant supergovernment and secession is illegal. For states to secede from Canada or the US, they would need to be able to join new federal layers that don’t already exist—a US inter-state trade deal, perhaps, or a Schengen-like agreement that keeps borders open between states or provinces, as well as an assortment of military agreements states could participate in.

Excitingly, US states are starting to form those layers. As the US federal government covers less and less, new entities are stepping up to cover more and more. The US Climate Alliance, for instance, is a new coalition of 24 states that have adopted the Paris Climate Accords independently of the federal government’s actions. They even participate in UN climate summits as an independent bloc, representing 55% of the US population and 60% of the US economy. Similarly, the Western Climate Initiative has created a carbon market between California, Washington, New York, and Quebec, without national government involvement.

As we continue to create new governance layers states can join ad hoc; they will become better equipped to operate without the federal government at all.

There are two ways we could get there, and I think both are viable, perhaps even inevitable. The first is that the federal layers created in Europe and around the world extend beyond geographic boundaries. That’s already happening, as evidenced by Readiness 2030. The second is that we create new federal layers that do the same, like CANZUK. The combined trend is unstoppable: as federal governments shrink, the new layers replacing them grow—completely independent from nation-states.

In the future, a seceding US state might join the Human Rights Convention or the EU’s mutual defense clause. It might join a US version of EFTA for trade or Schengen for borders. It might join CANZUK to have open borders with Canada and New Zealand and Australia, or participate in the US Climate Alliance or an independent FEMA that funds aid for natural disasters. The seceding state would enjoy all the same things they currently rely on big federal governments like the US for, but now they don’t need the US federal government at all.

States around the world could secede under similar conditions, choosing what borders to share, what military blocks to join, and what climate agreements to participate in.

They could become like Iceland—small, autonomous, but still global.

As we continue to create new federal layers, secession can become, not a risky rebellion, but a peaceful evolution. States could negotiate with federal governments, with the terms of secession contingent on participation in larger layers. Referendums in each state could put it to a vote: should we leave our country and join these federations instead?

As Nathan Schneider says in his essay “Lighten the load of the nation-state,” “If people have opportunities to be part of more kinds of jurisdictions, they can put less stock in any one jurisdiction. They can keep identifying most with their nation-states, which can then focus on being great at governing their particular territory, or they can exchange that layer for other ones. The ethnonationalist fantasy has less to offer if the nation is no longer the only hope for change. A constellation of new jurisdictions is globalist, but it is also localist and more.”

We should decentralize global superpowers

A world that does this will empower nation-states to focus on what they are actually good at—creating a good quality of life for the people who live there—even as it disempowers our highly centralized and morally problematic “world superpowers.”

One big country with one big military, that’s also a complex bucket of ideologies and economic policies and national interests, shouldn’t get to rule the whole world. Instead, decentralized layers of governance should.

A bloc of many countries, after all, is much more powerful than any one country alone, and that’s a good thing! In October of 2021, an unprecedented 140 countries agreed to a minimum corporate tax rate of 15% globally. Suddenly, Apple, Google, and Amazon couldn’t route their profits through Ireland or the Cayman Islands. There was nowhere they could hide their money—tax avoidance collapsed! No single country could have done that alone, but together they coalesced for the greater good.

The best federal layers, after all, are the ones most countries join, and those become the hardest to compete with. This is why NATO and the EU’s mutual defense clause are so powerful—it’s not one country defending itself, but many. Going against Poland became a lot riskier. It’s also why ICANN can’t be dismantled—Russia has been trying to make state control of the internet happen for 20 years, but too many countries rely on ICANN to defect from it and join a more state-specific version.

Even if nations don’t participate, they find themselves subject to blocs with the most momentum. The EU is a market of 450 million wealthy consumers—no company would willingly give up that market. As a result, when the EU passes regulations like data protection laws, bans on single-use plastics, the adoption of the USB-C charging device as a standard, and environmental regulations, a multinational company has two options: build a separate EU-only product or apply EU rules to global operations. More often than not, the latter is the more economical option.

Known as the “Brussels Effect,” this means companies adopt EU rules globally, and EU rules become the de facto world standard. Apple was forced to adopt USB-C, McDonald’s and Starbucks were forced to reduce plastic use, and global EV makers had to redesign batteries for recyclability. If they wanted to sell their products in Europe, it was the only thing to do.

Continuing this decoupling will be how we solve some of the greatest challenges yet to come. Giant superpowers are currently rushing toward AI doom all so we can beat other countries to it and best them in the next world war. But that thinking completely misses the point that we could avoid war altogether if we create federal layers that can effectively govern these institutions together.

Naturally, Europe is already building it. The EU’s AI Act is one of the most ambitious pieces of AI legislation, banning AI use in circumstances with “unacceptable risk,” like building facial recognition databases for surveillance. It also regulates AI use in “high-risk” circumstances, such as when used for critical systems like power grids and water. Even in “limited” or “minimal” risk scenarios, deepfakes must be marked as synthetic and AI-generated content must be labeled. A system of fines enforces all of the above.

The Brussels effect is already in action—as of early 2026, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have all signed the GPAI Code of Practice, committing to meet the act’s guidelines. Meta refused to sign, even as it adapted its products to AI Act standards. They have to, or they’d miss out on the European market.

Now, the superpowers still throw their weight around a lot. China chooses not to participate in human rights organizations and completely ignores attempts to enforce them. The US pulls out of the WHO, the Paris Agreement and the Iran Nuclear Deal, or refuses to participate in climate initiatives or women’s rights initiatives. Both countries are large enough that they could choose not to participate in any number of international treaties and veto the larger effect. And they do! What good is a bunch of countries agreeing to uphold AI safety regulations if the largest choose not to?

This is exactly the dynamic we are trying to disrupt. Only decentralized blocs can hold the world’s superpowers to account, and they have over and over again. As evidenced when the WTO thwarted China’s rare earth monopoly, and 140 countries outmaneuvered the US’s attempts to gain an exemption from the global corporate tax. As evidenced by constraints on China’s chip market, which were coordinated by Netherlands and Japan. As evidenced by every World Trade ruling that forced the US to end behaviors that harmed other world economies. The rest of the world can do a lot of good against even the largest forces, and that’s exactly what they should continue to do.

The creation of more and better layers of governance should eventually break those large governments into parts, even as we reassemble them without nations. As countries come together to agree on this regulation or that war, we shift risk away from centralized national interests in favor of decentralized international interests. Economic policies, military policies, environmental policies, and AI regulation—these shouldn’t be in the purview of one giant government that controls them all, but should be handled by independent governance layers that tackle each of them individually. And acting together!

We’re creating that already.

By creating independent layers of government smaller governments can adhere to, states and regions can peacefully secede from their larger cumbersome governments, even as they add lightweight layers that ensure they treat everyone well, can trade internationally and grow their economies, and can protect one another on the world stage.

In the future, Canada won’t need to join the EU, Alberta could join EFTA. The US won’t need to manage everything from borders to disaster relief; Utah could join a US Schengen and Texas could join FEMA. All of these secessions and re-affiliations could be negotiated case-by-case to work for the best benefit of the leaving and joining party.

Europe, after all, has a long history of peaceful secession. The institutions that made that possible didn’t exist a century ago. But they were built, layer by layer, to coordinate a more autonomous world.

We should keep going, building federal layers no longer limited to nation states, and that states and regions can join à la carte.