The end of the nation-state

-->@oromagi

Competence precedes the nation-state necessarily.  Merit precedes the nation-state necessarily.  There were  noble kings and competent generals long before the Treaty of Westphalia.

Nobles or generals may have been seen as superior, or even had certain training as part of their position, but this is different from the modern concept of competence.

The Declaration of Independence asserts that nations may be formed artificially- that all government really just exists  by the consent of the governed and that dissatisfied people may dissolve all prior allegiance to kings and countries and choose instead to pledge our lives, honor, and fortunes to one another.

Regardless of what is asserted in liberal documents, any arbitrary mass of people today cannot simply dissolve and form new countries or nations at will, by force of assertion.  On what territory would they do so, and by whose authority?

These documents and the American people's expansive allegiance to all comers so inclined

Are you implying that the US has open borders?

You skipped a lot of my direct questions but I think I have some sense of your subject now- a kind of utopian global anarchy.  Are you promoting a specific ism or just keeping it super vague?

in what way?

Gould argues that the primary assumption underlying biological determinism is that, "worth can be assigned to individuals and groups by measuring intelligence as a single quantity". Biological determinism is analyzed in discussions of craniometry and psychological testing, the two principal methods used to measure intelligence as a single quantity. According to Gould, these methods possess two deep fallacies. The first fallacy is reification, which is "our tendency to convert abstract concepts into entities".[3] Examples of reification include the intelligence quotient (IQ) and the general intelligence factor (g factor), which have been the cornerstones of much research into human intelligence. The second fallacy is that of "ranking", which is the "propensity for ordering complex variation as a gradual ascending scale".

Unity seems to be the trick and I agree that borders and militaries are obstacles to that unity but I don't buy that societies survive long or well without some government. 

The issue is this liberal egalitarian fever dream that has infected most Western societies. If the idea is that everybody and every group are exactly the same or will succeed and do things at the same rates in the same societies, then every disparity must be blamed on somebody. If more women are nurses, it must be because some societal force is forcing them to do that. If more blacks live in poverty than Hispanics and Asians, it must be because of oppression, not any group difference in language, culture, etc.

@oromagi

You skipped a lot of my direct questions but I think I have some sense of your subject now- a kind of utopian global anarchy.  Are you promoting a specific ism or just keeping it super vague?

Libertarianism

in what way?

I have in mind concepts like "meritocracy" or "general intelligence"....

Unity seems to be the trick and I agree that borders and militaries are obstacles to that unity but I don't buy that societies survive long or well without some government. 

It seems that your main contention

is that I do not directly identify these tendencies toward unification with classical liberal texts. In fact, the classical liberal position was much more ambivalent - it is characterised essentially by a kind of hypocrisy, in the sense of a tension between its implicit and its explicit tenets.

"In the United States, libertarian was popularized by the individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker around the late 1870s and early 1880s.  Libertarianism as a synonym for liberalism was popularized in May 1955 by writer Dean Russell, a colleague of Leonard Read and a classical liberal himself. Russell justified the choice of the term as follows:

Many of us call ourselves "liberals." And it is true that the word "liberal" once described persons who respected the individual and feared the use of mass compulsions. But the leftists have now corrupted that once-proud term to identify themselves and their program of more government ownership of property and more controls over persons. As a result, those of us who believe in freedom must explain that when we call ourselves liberals, we mean liberals in the uncorrupted classical sense. At best, this is awkward and subject to misunderstanding. Here is a suggestion: Let those of us who love liberty trade-mark and reserve for our own use the good and honorable word "libertarian."

Subsequently, a growing number of Americans with classical liberal beliefs began to describe themselves as libertarians. One person responsible for popularizing the term libertarian in this sense was Murray Rothbard, who started publishing libertarian works in the 1960s.  Rothbard described this modern use of the words overtly as a "capture" from his enemies, writing that "for the first time in my memory, we, 'our side,' had captured a crucial word from the enemy. 'Libertarians' had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over".

In the 1970s, Robert Nozick was responsible for popularizing this usage of the term in academic and philosophical circles outside the United States, especially with the publication of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a response to social liberal John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971).  In the book, Nozick proposed a minimal state on the grounds that it was an inevitable phenomenon which could arise without violating individual rights."

My main contention is that nationality and ethnicity are closely intertwined concepts, and that is what I mean by the fact that the idea of a nation-state built on a foundation of universality and blindness to race, is contradictory and abstract.

"Many articles in [Ron Paul's} newsletters contained statements that were criticized as racist or homophobic. These statements include, "Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."  An October 1992 article said, "even in my little town of Lake Jackson, Texas, I've urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense... for the animals are coming."  Another newsletter suggested that black activists who wanted to rename New York City in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. should instead rename it "Welfaria," "Zooville," "Rapetown," "Dirtburg," or "Lazyopolis."  An article titled "The Pink House" said "I miss the closet. Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities."  Another newsletter asserted that HIV-positive homosexuals "enjoy the pity and attention that comes with being sick" and approved of the slogan "Sodomy=Death."

A number of the newsletters criticized civil rights movement activist Martin Luther King Jr., calling him a pedophile and "lying socialist satyr".  These articles told readers that Paul had voted against the Martin Luther King Jr. Day federal public holiday, saying "Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for that pro-communist philanderer, Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day."

So what do you envision besides state or capitalism? 

Given its frequent re-alignments, I think I could successfully argue that Libertarianism is far more ambivalent a concept than Liberalism.

Slavery is not something that persisted despite the success of the three liberal revolutions. On the contrary, it experienced its maximum development during that success [...] Contributing decisively to the rise of an institution synonymous with the absolute power of man over man was the liberal world. [...] To a greater or lesser extent, there survived in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies 'ancillary slavery', which is to be distinguished from 'systemic slavery, linked to plantations and commodity production'. And it was the latter type of slavery, established above all in the eighteenth century (starting from the liberal revolution of 1688 89) and clearly predominant in the British colonies, which most consummately expressed the de humanization of those who were now mere instruments of labour and chattels, subject to regular sale on the market.

This did not even involve a return to the slavery peculiar to classical antiquity. Certainly, chattel slavery had been widespread in Rome. Yet the slave could reasonably hope that, if not he himself, then his children or grandchildren would be able to achieve freedom and even an eminent social position. Now, by contrast, his fate increasingly took the form of a cage from which it was impossible to escape.

Language and culture are shaped by "societal forces," and the fact that "more blacks live in poverty" shapes their culture as well. Unless you are going to rely fully on biological determinism I don't know how you can get around the fact that "societal forces" contribute to social outcomes. Also I am not a liberal egalitarian, but I don't think liberals or egalitarians claim that "everybody and every group are exactly the same."

However, that is quite clearly false. While poor blacks and whites have a few similarities in culture, their overall cultures are quite distinct. Biology and group identity are big factors affecting culture.

When any negative racial disparity for a non-white group is blamed on "white supremacy" or "structural racism" or whatever other jibberish term they choose to use, they are proving that they believe that all groups will achieve the same outcomes if there isn't some evil system preventing that from happening.

since you don't consider any group difference as an explanatory factor.