What happens when a globe-spanning corporation becomes so powerful that even nations have to answer to it? In the 18th century, the British East India Company (EIC) came close. Founded by royal charter to act as a trading arm of the British monarchy, the company grew into an imperial power in its own right.

After winning the Battle of Plassey in 1757 near Calcutta, the Company became the de facto ruler of Bengal and eventually much of South Asia. Then, in China, the EIC repeatedly violated the ruling Qing dynasty’s prohibition on the opium trade, helping to precipitate the Opium Wars and emerging victorious after strong-arming the emperor into legalizing the trade. Conquering faraway lands and evading countries’ efforts at domestic regulation, the EIC became as powerful as a nation, a colonial power ruling a vast area, and a power base that overshadowed its alleged rulers at home.

Today, a very different corporate force extracts monopoly profits and threatens national sovereignty, as the tech companies that already control the digital systems and data of billions of people worldwide—Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft—now invest aggressively in artificial intelligence, a technology poised to transform the future by changing the ways we work, shop, learn, and communicate.

Since the generative AI app ChatGPT launched publicly in November 2022 and became the fastest growing consumer application in history, commentators have rushed to celebrate AI’s potential or decry its risks. But few have focused on an important factor in how these technologies will shape the world: The companies building these systems are unprecedented in their economic might and political influence.

The tech giants’ globe-spanning power and influence hearkens back to the EIC’s vast rule and lack of accountability. Like the EIC, the tech powers are not cowed by national governments. The Pentagon’s new cloud infrastructure will be built and run by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle. OpenAI threatened to “cease operating” in the EU in response to regulation. It’s dangerous for companies to get so large and powerful that they can dictate what regulations they will accept—no longer having to answer to state controls intended to serve the public interest. As French President Emmanuel Macron asked in 2019, “who can claim to be sovereign, on their own, in the face of the digital giants?”

Such outsized power makes regulating AI particularly important. Academics, activists, and civil society groups have made the current and potential harms from AI abundantly clear, while technologists and researchers have criticized the biases built into many AI systems and warned of the existential risks potentially posed by super-intelligent machines. These risks include turbocharged propaganda, privacy violations, and the loss of human control over advanced AI systems.

To protect citizens from these potential harms, governments should regulate as they do elsewhere—limiting the risks from AI in the same way that they protect consumers from unsafe products and practices. Despite its novelty, and complexity, AI can—and should—be regulated just like any other technology. Training data can be disclosed, models can be licensed, legal accountability for harms can be established, and consumers can be protected. If AI heralds a “fourth industrial revolution,” as some enthusiasts claim, the fact that no politician has even proposed a regulatory regime comparable to those ensuring the safety of car taillights, Tylenol, or ground beef should give us pause.

Instead, politicians around the world are enthusiastically embracing AI with little to show for their stated concern for monitoring its safety. The U.S. Secretaries of State and Commerce, echoing Silicon Valley hype, recently wrote that AI “holds an exhilarating potential to improve people’s lives and help solve some of the world’s biggest challenges, from curing cancer to mitigating the effects of climate change to solving global food insecurity.” Similarly, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres claimed AI “has the potential to turbocharge global development, from monitoring the climate crisis to breakthroughs in medical research.”

These politicians seem to need to believe that AI will solve the spiraling crises of global warming, inequality, and authoritarian backsliding, and kickstart a productivity boom benefiting the average worker. As a result, they yield to ever-greater political and economic power of the big tech companies, and pay mere lip service to meaningful regulation.

Global policymakers do speak of voluntary commitments, frameworks, non-binding orders, advisory committees, and ethical guidelines. President Biden’s recent executive order on AI instructs agencies to write reports, conduct risk assessments, and hire “chief AI officers.” The only binding requirement on AI companies is a reporting requirement if they exceed a certain threshold of computational intensity. Even the European Union’s AI Act, derided as overly interventionist by politicians in the U.S. and U.K., may ultimately exempt large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT from oversight.

None of these should be mistaken for a serious commitment by national governments to regulate AI. We should be clear about the emerging regime of AI governance: self-regulation with a government imprimatur. A similar approach, in which regulators trusted the wisdom of supposedly “efficient markets,” led to the disastrous 2008 financial crisis.

Maybe someday AI will cure cancer and solve climate change, as some policymakers prophesy. Or maybe someday the machines will take over and become our overlords, as others warn. What’s more likely in the meantime is that without meaningful regulation, AI will make our corporate overlords even stronger. Far from liberating us from precarity, the AI revolution will intensify inequality and corporate power.

Already the big tech companies building advanced AI—dubbed “the magnificent seven” for their outsized stock returns over the last few years—now comprise 28% of the S&P 500 index and have outperformed the broader market by roughly 40 percentage points in 2023. There’s little chance this will trickle down to workers: Earnings calls with major corporations reveal expectations that AI will reduce labor costs—which translates into job losses for workers replaced by computers.

We should remind ourselves what a more historically normal trajectory of AI regulation might look like. The current approach is not a prudent response to technological novelty but a reflection of massive power imbalances between the tech giants building AI and national governments. The echo of the East India Company reminds us how dangerous these imbalances can become. The starting point for framing this new technological and economic era should not be the financial interests of big tech but established models of regulation, capable of steering corporate profit-seeking towards the common good.

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Before the 19th century, most peoples, in most parts of the world, did not live in nations, but in those larger conglomerations of peoples we call loosely “empires”—or as they were often known, “universal monarchies.” Most of today’s nations are the creatures of imperial collapse: Germany, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Norway, Albania, Finland, Ireland, Sweden—not to mention the former settler populations in North and South America and the former colonies in Africa and Asia—all were once part of larger imperial groupings.

Before they became independent, few of the inhabitants of these places had any real sense of themselves as belonging to nations. They took their identity, instead, from what was known in many European languages as “small homelands:” families, tribes, villages, parishes, ethnic and religious communities, etc. Italy, for instance, only came into existence in 1871 after a prolonged series of wars, mostly against its former Austrian rulers and their allies. All that had previously existed had been a collection of duchies, principalities, and city-states sharing a common religion, a more or less common language, and a more or less imaginary common history in imperial Rome.

So when these places became nations, they were compelled to invent for themselves a collective identity, a past, and a role for the future. They also had to lay claim to political legitimacy. This they did through the principle now known as “indivisible sovereignty.” If the nation was, henceforth, to be the only legitimate unit of human association, then the nation’s power to make decisions concerning the fate of its citizens had to be, in Thomas Hobbes’s words, “immortal…incommunicable and inseparable.”

A nation might be prepared to open its borders, share its resources with other nations, make and abide by international treaties, etc. But the decision to do these things had to rest with the nation alone. This is essentially what “self-determination” means; and “self-determination,” which Woodrow Wilson in 1918 called “the imperative principle for action” in the modern world order, has become the defining feature of the modern nation-state.

While this definition of nationalism seems inward-facing, in its earliest forms, it was also paradoxically cosmopolitan. These new nations—unlike the old empires—were liberal and democratic and did not look upon their demand for self-determination as a threat to, or threatening for, that of any other peoples. Giuseppe Mazzini—the theoretical architect of Italian nationalism and one of the most influential political writers (and activists) of the 19th century—forecast that the future would be made up of assemblies of nations, each sovereign and independent in its own right, but each living in harmony with all the others. The new “nationality” was, he insisted, no “bitter war on individualism,” nor was it intended “to foster a new sectarianism.” “Ours is not a national project,” he claimed, “but an international one.”

Not all, however, thought like this. In Germany, in particular, and under the influence of some followers of philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel, an alternative vision emerged of the nation as the creation of a distinction between “friend and foe.” Nations, the neo-Hegelians insisted, were born out of conflict, and could only survive and prosper through conflict. Every nation, in order to become and to remain a nation, required an “other” against which to struggle.

To put it very crudely: If Mazzini’s nation was built upon some species of love, the neo-Hegelian one was built on hate. If the liberal, Mazzini nation aimed for international peace, the neo-Hegelian one could only flourish in war. And with this came most of the vices we currently associate with nationalism: xenophobia; bigotry; the contempt for other cultures, other religions, even other languages; and the belief that “we” are best and that “we” must always be first.

In Europe, the end of World War I, and the subsequent economic and political disorders, made versions of the neo-Hegelian brand of nationalism seem particularly attractive. As many—most notably Madeleine Albright—have pointed out, the similarities between the situation in the 1930s and the one we face today in many parts of the world can seem uncanny. The fault for every national malaise, from the economy to diminished political status, is laid on the international order—today we call it “globalization”—and on the remote indifferent “elites” who govern what the Italian Fascists sneeringly called “the individualistic liberal state.” The solution for every ill is believed to be to return power to the “people,” and not to the so-called “representatives” of the liberal state.

Inevitably, since the “people” are only ever a figment of the political imagination, restoring their power is believed to require a strongman who would not “represent” but—literally—“embody” them, just as he would also embody the nation: a Mussolini, or a Hitler; an Orbán, an Erdogan, or a Putin or a Trump. But strongmen, like the nation itself, can survive only so long as there exists the threat of an “other” for them to be strong with. And if this “other” does not exist, then, like the Jews in the 1930s or immigrants today, it has to be invented.

But history does not ever really repeat itself. The end of World War II led to the creation of a large number of international institutions ranging from the United Nations to NATO to the International Monetary Fund, from the Arab League to the Organization of American States. The most far-reaching and ambitious of them all began in 1952 as the European Coal and Steel Community, and is now the European Union. Although these institutions are very different from one another, they are all based upon international treaties; and they all attempt to solve the one problem that the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 had also attempted, but so spectacularly failed to solve: how to put an end to war.

The international institutions still have not ended that great human scourge. The source of their weakness is that they are constituted of nation-states that are defined by their sovereignty. But international agreements require nations to be bound by international law, which means sharing sovereignty with other nations. This is a difficult juggling act.

Of course, the post-1945 order worked more or less effectively for a while. The long-awaited World War III never materialized. But the order worked only so long as the threat of war these international organizations had been created to avoid remained. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s removed the presence of what had been, even before 1945, the West’s single great “other.”

After 1990, as the threat of war receded, nations began to question the wisdom of having surrendered their sovereignty to bodies over which they have no unilateral control. The new nationalism which has arisen in the past three decades, therefore, found its neo-Hegelian “other” not in other nations, but in the international institutions themselves. People at the local and national levels saw the international order’s devotion to immigration, free trade, and open borders as, above all, a danger to their “indivisible sovereignty.”

This opposition to the concept of an “international community” is what unites all the new nationalist parties of the far right—and the far left—against the European Union. Hence Hungarian president Victor Orbán’s flouting of EU law; Britain’s suicidal attempt to “take back the country;” Turkish leader Recep Tayipp Erdogan’s rejection of any attempt on the part of the “international community” to limit his authority as an affront to his country’s sovereignty; and Donald Trump’s attacks on NATO, on the EU, and on virtually all international trade agreements. All, he argues, challenge the right of what he called recently “this Great Sovereign Nation” to act unilaterally. “Internationalism”—or, as it used to be called, “cosmopolitanism”—is the new enemy at the gates in all its forms, cultural, legal, racial, political, economic.

In a sense, this always has been so. Cosmopolitans have always despised nationalists, and nationalists have always hated cosmopolitans. But whereas liberal nationalism was an attempt by the world’s Mazzinis to replace cosmopolitanism with a new vibrant international order of nation-states, the new-old neo-Hegelian nationalism seeks simply to destroy it altogether. If the cosmopolitan world we unsteadily inhabit is to survive, Hegelian logic would seem to demand that it find itself a new “other”—something which the nations of the world can only face, as they once faced the threat of perpetual conflict, as a cosmopolitan community, in which the self-consuming monster of national sovereignty would, once again, be laid to rest.

Climate change, perhaps?

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Similarly, the World Cup fuses sport and national identity on a quadrennial basis. In both cases, media coverage transforms feats of physical prowess into stories of national triumph or defeat, and in the process recasts athletes, many of whom the larger public has never cared about previously, into national heroes and sometimes even villains.

Lost in the drama and pageantry is the question of why sports should be framed in terms of political geography at all. How is it that we have learned to see the world as a collection of countries?

A nation is a group of culturally similar people who believe they belong together and deserve to govern themselves. This way of thinking about the world, or imagining the world, begins by kindergarten, when children are taught to read basic maps and globes depicting the world as organized into a jumble of colorful, interlocking shapes demarcated by clear borders, invariably accentuated as black lines. We are taught that these borders delineate distinct peoples, societies, and environments, and dutifully memorize their locations, names, and physical features—and of course their flags—by coloring maps with crayons. Teachers emphasize knowing our own place within this political jigsaw puzzle, and, over time, we come to identify ourselves as belonging to a nation.

The staging of the Olympics and the World Cup and the teaching of geography in the intimate confines of an elementary school classroom seem worlds apart, yet both are simultaneously cause and effect to how we think of the world as a world of borders, a globe comprised of clearly partitioned, sovereign political territories. The process of nationalization, however, is much more complicated than simply putting crayons in the hands of five-year-olds. It extends beyond education to encompass most aspects of daily life, from the media and popular culture to professional and political organizations.

Today’s most pressing debates are rooted in and around notions of borders. Some focus on overturning accepted borders, such as the attempts of ISIS to establish a new caliphate across Syria and Iraq, the Chinese government’s ongoing efforts to secure control over the South China Sea, or the disputes between Russia and Ukraine over eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

Other debates have little to do with the location of the borders, but rather involve how borders should function and be marked or policed. President Trump’s call to build a new southern border wall funded by Mexico is a prominent example. Another is the struggle among members of the European Union to maintain open borders while simultaneously strengthening border controls along their southern and eastern peripheries—demonstrating the poignancy and power of borders in contemporary politics. For better or worse, our disparate views on belonging, migration, trade, political populism, sectarian strife, natural resource extraction, environmental sustainability, climate change, and even, of course, global sports, are filtered through the spatial paradigm of a bordered world.

This is a relatively recent phenomenon, though. It is also one that is incomplete, inconsistent, and might ultimately prove to be transitory.

Scholars trace the origins of our modern notions of borders to Western Europe. As that region transitioned from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period, Europe was structured around a political system of mutual obligations and privileges between lords, vassals, and peasants, later known as feudalism. Lacking the ability to govern their kingdoms directly, kings granted nobles the right to administer certain areas, or fiefs, on the king’s behalf in exchange for allegiance and military service. The king retained nominal authority over the kingdom through this system of vassalage, but nobles soon gained considerable autonomy over their fiefs, including the rights of taxation and hereditary title.

Nobles repeated the basic arrangement with lesser nobles and further partitioned their estates into ever smaller fiefs, eventually creating a confused patchwork of overlapping loyalties and decentralized governance scattered across an assortment of principalities, duchies, counties, etc. In some cases, nobles held fiefs in different kingdoms and therefore nominally owed allegiance to multiple kings. The situation was further complicated by what we would today call non-governmental organizations, such as the Catholic Church, military or monastic orders, occupational guilds, and city-states. Within this feudal system, clear territorial borders were unnecessary, as long as lords and vassals honored their mutual obligations.

This decentralized system began to break down by around the 15th century for complex reasons, including the rise of capitalism and wage labor, advances in military technologies, and the growth of an urban-based merchant class. The incessant religious wars that marked the Reformation brought developments to a head, culminating in the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

These treaties helped usher in the notion of territorially sovereign states, which became the foundation for the contemporary international system. Basically, these monarchs mutually recognized each other as possessing the right to exercise absolute authority over their territories free from outside interference. In theory at least, each monarch possessed absolute sovereignty over his or her territory and all the people within it.

During this transition, monarchs also began to acquire the tools to more directly exercise sovereignty, most notably standing militaries, professional bureaucracies, and systematic taxation. The grounding of state sovereignty in territory also created a need to precisely determine the territorial extent of the state. The blurry borders of the Middle Ages were incompatible with these new notions of territorial sovereignty. Aided by advances in surveying, navigation, and cartography, governments carefully mapped and marked their respective territories. Borders as we conceive of them today came into being.

The final shift occurred when royal sovereignty was replaced by popular sovereignty. The rise of nationalism as a mass social movement in the decades following the French Revolution led to the corollary idea that the political borders of the state should conform to the cultural borders of the nation. The idea of a nation-state—in which the French state should include all French people, while the German state should include all Germans—was born.

The idea of grouping culturally similar peoples within their own states makes sense in theory, but has proven impossible to put into practice without widespread forced migration and horrendous violence, as demonstrated by two World Wars, among other tragedies.

Those western notions of the nation-state, territory, and borders—and their underlying assumptions—would eventually be exported around the world by force through colonialism to form the foundation of the modern nation-state system. Still, this nation-state system contains a fundamental contradiction: The idea of territorial sovereignty exercised by states can’t always be reconciled with the right of national self-determination and sovereignty.

This leads to confusion and conflation between the terms state and nation. For example, the Charter of the United Nations simultaneously affirms its commitment to the territorial integrity of states and the right of national self-determination. The actual name of the United Nations is misleading since only states, not nations, can be members. The United Nations is actually an organization of disunited states.

Some saw the end of the Cold War, the advent of the internet, and the growth of multinational corporations, organizations, and treaties, among other developments, as heralding an embryonic borderless world. Globalization became a buzzword. Yet because of our continued proclivity to think of most issues, from politics and economics to identity and culture, in state-centric terms, the framework of territorially sovereign nation-states marked by clearly defined, linear borders continues to exert a powerful hold over our understanding of the world and our place in it.

During this year’s winter Olympics, television commentators debated whether America’s historically low medal count in PyeongChang should be a cause of national concern. Brazil’s 7-1 World Cup loss to Germany in 2014 provoked discussion of a national identity crisis. The fact that these issues were raised in earnest demonstrates the continued power of borders to frame how we think about the world, including in such apparently trivial matters as sports.

We may live in a world of unprecedented connectivity marked by dramatically increasing flows of people, goods, technologies, and information, as well as issues like climate change, sectarian strife, demographic transitions, and economic dislocation that seem to beg for global responses, yet the world will remain a very bordered one for the foreseeable future.

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