Post-Westphalian Governance

What if atypical statehood becomes an advantage rather than a disadvantage?

The international order shaped by the 1648 Peace of Westphalia presumes a world of clearly bounded, sovereign nation-states as the basic units of governance, legitimacy, and diplomacy. But this system, once a stabilizing innovation, is increasingly unfit for our planetary age. From climate collapse and AI threats to stateless populations and authoritarian resurgence, many of today’s most urgent challenges transcend borders, jurisdictions, and national interests.

Taiwan — long excluded from the benefits and constraints of Westphalian recognition — is often seen as a geopolitical anomaly. But what if its atypical statehood is not a weakness to be fixed, but a generative prototype of post-Westphalian governance?

🌍 Why the Westphalian Model No Longer Holds

Several converging crises press us to reexamine the legacy of the nation-state:

Corporate and Digital Dominance Tech giants and digital platforms now act as transnational governments — shaping identities, values, economies, and speech. Yet users remain “subjects,” not “citizens,” lacking rights, recourse, or real participation.
Border Conflicts and the Return of War Escalating geopolitical tensions, many rooted in the rigid territorial logics of Westphalian borders, risk triggering large-scale conflict. These boundaries, once imagined as peacekeeping tools, now serve as triggers.
Institutional Paralysis Global institutions like the UN, WTO, and COP summits routinely fail to address systemic threats. Bound by national self-interest and formal diplomacy, they lack the agility and coherence needed for 21st-century challenges.
Democratic Fatigue and Passive Citizenship Modern democracies reproduce passive citizenship — replacing monarchs with bureaucrats and transforming citizens into voters or service consumers. This undermines shared responsibility, and fosters populist calls for “strongmen” over engaged publics.

✨ Lessons from Stateless Innovation

This isn’t the first time stateless or liminal actors have driven major social innovations:

Free Cities of the Renaissance and Enlightenment (e.g., Amsterdam, Venice, Florence) thrived as semi-autonomous nodes of trade, creativity, science, and pluralism — precisely because they existed outside feudal empires or absolute monarchies.
The “Ungoverned” Zomia Highlands in Southeast Asia, as described by anthropologist James C. Scott, cultivated cultural and political autonomy through avoidance of state capture. Their statelessness was a deliberate strategy to preserve relational forms of life that resisted domination.

These historical examples remind us: legibility to states is not the only path to coherence, justice, or flourishing.

🧬 Taiwan as a Living Laboratory

From my work in education reform, civic dialogue, and international cultural diplomacy — including Education Bypass Surgery, Taiwan Education Vision 2032, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung’s civic seminars, and ZA Share — I came to understand that Taiwan’s “liminality” is not just geopolitical. It is epistemic — a capacity to imagine otherwise.

Rather than mimic broken global institutions, if Taiwan can overcome its urge to finally “catch up” with others as a “normal country,” it holds the potential to serve as a living prototype for post-Westphalian innovation:

A civic laboratory for soft infrastructure — grounded in learning, mutual care, and distributed stewardship over coercive power.
A cultural bridge between individualist and relational worldviews, modernity and indigeneity, formal diplomacy and commons-based collaboration.
A safe node in global networks where plural, cooperative governance structures — from DAOs to ecoversities — can flourish outside traditional sovereignties.

This vision began to take form through my work on Reflexive Media and with ZA Share, where I co-organized participatory spaces that challenged democracy’s passive roles. Instead of training better voters, we asked: Can we cultivate co-governing learners through "Learning by Caring"?

🛠️ Speculative Scenarios

Rather than clinging to sovereignty as control, we can reimagine it as relational stewardship, manifested through, for example:

Networked Sovereignty Power is shared among local communities, indigenous councils, transnational alliances, and Web 3 platforms, rather than being monopolized by states.
Functional Legitimacy Legitimacy arises from communal coherence, care, and contribution, not from centralized gatekeeping. Governance becomes a peer-to-peer trust-building process, not a privilege.
Epistemic Pluralism Develop planetary problem-solving approaches and infrastructures grounded in diverse wisdoms — East Asian ethics, Indigenous cosmologies, feminist politics, and post-growth economics — instead of monocultural liberalism.
Antifragile Interdependencies Reimagine new types of interdependencies that extend beyond those that harm the planetary ecosystem and local resilience.

⚙️ Potential Starting Points

📚 Education as Soft Infrastructure

I have long advocated for making Taiwan "the world’s experimental education island." Through initiatives like Education Agenda 2032, I've argued that Taiwan’s dynamic education system — particularly its forward-thinking experimental education policy — could become a global accreditation hub for various educational alternatives and innovations. This could help break institutional deadlocks and enrich Taiwan's educational landscape by welcoming stakeholders from around the

🌿 Diplomatic Alternatives via Cultural Shared Power Rather than replicate the hegemonic models of influence (e.g., Confucius Institutes), Taiwan can co-create global learning infrastructures rooted in humility, ethics, and relational knowledge. The proposal to develop planetary experimental education platforms — not as propaganda, but as hubs for collective intelligence and democratic participation — exemplifies this shift from soft power to shared power.

🌏 Civic and Ecological Bridge-Building Through engaging civic communities worldwide, Taiwan can act as a translocal knowledge node, offering epistemic hospitality where traditional states cannot. These relationships foster trans-sovereign solidarity beyond diplomatic exclusion.

🛡️ Redefining Security and Resilience Sustainable peace for the future must extend beyond borders, guns, or deterrence, with concepts like "antifragility" — those that embrace accidents and unpredictability as assets rather than liabilities.

🔧 Relevance Beyond Taiwan

Taiwan is just one of the many entities that may pursue similar strategies:

Stateless Nations (e.g., Kurdistan, Palestine, Sámi territories): Build legitimacy through cultural diplomacy, education, and distributed governance.
Digital Communities & DAOs: Prototype governance beyond territory — learning from Taiwan’s civil-state hybridity and democratic experimentation.
Global South Localities: Use marginalization by Western-led institutions as creative freedom to build pluriversal, post-developmental futures.
Indigenous Polities: Reclaim and update ancient governance models based on land, relation, and ecological reciprocity.

🌐 Beyond Recognition, Toward Regeneration

Post-Westphalian governance is not about replacing states — it’s about transcending their limitations. It reframes politics from “Who governs?” to “How do we live well, together?”

Taiwan does not need permission to act like a nation. It can become a planetary hub — prototyping governance by relation, not recognition.

Rather than begging for seats in obsolete rooms, we create new rooms — and new rituals of care, dialogue, and learning. This is not diplomacy as symbolism, but governance as co-becoming.

📝[in Traditional Chinese] Agenda Setting for "Taiwan Education Vision 2032"