..as this article ingeniously argues, the Westphalian system never existed in the first place. It was mostly American theorists making up “the Westphalian system” because the idea of international law made Americans feel better. The real world was always about bandits, terrorists, anarchists, mercenaries, and naked exercises of cynical power, and if we could get our heads around that, we wouldn’t have to sweat a New Dark Age because we wouldn’t be able to tell it from common reality.

Imagine a place – perhaps a shrinking city, or a badly savaged brownfield neighborhood – where laws were set up to strip rules and regulations down to a do-no-harm minimum (maintaining criminal laws and protecting health, safety, workers’ rights and civil liberties, but perhaps limiting liability and certainly slashing red tape and delays) allowing for wild deviations from existing patterns for buildings, systems and operations. Imagine a free-fire zone for sustainable innovations, where new approaches could be iterated and tested rapidly, and, when they work, sent to proliferate outside the Zone. Conversely, some of the freedom might paradoxically come from imposing boundary limitations that can’t yet be made practical or survive politically outside the Zone, such as bans on broad classes of chemicals or strict greenhouse gas emissions limits.

It’s July 2009, and in Johnson City, America’s permanent colony on the moon – named after Lyndon B. Johnson, the president who authorised it – they are celebrating the third generation of lunar Americans: the first child born to parents themselves born on the moon. With just 5000 inhabitants, “city” is perhaps too grandiose a term.