The previous discussions of nomos emphasize the arbitrary but meaningful geometry of political geographic subdivisions, including secession. It begins with an image of the Earth ’ s surface differentiated by chemical arrangements of water, land, and air. Nation-states can be read in relation to these as petroglyphs written by law. They are keen to concretize the integrity of virtual boundaries when ingress and egress are seen to compromise asymmetries of power between zones of a synthetic landscape of loops and bubbles. Enclaves, exclaves, and especially colonies drew another jigsaw on top of the first, nonlinear and noncontiguous outlines of sovereign control rule. <sup>25</sup> At various times, this becomes a momentum for jurisdictional integration (as for the American colonies in the 1770s, the European Union in the 1990s, Italy and Germany in the nineteenth century), and at other times it is an equal momentum for disintegration (as for the United States in the 1860s, India/Pakistan in the 1940s, the USSR in the 1990s, and seemingly everywhere today). It takes different forms and seeks different ends: schemes to break up California would mean political autonomy for Silicon Valley and several more Senate seats; Special Economic Zones freeing up markets for commodity assemblage by keeping hands and fingers on call in special factory camps; sovereign wealth funds turning states into corporate actors; Supreme Court rulings turning corporate actors into holders of religious and political speech rights; neo-Confederates once again taking control of one of the major US political parties; Saudi Arabia buying sovereign farmland in Indonesia to secure its food future; the hard geopolitics of ongoing state-sponsored spying, hacking, and mutual recriminations; and so on. The great migrations, psychodemographic segmentations, and biopolitical wall building are not always about claiming more and more zero-sum territory at the expense of rivals. Sometime it means the opposite, even deliberately shrinking domains of sovereign interest (Australia recently relinquished its sovereign claim on a nearby island so that it would not have to take responsibility for refugees who landed there hoping to gain admittance to the jurisdiction and its protections). However, these examples of generalized secession are not interoperable with one another, at least not in the same way that the Westphalian platform for political consolidation made the form and formats of states compatible. Instead, according to pressures of combination and separation, integration and disintegration, bull markets in both nonpolarity and hyperpolarity collaborate to assassinate unipolar geopolitical architectures.
The Stack to Come
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