To put it simply, yes, I do agree. The sovereignty of any nation helps people retain their own identities. While people may move away from their home nation, they always will retain their original identity. Expatriates manage to retain their own sovereignty while living in the country of another. In the future though, if genetic modification becomes widespread, it may become impossible to know who comes from what nation.
Currently, the world has an established means of retaining individual sovereignty protected by a nation. In the United States these rights materialize through our passports. A passport, in my mind, represents more than a means to gain access to other countries. Passports represent our belonging to something larger. With our passport, we identify with a nation that ensures our security. You can take your United States passport and gain access to any embassy overseas if there is unrest and your security is the responsibility of the government. Therefore, passports are of the difference that is protected by our sovereignty.
In the future though, with the advent of space colonies and genetic differences these concrete differences in our culture may become subtler. How should the world secure sovereignty? One interesting way that comes to mind could be in the security chips that are embedded in people. Those would in essence become the new passports and could protect us even more because they would be tied into our biometrics. The tie in with the biometrics has the potential to make us even more secure, sovereign, and protect our differences at a level that has never been seen before.
The issue of the future you reflect on at the end of the post raises another interesting point: if, in hundreds or thousands of years, all differences between people were dissolved, could the entire earth really be a sovereign state if there was no "other" to define the self as being different from? If sovereignty protects difference, it would make sense that without any difference, sovereignty would cease to exist. In that case, maybe the boredom of all being alike would cause new and modern differences, like genetics and biology, to arise.
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