Is the nation-state obsolete?

In 1986, the American historian William H. McNeill delivered a series of lectures entitled Polyethnicity and National Unity in World History. He argued that the period of nation-states, which began with the French Revolution in 1789, had come to an end in 1945. In the post-national future, as in the pre-national past, political identity and ethnic identity would be separated as a result of mass immigration and multiculturalism.

A few years later, in 1990, the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm echoed McNeill, announcing the death of the nation-state in his book Nations and Nationalism since 1780. According to Hobsbawm in 1990, nationalism "is historically less important … Nation-states and nations will be seen as retreating before, being absorbed or dislocated by, the new supranational restructuring of the globe".

McNeill and Hobsbawm proved to be better historians than prophets. In the decade between the time that they wrote and the present, nationalism has reshaped the map of Europe and other parts of the world and been the major cause of conflict. More than twenty new sovereign states have appeared. Germany was reunited; the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and recently Serbia have crumbled or lost territory, Czechoslovakia peacefully divided into the Czech and Slovak republics, and Scotland has its first parliament in almost three hundred years. Eritrea has won its independence from Ethiopia, East Timor from Indonesia, and a de facto Palestinian state is gaining its independence from Israel. Contrary to those who have predicted the imminent demise of the nation-state, nationalism is the most powerful political force in the world today.

I said political force – not economic force. The term globalization is used to describe a number of phenomena: increases in trade among capitalist countries, the marketization of former socialist and statist economies, growing transnational communication by means of the Internet and satellite TV and telephony. Globalization is reshaping nations – but it is not replacing nations. A Norwegian may order a product from Thailand over the Internet but he is still a Norwegian; it is the Norwegian government, not the Thai government, that provides for his health care and his state pension out of taxes levied on his fellow Norwegians.

Are immigration and multiculturalism sapping national identity? In a word, no. In the United States, multiculturalism is about race, not about culture or language. The high rate of immigration of Spanish-speakers in some border states is less of a threat to national unity than was the proportionately larger immigration of Germans and other Europeans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nor, despite the propaganda of right-wing nativists in some countries, is immigration threatening national unity in Europe or Asia.

Is there a tendency for national sovereignty to give way to supra-national governance? The only region in the world today where national sovereignty appears to be giving way to trans-national governance is in Europe. The European Union, the successor to the Common Market, has many of the trappings of a state: a common currency, a parliament, a flag, even a national anthem. But every failure to agree on what to do in a crisis reveals that the foreign policies of Germany, Britain, France and Italy are still national rather than European policies. If regional organization is not superseding the nation-state in Europe, then that is not happening anywhere.

The nation-state, then, is in no danger of extinction but the multinational state is. For the past two centuries, the major trend in world history has been the replacement of a few large multinational empires by an ever-growing number of mostly small, ethnically homogeneous nation-states. This development is a radical break with the past; the modern nation-state is an invention of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The same industrial technologies that made nation-states possible also permitted imperial nations like the British, the French and the Russians, and later, briefly, the Germans and Japanese, to assemble enormous empires governing many different ethnic nations. Since both kinds of regimes used the same technology, why did multinational empires like the British Empire and the Soviet Union fail in competition with nation-states? After all, in both the military realm and the realm of the market, technical economies of scale should have given the prize to the empires.

The answer is that the nation-state has prevailed in Darwinian competition among rival forms of state organization because of psychological economies of scale. The ethnic nation can be broadly defined to include all people with a common language or culture, or limited narrowly to people sharing a common descent. But whether it is defined broadly or narrowly the ethnic nation is the largest community with which ordinary human beings can have an emotional attachment. Even universal religions like Christianity and Islam tend to inspire less devotion than their ethno-national divisions; a person is not merely a Catholic, but an Irish Catholic, not merely a Muslim but an Arab Muslim.

Most nation-states are relatively small but this need not be a handicap. A small nation-state can take advantage of commercial economies of scale by joining the global market or a trading bloc like the EU or ASEAN, and it can take advantage of military economies of scale by joining a military alliance like NATO. This is something no ethnic minority in a multinational state can ever do.

Nationalism, then, remains the most powerful political idea in the world, notwithstanding the importance of globalization in the economic and cultural realm. It is true that atrocities like ethnic cleansing and genocide have been committed by some nationalists in the name of nationalist ideologies. But it also the case that the greatest record of political murder in human history, far outweighing the death toll in all the wars of national independence, was compiled by Soviet and Chinese communists in the name of international socialism. From the Middle Ages to the present, Christian and Muslim crusaders and terrorists have been willing to murder and torture and plunder in the name of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of Man.

Another myth we commonly encounter is the notion that the world wars of the twentieth century were caused by petty nationalisms of the Balkans. This is nonsense. The ultimate cause of World War I was the ambition of Germany to become the dominant world power by becoming the dominant European power – an ambition that threatened the interests of the Russian Empire, the French Empire, the British Empire and the United States, which was also a colonial power at the time. A general war in Europe might have been triggered by the earlier crisis in Morocco or any number of other events which, like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, would have been the occasion of the war, but not its cause.

When we turn to World War II, it is clear that equating Hitler's ideology with German nationalism as such is problematic. Hitler's kind of racial imperialism has nothing to do with ordinary cultural nationalism, which demands a territorial home and political independence for a particular cultural nation but does not deny other nationalities the right to their own territories and their own independence. The more extreme Nazi theorists and leaders were willing to assimilate anybody, European or American, with the right physical appearance into their supposed master race, whether they were ethnically-German or not.

While the fascists and their sympathizers in the democracies believed in transnational racism, the communists believed in transnational socialism. The early communists, for their part, envisioned the Soviet Union as the expanding nucleus of a global federation of soviets. Although he settled for dominating Eastern Europe through the Warsaw Pact, Stalin considered incorporating some of the countries of Eastern Europe directly into the Soviet Union, the way he incorporated the Baltic republics. The Third Reich, in theory, could have kept expanding until it exhausted the world's supply of Aryans, and the Soviet Union, in theory, could have kept expanding until it exhausted the world's supply of proletarians.

In addition to blaming nationalism in general for wars that were really caused by imperialism, critics of nationalism often assume that nationalist sentiment is somehow incompatible with democracy. In fact, the relationship tends to be the other way around. Almost all stable democracies are nation-states, while multinational states tend to be dictatorships of some kind. Mono-ethnic democracies tend to be more stable than multi-ethnic democracies for a very simple reason. In a mono-ethnic society, ethnic power is not an issue; whatever party wins in Sweden will be made up of Swedes. That means that there can be political coalitions based on various other aspects of identity, like class, or religion, or political ideology. But in a multi-ethnic society, political parties almost invariably coalesce around the major ethnic groups. It is a mistake to call wars in multi-ethnic countries civil wars; strictly speaking, even though they are fought by residents of a single territory, they are wars among separate ethnic nations. They are international wars fought in the ruins of a multinational state.

Where a state has crumbled because its constituent ethnic nations do not want to live together, it is folly for outsiders to try to force them together into a shotgun marriage, or rather a shotgun remarriage. In such circumstances, it is in the interest of all concerned that the outside powers act as divorce counsellors, seeing to it that the divorce takes place with as little bloodshed and plunder as possible. The wisest course may be to turn temporary division into permanent partition, and to formally recognize the existence of new nation-states born from the wreckage of multinational entities that, in many cases, never had any political legitimacy of their own. The rough justice of partition may be acceptable if it prevents endless warfare or endless peace-keeping.

Just as we should sometimes encourage the partition of states along national lines, so we should sometimes permit the voluntary merger of nations that are today divided into more than one state. If the two German states were allowed to fuse to form a single German nation-state, then by what principle can the Albanians of Kosovar be denied merger with Albania? Why can't Bosnian Croats join Croatia, and Bosnian Serbs join Serbia?

The Balkan peninsula is not the only place where there may never be peace or prosperity until borders are redrawn along national lines. In sub-Saharan Africa, most of the states are artificial creations of British and French colonial administrators. There is no ethnic Nigerian or South African nation, any more than there was a Yugoslav or Soviet nation. Any attempt to make political borders correspond with ethnic nations in Africa, as in the Balkans, would be messy and imperfect but the alternative of preserving the political relics of European colonialism at the cost of endless authoritarianism and internecine conflict is much, much worse than redrawing a border here and a border there.

Needless to say, most of the several thousand ethnic groups in the world are too small to have states of their own-although the example of the Slovenes proves that statehood is possible for very tiny nations. The Sorbs and Wends of Germany will never have their own nation-states, any more than the German-speaking Amish in the United States. But the fact that every tiny ethnic group does not qualify for statehood does not discredit the desire for independence of substantial ethnic nations like the Kurds.

At what point would there be too many countries? Between 1946 and today, the number of UN member states increased from 52 to 188. The addition of a dozen or two dozen more nation-states to the General Assembly would not create international chaos. At any given time, there are only a few great military and economic powers and it is on their relations among themselves, not the number of small states, that international order depends. The "international community" is something of a fiction.

If the nation-state is alive and well, as I have argued that it is, and if nationalism is by no means the evil that is made out to be, then why is the discussion of this subject dominated by loathing of nationalism and propaganda in favor of various kinds of supra-national systems of world order? One reason is obvious: most of the states in Africa and the Middle East and much of Asia are non-national entities whose borders are threatened by nationalist movements. The United Nations should really be called the United Regimes, inasmuch as many of the members of the General Assembly are multinational states held together by repression. For obvious reasons, many of these governments would prefer that self-determination be sacrificed to the sanctity of inherited borders, no matter how absurd and anachronistic the borders are.

But this doesn't explain the intense hostility to nationalism in the Western media. One explanation for that, I think, is the continuing residual influence of Marxism on intellectuals everywhere in the world, including the United States. Marxism-Leninism may be discredited, but a substantial portion of the intelligentsia in Europe, Asia, Latin America and even the United States still believes that economic class is more important than ethnic nationality and believes as well that the nation-state is a bourgeois invention that soon will be superseded by transnational movements and transnational institutions. These are articles of a secular religion that no amount of contrary evidence is likely to affect.

While lingering socialist fantasies of international solidarity among the working classes continue to inspire the post-national and anti-national rhetoric of leftist and liberal intellectuals, among mainstream politicians and political journalists in the West the major source of one-world rhetoric comes from the libertarian Right. Today's libertarians believe that at some point in the not-too-distant future universal free trade will render the borders between nations as irrelevant as the borders between Kansas and Oklahoma. Libertarians or classical liberals have been predicting the withering away of the nation-state as a result of free trade for 160 years, and they will probably be predicting the triumph of free trade over nationalism for the next 160 years.

I will conclude by making some predictions about the future of the world. A century from now, in 2100, there will be more nation-states in the world, and fewer multinational states. Nation-states like Japan, Russia, China, the United States, Germany and India, in some form, will still be here. But many if not most of today's multinational states will have vanished from the map. I don't think there will be a United Kingdom in 2100; at best there may be a federation of the nation-states of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Australia and New Zealand will be sovereign republics. Canada is unlikely to survive the twenty-first century; the only question is whether the English-speaking provinces join the United States or straggle along on their own when the federation dissolves. Indonesia and Malaysia may be replaced on the map by a number of new, smaller countries.

Not all of the nationalism of the century ahead will be disintegrative. A Greater Albania and a Kurdistan might be cobbled together. The inevitable overthrow of the remaining monarchies in the Middle East may produce the amalgamation of portions of the Arab world.

Not every nation will obtain its state; China is unlikely to free Tibet, and India is unlikely to consent to a Sikh nation-state. Whether Africa progresses or continues to decay depends in large part on whether the international community permits genuine nation-states to be formed from the wreckage of the post-colonial regimes. In some cases, like the break-up of the United Kingdom, these changes might occur without bloodshed; in other cases, they may be accompanied by immense suffering, and may even trigger conflicts among rival great powers.

Nationalism, then, has effects that are both good and bad. On the whole, I think that the good that has come with replacing multinational dynastic empires and dictatorships with nation-states that at least have a chance to become stable liberal democracies has outweighed the bad that often accompanies the break-up of non-national states. But even if you disagree and think that nationalism is more bad than good, the future seems clear. The nineteenth century was the century of nationalism. The twentieth century was also the century of nationalism. And in all likelihood the twenty-first century will be the century of nationalism as well.