The Need for Nations

“It may sound trite to say so, but the national state is the worst way of arranging and governing human societies, apart from all the others.”

Nationalism is a dirty word, conjuring images of bigotry and exclusion. Nationalism, like anything in extreme doses, is poisonous. However, the absence of the national state is arguably equally lethal. I’d like to defend the concept of the nation in this essay. I will look at the history of the nation, and why this might suggest that we should not wish to hasten the nation’s demise. I hope to show, and to perhaps convince the reader, that if nothing else, the nation is the worst way of organizing society, apart from all the others. While we should not lift up the nation as an object of worship, we should not denigrate it either. We should, I would argue, show gratitude for what the nation can provide. Gratitude is the driving motivation of this essay.

The national state is a relatively recent innovation in the long span of human history. As Yoram Hazony argued in his book The Virtue of Nationalism, for most of our history humans lived in hunter-gatherer groups, which then grew to clans, and then tribes. According to Hazony, for most of history, human society was either tribal or imperial. For Pierre Manent meanwhile, it was the city-state and the empire. The earliest one can say that anything like the national state emerged was in the medieval period in England and France. Fast forward to 1648 and the Treaty of Westphalia, the treaty that ended the Thirty Years War and widely held to signal the birth of the national state system in Europe. This history is an influence on how I view the national state in an instrumental way. Despite my profound disagreement with Hobbes’s conception of the individual, his views of the unshackled human nature and its propensity towards chaos and carnage have been borne out by history, most especially the period leading up to the treaty of 1648. If it were not for the stability, law, and order that the nation state provides, our fundamentally flawed human natures would lead to our lives being “nasty, brutish and short.”

However, in the post-medieval era, the human murder rate has fallen to 1.3%. It is interesting that this coincides with the rise of the national state.

While it is, as usual, important not to confuse correlation and causation, there are some interesting facts related to the history above. Spanish scientists have found that among primates, 2% of deaths are murders. They then found the same murder rate from human archaeological records up to 10,000 years ago, when it rose slightly with increased contact between groups of humans. However, in the post-medieval era, the human murder rate has fallen to 1.3%. It is interesting that this coincides with the rise of the national state, with its strengthened capacity for imposing law and order on a chaotic European continent through its monopoly over the use of violence. This point is further made by the fact that in countries where peace and the rule of law prevail (something found only in strong national states), the murder rate is under 0.02%. In the medieval period, lawless bands of brigands, mercenaries, and feudal armies were roving across Europe killing each other. With the inception of the nation state following the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, rates of violence began to fall.