Civilization #58: Birth of the Nation-State

The nation-state is composed of two words: nation and state. The state is easy to understand; it is the supreme executive authority sovereign to a territory. The nation is a new idea—the idea of a people with a shared identity, whether it's a language, a culture, a history, or an ethnicity.

For example, the Jews were, for the longest time, a nation without a state. It was only with the founding of Israel that the Jews had a nation-state. Today, there are many peoples, including the Kurds living in the Middle East, who are a nation but do not have a state.

This idea of the nation-state is probably the most powerful ideology in human history. It has led people to tremendous achievements, but it has also led people to catastrophic wars, including World War I and World War II.

The Culmination of Religious, Economic, and Social Forces

The idea of the nation-state comes from the culmination of different religious, economic, and socio-cultural factors. Let's look at them individually.

The Religious Factor: A Solution to the Crisis of Faith

As we discussed with the Protestant Reformation, there was a crisis of faith. Christianity created the idea of the individual, who is in direct connection with God. Before, the church would mediate this connection. You didn't have to worry about God; you just had to worry about the church. If you did what the church told you, you could be promised entry into heaven. The Protestant Reformation removes the Catholic Church from the equation. Now, you are in direct communion with God and must show absolute faith if you are to achieve salvation.

This creates a crisis of faith because, as an individual, how do you know you truly believe in God? You know you love your mother, but do you love your mother every single day, all the time? Probably not. But in religion, you cannot doubt God ever. You can never throw a temper tantrum at God, or you will be sent to hell. This creates a conflict, and historically, there have been different solutions proposed for this problem.

• Money (Capitalism): The first solution was to replace God with money. The Calvinists believed this: God is money, money is God. If you accumulate enough wealth, that shows your absolute faith in God and God's love for you.
• Reason (Enlightenment & Liberalism): Others said, "Nope, God is reason." As long as you pursue reason and show enlightenment, that shows your faith in God.
• The Individual (Modernism): Then others said, "Nope, God is the individual itself." As long as you believe in yourself and engage in a process of self-discovery and self-growth, that will lead you to heaven. This was most famously proposed by Freud and Jung and has become the basis for what we call modernism.
• The Nation (Nationalism): Finally, another solution was proposed: God is in the nation.

It turns out that of all these ideas, the most powerful, resilient, and enduring is the idea that by celebrating your nation, you are celebrating your faith in God. Why? Because the other solutions propose a problem: the individual is still isolated from others. It still creates a problem of alienation. The nation solves this problem because a nation has to be, by definition, a community of individuals with a shared identity.

The nation is the perfect solution because it solves both the problem of religion and the problem of politics and community. In fact, the nation is a conflation of both religion and politics, which is why historically it has been the most emotionally powerful idea. From a religious perspective, the nation-state solves the problem of faith and alienation.

The Economic Factor: The Industrial Revolution's Demands

During this time, the Industrial Revolution created many issues. The first problem was the need to constantly expand for markets and resources, which is another way of saying you need to engage in imperialism. Another problem was the rise of the bourgeoisie.

Historically, priests and warriors were the elite of society. But with the Industrial Revolution, the bourgeoisie—the industrialists and capitalists—became the new elite. As such, they wanted more political power, but what they really wanted was property rights. They wanted to be assured that the wealth they generated could be protected and inherited by their children and grandchildren.

The problem was that the system of the monarchy could not really ensure property rights, because a king or an aristocracy could be overthrown, as happened throughout European history. But the nation-state cannot be overthrown. The nation-state is a solution to the problem of property rights for the bourgeoisie. Also, the nation-state has the resources and the desire to engage in imperialism. Monarchies are usually pretty conservative; they like to maintain their position and will form alliances to do so. The nation-state is aggressive, expansionist, and imperialist. From an economic perspective, the nation-state solves the problems created by the Industrial Revolution.

The Socio-Cultural Factor: Coping with Modernity

Because of the Industrial Revolution, people were moving from the villages to the cities in a massive process of urbanization. There was more trade, and the market proliferated goods throughout the entire country. This created the idea of systemization and standardization, along with the mobility of people, goods, and ideas. New technology, not just in factories and steamships but also in print, spread literacy and information.

Think of this as the beginning of globalization. For most people, this can be frustrating and bewildering, and it creates psychological issues:

• Anomie: A loss of a sense of cultural rootedness. As things change, you don't know how to adapt. Your values are based on the past, and you're not sure if they can confront the future.
• Alienation: A sense of powerlessness. You lack agency. These changes are happening so fast and so quickly that you don't know if you can control them.
• Disenchantment: A feeling that all these changes are dehumanizing. You're becoming just a cog in a machine.

There were different solutions to this: communism, liberalism, and nationalism. All three ideas were appealing. Communism preaches international solidarity, which can be even more confusing for people. Liberalism preaches individual rights, but if you're poor, the right to speak or organize does not really apply to you. And the fact of the matter is that most people are poor.

But nationalism—the idea that we are one group of people in a struggle against other groups of people—is powerful and appealing. Nationalism can also absorb other ideas. You can be both a nationalist and a liberal; in fact, most people were. You can also be a nationalist and a communist, which is what Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong proposed. Nationalism is the one ideology that can absorb and control all other ideologies.

For these three reasons—religious, economic, and socio-cultural transformation—the nation-state became the best idea of that time, and it spread really quickly.

Why the Nation-State Spread So Quickly: A Game Theory Analogy

To understand why the nation-state spread so quickly, let's use game theory. Imagine millions of us are playing a game—checkers, chess, Monopoly, it doesn't matter. We're all individual players. The problem is that if a small group of us, maybe three or four, decide to coordinate and play the game together, this automatically forces everyone else to group together.

That's the idea of the nation-state. The moment that France decided, "We're a nation-state," that forced everyone else—Germany, Russia, Italy—to become nation-states as well. Otherwise, you're going to lose this game.

The other thing that's really important to remember about this theory is that to win this game as a nation-state, your size does not actually matter. What matters is your cohesion—how well you're willing to work together—or your unity of will.

For example, imagine a bar fight between four brothers and ten strangers. I would bet the four brothers are more likely to win. The ten strangers don't really know each other and don't really care; there's not much at stake. But the four brothers need to protect each other. They love each other, so they're going to fight a lot harder, maybe to the death. The ten strangers, if they feel they're going to lose, are just going to run away. That's the idea of the nation-state. What determines its strength is unity of will and cohesion, not size, wealth, or territory.

The Two Foundational Models: Enlightenment vs. Romanticism

The idea of a nation-state comes from two different sources: the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The Enlightenment was a major intellectual trend in 17th, 18th, and 19th-century Europe, marked by the spread of reason, science, literacy, and free thinking. Romanticism was a direct response to the problems created by the Enlightenment. Because the Enlightenment preached science, social forces, and deism (the idea that God set the rules and then left), it created a lot of anxiety. Romantics were a movement that responded by focusing more on nature, individual will to change the course of history, and spirituality over materialism.

The Enlightenment Model: The French Revolution

From the Enlightenment, we have Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote a book called The Social Contract. In it, he argued that as individuals, we are born free with inalienable rights like life and liberty. We choose to surrender some of these rights for more safety, security, and wealth. The people come together and create something called the general will, which is the collective mind of the people. From the general will, you have the government, but the government exists to serve the general will, which serves the people. The government exists to protect the individual rights of people and to ensure their happiness and well-being. This is where Abraham Lincoln gets his famous phrase: "of the people, by the people, for the people." He is just reiterating Rousseau's idea.

This was, of course, implemented by the French Revolution and Napoleon. The general will becomes manifest in the nation-state. This was really successful because it conceives of a country as a unified whole, almost like a body. This was new. Before, in a monarchy, the monarch, the people, and the military were all separate. It was common for monarchs to hire foreign mercenaries to fight their wars. But now, in the French Revolution, when you conceive of the nation as a whole, you can draw on the people to become your soldiers. You can create an almost infinite supply of them. And because the people believe they're fighting for themselves, they're more motivated and willing to sacrifice themselves than mercenaries who are just in it for the money. That's why the French Revolution was able to spread throughout Europe and conquer Spain, Italy, and Germany.

The Romantic Model: The German Response

Once the French conquered most of Europe, it stirred resentment. Before, these were free and independent peoples who had control over local matters. Now, the French were imposing a new political, economic, and social regime on them, with foreign troops to ensure they obeyed. This created a lot of resentment, and the people's response was to create their own form of nationalism in response to French nationalism, influenced by Romanticism.

In their response, the idea is this: there is a culture, and it gives us a people. From the beginning, there are no individuals; there's only a culture that creates a community. The people's responsibility is to protect, enhance, and spread that culture, and the best way to do this is through the nation-state. This gives us a different interpretation of the nation-state. Because the French are now imposing their culture on our indigenous culture, we have a responsibility as a people to rebel and fight back. This would give us German nationalism, an idea that first emerged among the Germans but then spread to Italy as well.

These are two extremely different interpretations of nationalism.

How the Nation-State Replaced the Monarchy

It's important to understand that the nation-state replaces the monarchy, and there are three fundamental differences.

1. Authority: For the monarchy, the bureaucracy is the ultimate authority because it represents the monarch. In a nation-state, it's the people or the culture.
2. Elite: In a monarchy, the elite are the aristocracy, those rewarded by the monarch. In a nation-state, it's usually the bourgeoisie—the industrialists and capitalists.
3. Character: The monarchy is pretty flexible and conservative. It's about shifting alliances, with monarchs cooperating to maintain peace and prevent encroachment. After the French Revolution, the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was an agreement among monarchs to never fight again, a model that held until the revolutions of 1848. The nation-state, however, is almost like a new religion. It wants standardization and systemization. It wants everyone to buy into the nation-state, and as a result, it's expansionist, either outwards or inwards.

The Architects and Analysts of the Nation-State

Several thinkers have explained how the nation-state came about. In his book Seeing Like a State, James Scott explains that it arose from a process of systemization created by the social forces in Europe.

Three factors, in the end, conspired to make what Kula calls “the metrical revolution” possible. First, the growth of market exchange encouraged uniformity in measures. Second, both popular sentiment and Enlightenment philosophy favored a single standard throughout France. Finally, the Revolution, and especially the Napoleonic state-building project, actually enforced the metric system in France and the Empire.

The homogenization of measures, then, was part of a larger, immanent, and emancipatory simplification. At one stroke, the equality of all French people before the law was guaranteed by the state. They were no longer mere subjects of their lords and sovereign but bearers of inalienable rights as citizens.

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson explains how new communities became imaginable.

What made the new communities imaginable was a half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity.

At this time in Europe, there was no conception of a national language; everyone spoke what was local to them. There was also no conception of race, which is a very new concept. But with print, you're able to spread a language and create a national language. This is key to the nation-state because print and language allow people to think the same way and to imagine a shared history—because culture and history are all just made up.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau laid the theoretical groundwork in The Social Contract.

Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.

He also argued for the separation of church and state, believing Christianity was incompatible with a republic.

But I am mistaken in speaking of a Christian republic; the two words are mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favourable to tyranny that it always profits by such a régime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not much mind: this short life counts for too little in their eyes.

This is one of the fundamental ideas of the French Republic, which explains the antagonism today between Islamists and the French government. The Islamists want to maintain their traditions, like wearing the hijab, but the French nation prevents them from doing so in public places and schools.

Napoleon spread these French Enlightenment principles throughout Europe. In 1805, he defeated both the Russians and the Austrians at the Battle of Austerlitz. At this point, Napoleon should have been made Holy Roman Emperor, as was tradition. But the emperor at the time decided that rather than give up the throne to Napoleon, he would just dissolve the empire. This was a major blow to the people of the Holy Roman Empire, which in their minds had existed for a thousand years since Charlemagne and was the direct heir to the Roman Empire.

Napoleon created the Confederation of the Rhine, a vassal state to the French, which antagonized many Germans who felt their culture and history were being eroded. At this time, however, the Germans didn't have a sense of "Germanness" or a national identity. In response, German intellectuals attempted to create one. The poet Ernst Moritz Arndt believed this new identity should be fashioned in opposition to the French.

Let the animosity of your hearts be your church. Let us be one people, and let this nation be your religion. Let hatred of the French be your religion. Let freedom and fatherland be your saints to whom you pray.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a major philosopher, argued that if they wanted to create a nation-state, they had to figure out what united them as a people. He decided it would be language. The German language would define their culture and identity.

Description and characterization in such a language is itself a directly vital and sensuous matter.

Fichte also explained that the nation is not just a collection of people; it is something that transforms them.

Let the component parts of our higher spiritual life be just as dried out, and thus let the bands of national unity also be just as torn apart, lying about in wild disorder, scattered and disarrayed, as are the bones of a seer. Let them be bleached and dried out by many centuries of storms, deluges, and blazing sun. The animating breath of the spiritual world has not yet ceased to blow. It will also take hold of our national bodies in our bones and join them together, so that they might gloriously exist in a new and transfigured life.

A Tale of Two Nationalisms: The Jewish Question in France and Germany

An example that highlights the difference between the French and German forms of nationalism is the "Jewish Question." There were many Jews throughout Europe, minorities in these countries who saw themselves as a nation. With the rise of the nation-state, the question was: what do you do about the Jews?

The French Response: The Dreyfus Affair

In 1894, a French military officer named Alfred Dreyfus, who was Jewish by ancestry, was arrested and accused of being a German spy. French counter-intelligence quickly found out he was not the spy, but the military didn't want to lose face. There were also many anti-Semitic elements within the military. So, rather than admit they got the wrong guy, they put the real spy on trial and acquitted him, while Dreyfus was sent to a penal colony for life.

News of this leaked and created a national controversy. Émile Zola, probably the most famous writer in France at the time, wrote a newspaper article called "J'Accuse…!" in which he accused the French military and state of corruption, incompetence, and negligence.

Why were people so riled up about this one guy in prison? It had to do with French identity. There was a huge conflict between French liberals, who saw themselves as heirs to the French Revolution, and monarchists. For liberals like Zola, the republic was about maintaining the rights of all citizens. If one citizen loses his rights or is mistreated by the justice system, then all citizens will be mistreated. Even though Alfred Dreyfus was a Jew, he was first and foremost a French citizen, because the French nation exists to protect the rights of all its citizens.

The German Response: The Holocaust

The German response to the Jewish question was the Holocaust. These are the two different conceptions of nationalism—the French and the German—and their ultimate outcomes.

Nationalism Unleashed: Imperialism, Racism, and Eugenics

After the 1848 revolutions throughout Europe, monarchs recognized they couldn't hold back the tide of social change and began to embrace nationalism. This new philosophy of culture was provided by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species. His theory of evolution contradicted Christian teaching and introduced the idea that we are who we are by random chance.

This gave birth to scientific racism. The logic was that if God has no design and we develop by chance, then certain people must be inherently superior to others. Since Europe was the wealthiest and most advanced part of the world, Europeans must be superior as a people to everyone else. This led to a popular trend of measuring skulls to "prove" that Europeans were superior.

This also led to the idea of eugenics. Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, was concerned about the gene pool. For Darwin, evolution meant that bad genes were systematically eliminated. But in a time of improved sanitation and hospital care, people who should have died were living, diluting the quality of the gene pool. Galton proposed eugenics: a society should systematically eliminate bad genes to maintain its purity. There were three ways to do this:

1. Forced sterilization of the handicapped or criminals.
2. Execution of criminals or those with low IQ.
3. Limiting immigration.

This was an extremely popular idea in the United States, where immigrants from "low genetic stock"—the Polish, Irish, Italians, and Eastern Europeans—were seen as a threat to the WASP elite. The center of the eugenics movement at the turn of the 20th century was the United States, where many states passed forced sterilization laws.

Madison Grant wrote a popular book arguing that the Nordic race—Germans, Scandinavians, and the British—was the dominant, superior race. A big fan of his ideas was Adolf Hitler. The Nazis translated and spread his book, and many of his ideas became the basis for Nazi eugenics policy.

A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit—in other words, social failures—would solve the whole question in a century, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums.

It's hard for us to imagine, but in the 1930s, this was a widespread idea in America, Britain, and Germany. In 1935, the most likely scenario seemed to be an alliance between America, Britain, and Germany against the Soviet Union, a Slavic and communist country seen as a threat to the capitalist Nordic people. The great mystery is why America and Britain instead supported the Soviet Union in destroying Germany.

The Path to Global War

This era gave us the age of imperialism. Europeans needed more resources, but they were also spreading their cultural mission to civilize the world as the master race—the "white man's burden." They carved up Africa among themselves, leading to notorious atrocities, especially in the Congo, which was the personal property of King Leopold of Belgium. China was also carved up by Europeans into treaty ports.

The Japanese Anomaly

The problem for the Europeans was the Japanese. In the European understanding, they were superior, and everyone else should submit. That's what happened in Africa and China, but not Japan. Japan underwent the Meiji Restoration, a tremendous social change that transformed it from a feudal society into a modern industrial nation. In 1905, it defeated a major European power, Russia, in a war. This was shocking because it went against all understanding of the world at the time.

The rapid pace of transformation was as though everyone in Japan decided, "We as a people need to change, and we're going to change today." By 1928, Japan had universal male suffrage. Its economy exploded. This deep-seated social cohesion has historical roots. In the 13th century, the Mongols launched two invasions of Japan, both of which failed. The myth is the kamikaze (divine wind), but the real reason is that the Mongols could not divide and conquer. They could not find any local allies. The people were united against the invaders, making it too expensive for the Mongols to take over Japan. This created a sense of national identity and unity that persists today. The strongest nation in East Asia is not China; it's Japan, due to its social cohesion and patriotism.

The Collapse of the Old Empires and World War I

In 1871, the German Empire was proclaimed, uniting Germany into one political entity. This was a threat to Britain, whose foreign policy was to always ensure a balance of power in Europe. At the same time, nationalism was spreading throughout the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, multi-ethnic empires that had no reason to exist in an age of the nation-state. The Greeks rebelled against the Ottomans; the Italians rebelled against the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

World War I was started by the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire by a Serbian nationalist, which brought Austria-Hungary into conflict with Russia, which then brought in Britain and Germany. World War I and World War II were by far the deadliest wars in human history.

Fascism: The Apogee of Nationalism

After World War I, you have the rise of extreme nationalism, which we call fascism. Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascism, explained it this way:

We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality. It is a reality in the sense that it is a stimulus, is hope, is faith, is courage. Our myth is the Nation, our myth is the greatness of the Nation! And to this myth, to this greatness, which we want to translate into a total reality, we subordinate everything else.

Fascism is the belief that the nation is in an eternal struggle of the fittest. It must defeat other nations to survive. Even if the nation looks weak, as long as its people stick together and fight together, they will be invincible. This is the romantic nationalism that drove both Italy and Germany. The fascist Filippo Marinetti said:

We want to glorify war—the only cure for the world—and militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill.

For fascists, war is a good thing because it automatically unites people in the final struggle for survival and can be used to remold people into extreme nationalists. This, of course, led to the rise of Hitler in Germany and Stalin in the Soviet Union.

After the Catastrophe: Building the Post-War World

After World War II, people looked at the tremendous carnage and catastrophe. Hannah Arendt, in her fantastic book The Origins of Totalitarianism, tried to explain how the Holocaust and the rise of the Nazis and communists were possible.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

She argues that these regimes systematically eroded people's capacity to judge for themselves, destroying the idea of the individual.

Karl Popper, another European Jew who escaped the Holocaust, wrote a famous book called The Open Society and Its Enemies.

The open society is one in which men have learned to be to some extent critical of taboos, and to base decisions on the authority of their own intelligence.

He argues that for peace to thrive, we need to celebrate the individual rather than the nation. We also need to be skeptical of grand theories of human history, like those of Plato, Hegel, and Marx, which are anti-democratic and anti-individual. He proposed that Anglo-American civilization was far superior to Russian and German civilization, and his book became an intellectual basis for the American Empire.

New Trends and a Potential Backlash

Popper's philosophy and the American Empire created new trends in society that weren't there before, such as identity politics, which is the celebration of individual helplessness, requiring the state to protect vulnerable minorities, women, and immigrants. You also have mass immigration, which is now celebrated in America and Europe but was not historically.

When you have identity politics and mass immigration together, that ultimately creates a conservative pushback, which is what we're seeing today with the Trump era and mass deportations. In other words, even though the nation-state created problems that the Pax Americana tried to resolve by focusing on individual rights, the focus on individual rights is creating more problems that may allow for a return of nationalism in the future. That is a very strong possibility.