By Predictive History in The story of CIVILIZATION — 05 Jun 2025

Civilization #58: Birth of the Nation-State

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

For example, the Jews were for the longest time a nation without a state. It was only until the founding of Israel that the Jews had a nation-state. Today there are many peoples, including the Kurds, who are a people living in the Middle East. They are a nation, but they don't have a state. This idea of the nation-state, it is probably the most powerful ideology in human history. It has led people to tremendous achievements, but it's also led people to catastrophic wars, including World War I and World War II.

First thing I want to do is go over where this idea comes from. In many ways it is the culmination of different religious, economic and social-cultural factors. Let's look at them individually.

The Religious Factor: A Solution to the Crisis of Faith

Religion. With the Protestant Reformation there is now a crisis of faith because Christianity creates the idea of the individual. The individual is in direct connection with God. Before the church would mediate this connection. So 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 you 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. So it creates this conflict. Historically there have been different solutions to this problem.

The first solution that people have proposed is the idea of money. Let's just replace God with money, and that gives us the idea of capitalism. The Calvinists believe this, that God is money, money is God. If you accumulate enough wealth, then that shows your absolute faith in God and God's love for you. That's the idea of money.
Then people have said, "Nope, God is reason." As long as you pursue reason, as long as you show enlightenment, then that shows your faith in God. This gives us the idea of the Enlightenment as well as liberalism.
Then others have said, "Nope, God is the individual itself." As long as you believe in yourself, as long as you engage in a process of self-discovery and self-growth, then that will lead you into heaven. This was most famously proposed by Freud and Jung, and this has become the basis for what we call modernism, which is still with us today.
Then there's proposed another solution to this problem, and it's the idea that God is in the nation.

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

So the nation is the perfect solution because it both solves the problem of religion and it solves a problem of politics and community. In fact the nation is a conflation of both religion and politics. That's why historically it has been the most emotionally powerful idea. For a religious purpose, the nation-state solves the problem of faith and alienation.

The Economic Factor: The Industrial Revolution's Demands

Now let's look at economics. During this time you have the Industrial Revolution, and there are many issues created by the Industrial Revolution. The first problem is you need to constantly expand because you need markets and resources. Expansion. Another way of saying this is that you need to engage in imperialism.

Another problem created by the Industrial Revolution is the rise of the bourgeoisie. Historically it was the priests and the warriors who were the elite of society. But now with the Industrial Revolution, the bourgeoisie, the industrialists and the capitalists, are now the new elite. As such they obviously want more political power, but what they really want is property rights. They want to be assured that the wealth they've generated can be protected and inherited by their children and their grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.

Now the problem is this. The system of the monarchy cannot really ensure property rights, and the reason why is the king can be overthrown. The aristocracy can be overthrown, and this is what happens throughout European history, but the nation-state cannot be overthrown. So the nation-state is a solution to the problem of property rights for the bourgeoisie. Also the nation-state has the resources to engage in imperialism, and it has the desire to engage in imperialism. Monarchies are usually pretty conservative. They like to maintain their position, and they will form alliances in order to maintain their position. The nation-state is aggressive and expansionist and imperialist. So from an economic perspective the nation-state solves a problem created by the Industrial Revolution. That's the economic factor.

The Socio-Cultural Factor: Coping with Modernity

Then let's look at the social-cultural factor, social-cultural aspect of this. What's happening because of the Industrial Revolution is that people are moving from the villages to the cities. You have this massive process of urbanization. Also because of the Industrial Revolution there's more trade. There's now the market. These goods are proliferating throughout the entire country. This creates the idea of systemization and standardization, and you have mobility of people, of goods and of ideas. Then you have new technology, not just in factories and not just in steamships but also in print, and it spreads literacy and information.

Think of this as just the beginning of globalization. In China we're inundated with new ideas all the time because of the internet, because of access to the world. But for most people this can be frustrating and bewildering, and it creates psychological issues. Primarily the idea of anomie.

Anomie just means a loss of sense of cultural rootedness. As things change, you don't know how to adapt to the change. Your values are based on the past. You're not sure if your values can confront the future.
Also alienation. Alienation just means a sense of powerlessness. You lack agency. These changes are happening so fast and so quickly, you don't know if you can control these changes.
Also disenchantment. Disenchantment means all these changes are dehumanizing. You're becoming no more than a machine. In today's world AI could possibly replace us. So it's creating all this doubt, all this confusion.

There are different solutions to this. There's communism, there's liberalism, and then there's nationalism. For people all three ideas are appealing, but communism preaches the idea of international solidarity, which can be for people even more confusing. Liberalism preaches the idea of individual rights. But if you're poor, the right to speak, the right to organize does not really apply to you. The fact of the matter is that most are poor.

But nationalism, the fact that we are one group of people in a struggle against other groups of people, this is powerful. This is appealing. Also if you think about it, nationalism can absorb other ideas. You can be both a nationalist and a liberal, and in fact most people were. You can also be a nationalist and a communist, which was what Joseph Stalin proposed, and this is what Mao proposed. So nationalism is the one ideology that can absorb and control all other ideologies. For these three particular reasons, religious transformation, economic transformation and social-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 it spread so quickly, let's talk about game theory. Game theory. Let's do a thought experiment and say there are millions of us playing a game. It doesn't matter what game we're playing. It could be checkers, it could be chess, it could be Monopoly, it could be a game of tag. It doesn't matter. But there are millions of us individually playing this game. We're all individual players. The problem is this. If maybe a group of us, maybe three or four or five, decide that they will coordinate, they're going to play the game together, maybe because they're family, maybe because they're friends, it doesn't matter why, but the moment they decide to play as a group, this automatically forces everyone else to group together.

That's the idea of the nation-state. The moment that France decides we're a nation-state, that forces everyone else, Germany, Russia, Italy, to become nation-states as well, because otherwise you're going to lose this game. The other thing that's really important for us to remember about this theory is this. To win this game now, as a nation-state, it does not actually matter your size. What matters is your cohesion. How well you're willing to work together to play this game. Or maybe unity of will.

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

The Two Foundational Models: Enlightenment vs. Romanticism

The idea of a nation-state comes from two different sources. The first is the Enlightenment. The second is Romanticism. To summarize, to recap, the Enlightenment is this major intellectual trend happening in 17th and 18th and 19th-century Europe at this time, the spread of reason as a god, the spread of science, of literacy, of free thinking, of debate.

Romanticism is a direct response to the problems created by the Enlightenment, because Enlightenment preaches the idea of science, of social forces, of an idea called deism, which is God has set the rules of the game. He's left us, and we're free to play the game. This creates a lot of anxiety in people. So Romantics were a movement to respond to the problems created by Enlightenment. They focus more on nature rather than science. They believe that there's a divine power to nature that we can access by embracing it. They believed in the idea of individual will to change the course of history, that we are stronger than the historical social forces around us. They rejected materialism. They were very spiritual. Now the Romantics are a huge movement of people. I don't want to generalize too much. But the Romantics were a response to the Enlightenment thinkers.

The Enlightenment Model: The French Revolution

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

This of course is implemented by the French Revolution, Napoleon and France. The general will becomes manifest in the nation-state. Rousseau proposed the idea, and the French Revolution implements this idea and gives us the first iteration of the nation-state. Now this is really successful because what it does is it conceives of a country as a unified whole, almost like as a body. This is new in human history because before, in a monarchy, the monarch, the people and the military were all separate. In fact it was very common at the time for monarchs to hire foreign mercenaries to fight their wars. The people weren't really engaged in war.

But now in the French Revolution, when you conceive the nation, the country, as in fact whole, you can now draw on the people to become your soldiers. In fact when you do this, you can create almost an infinite supply of soldiers. Because the people believe that they're fighting for themselves, they're more motivated, they're more energetic, they're more 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 basically conquer Europe, including Spain, Italy and Germany.

The Romantic Model: The German Response

But once the French conquered most of Europe, it now stirs resentment against the French because before these were free and independent people who had control over local matters, and now the French were coming and imposing a new political, economic and social regime on them. There were foreign troops, French troops, to make sure that you had to obey. So this creates a lot of resentment, and the people's response was to create their own form of nationalism but in response to French nationalism. Now they're being influenced by Romanticism.

In Romanticism their response is this. There is a culture, and it gives us a people. So from the beginning there are no individuals. There's only a culture, and so it creates a community. The people's responsibility is to protect their culture, to enhance the culture, to spread the culture, and the best way to do this is through the nation-state. This gives us a different interpretation of the nation-state, and because the French are now imposing their culture on our indigenous culture, then we have responsibility as a people to rebel and fight back. This will give us German nationalism. So it's the Germans who first proposed this idea, but then it spreads to Italy as well.

These are two extremely different interpretations of nationalism. In the French interpretation, which is also supported by the Americans and the British, the nation exists to protect individual rights. In a second interpretation, a Romantic German interpretation, the nation-state exists in order to protect a culture, because it's culture that gives life to people. What the Germans will say is the culture is something that you don't think of. It's already in your blood.

How the Nation-State Replaced the Monarchy

Really important is to understand the nation-state replaces the monarchy. There are three fundamental differences that I want you to remember and emphasize.

The first is for the monarchy the bureaucracy is ultimate authority. Why? Because the bureaucracy is what represents the monarch. But in a nation-state it's the people or the culture.
In a monarchy the elite are the aristocracy, those that have been rewarded by the monarch. But in a nation-state it's usually the bourgeoisie that are the elite. The industrialists, the capitalists.
The monarchy, it's pretty flexible. It's because it is really about shifting alliances. Monarchs cooperate with other monarchs to maintain the peace and to prevent other monarchs from encroaching on their territory. As a result the monarchs tend to be conservative people. They like the way things are, and they work towards that. After the French Revolution there was something called the Congress of Vienna in 1815, where the monarchs of Europe basically decided to never fight again. This was a successful model until 1848, when the people rebelled against them. But the nation-state, because it 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 expansive. It's either expansive outwards or it's expansive inwards.

The Architects and Analysts of the Nation-State

Let's look at some evidence or support for this argument. This is a really good book called Seeing Like a State by James Scott, published by Yale University Press. Fantastic book. If you are interested in this stuff, I highly recommend you read this book. He explains how the nation-state comes about because of a process of systemization created by all the social forces happening in Europe at this time. Let's just read quickly what he wrote.

Three factors in the end conspired to make what Kula calls the metrical revolution possible.

So the fact that we use the meter, that came about during this time.

First the growth of market exchange encouraged uniformity in measures.

So capitalism.

Second both popular sentiment and enlightenment philosophy favored a single standard throughout France.

Enlightenment.

Finally the revolution and especially the Napoleonic state building actually enforced the metric system in France and the empire.

Just summarizing what we discussed in the first section. Then Scott summarizes:

The homogenization of measures then was part of a larger 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 the lords and sovereign but bearers of inalienable rights as citizens.

This is just repeating what I just said, which is the main purpose of the French Revolution was to create a nation-state that guaranteed individual rights.

This is Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson, and again he goes into why the nation-state was born and how it spread, and he explains:

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

What he means by that is that in Europe at this time there really is no conception of the idea of a national language. Everyone just spoke what was local to them. There's also no conception of race. Race is a really new concept that was alien to most people. But now that you have print, you're able to spread language, and you're able to 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, it's all just made up. History, it's all just made up. There's nothing real in it. Because of this it's destroyed linguistic diversity. So if you were to go to France in the year 1800, and you go from village to village, they would speak different languages.

This is too long to read, but I'll just summarize. What he says is this. Before the nation-state the elite of Europe, the way they communicate with each other is through intermarriage. As a result there really wasn't a sense of national identity. But now with the rise of print technology there's now a separation, because you spoke your own language. This is important because the bourgeoisie are the new elite, and in theory they would want to move their capital around Europe. They would want to move to places where the capital would be more safe, where it'd be most productive. But the idea of a national language prevents them from doing that.

Jean Rousseau. We're just going to read a couple sentences from his book The Social Contract.

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

But I'm wrong to speak of a Christian republic. Those two terms are mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favorable to tyranny that it always profits by such a regime. German Christians are made to be slaves and they know it and don't mind much. This short life counts for too little in their eyes.

This is the theory of the separation of church and state. This is the beginning of the idea of separation of church and state. It's one of the fundamental ideas of the French Republic. That's why today there's so much antagonism between Islamists and the government. Because the Islamists want to maintain their tradition. They want to wear the hijab. They want to maintain their cultural customs. But the French nation prevents them from doing so in public places and in schools.

As we discussed, Napoleon will spread French Enlightenment principles throughout Europe. In 1805 he defeats both the Russians and the Austrians at the Battle of Austerlitz. At this point Napoleon should be made Holy Roman Emperor. He should be made emperor of the Holy Roman Empire as is tradition. But the emperor at that time decides, you know what, rather than give up the throne to Napoleon, I'm just going to dissolve the empire. This was a major blow to these people because the empire in their minds existed for a thousand years, ever since Charlemagne, and the Holy Roman Empire is direct heir to the Roman Empire. So for a lot of these intellectuals living in the Holy Roman Empire this was extremely embarrassing.

Napoleon will create something called the Confederation of the Rhine, which replaces the Holy Roman Empire, and it's basically a vassal state to the French. This will antagonize a lot of the Germans because they feel as though their culture, their history, is being eroded. But at this time, this is really important, the Germans don't have a sense of Germanness. They don't really have a sense of a national identity. So what will happen is to counter the French, German intellectuals will attempt to create a new German national identity. This is Ernst Arndt. He's a poet, and he believes that this new identity should be fashioned like this.

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.

He's considered the father of German nationalism because he's presenting this idea that we Germans must exist in opposition to the French. This idea is going to drive a lot of the catastrophes of European history for the next hundred years.

This is Johann Fichte. He is a student of Kant. He is a major philosopher in his own right. He's considered the founder of a German idealism school, and he explains that if we want to create a nation-state, we have to figure out how to do so. What unites us as a people? It's not history because we have different histories. He decides, because he's a huge fan of Shakespeare, that this shared heritage will be one of language. We will speak one language together, and this language, the German language, is what will define our culture and our identity. He writes:

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

So our cultural identity, our Geist, will be manifested in our language. At this time there's a tremendous explosion of German literature to spread the idea of language. He also explains that the nation, it is not just a collection of people. Let's read this passage together because it's really important.

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.

What he's saying is the nation is not a collection of individuals. What the nation is, it's individuals who are transformed together that creates a nation. A nation will transform everyone.

Let's just summarize the differences between Enlightenment and Romanticism, because the Enlightenment is what's going to drive French nationalism, and Romanticism is what's going to drive German nationalism. It's science versus nature, reason versus emotions, liberty versus will and struggle. Through our struggle as a people we can liberate ourselves from the French and reforge ourselves as a great nation.

Main difference between French nationalism and German nationalism. Separation of church and state. For the Germans the nation is the church. The French believe in the general will. What is in the best interest of everyone? The Germans believe in the Geist, the spirit of your people.

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

I'm going to use an example to highlight the difference between the French form of nationalism and the German form of nationalism, and it has to do with the Jewish question. There are lots of Jews throughout Europe at this time. They're minorities in these countries, and the question is, with the rise of the nation-state, what do you do about the Jews? They're a problem because the Jews believe themselves as a nation. They don't have a state, but they're a nation. The Jews have the Bible, which gives them a shared language, a shared culture, a shared history. So how do you deal with a people in your nation that are explicitly not part of your culture, and they're very adamant about not being part of your culture?

The French Response: The Dreyfus Affair

There is antisemitism throughout Europe at this time, but the response to antisemitism is different in different nations. In 1894 there's something called the Dreyfus affair. The Dreyfus affair is this man Alfred Dreyfus. He is Jewish by ancestry, but at this time a lot of elite Jews have already assimilated into the popular culture. In 1894 he was arrested and accused of being a German spy. Alfred Dreyfus was an officer in the French military. The problem is that French counterintelligence conducted a short investigation, and they quickly found out that this man was not the spy. But the French military didn't want to lose face. Also there were a lot of antisemitic elements within the French military.

So rather than just say, "You know what? We got the wrong guy. We were wrong. Let's forget about this," their response was to put the real spy on trial and acquit him. It's like, "No, you're innocent," even though the evidence all suggests he's guilty. They put Dreyfus in prison in a penal colony far away for his entire life. So news of this leaks, and this creates a national controversy. A man named Émile Zola, who was probably the most famous writer in France at this time, writes in a newspaper article called I Accuse. I accuse the French military of corruption, of incompetence, of negligence. I accuse the French state of corruption, incompetence, negligence.

The question then is, why are these people so riled up about this one guy in prison? The answer is it has to do with the French identity. At this point in history there's this huge conflict between French liberals, who see themselves as heirs to the French Revolution, and monarchists who want to get rid of revolutionary elements. For the liberals like Émile Zola the republic is about maintaining the rights of all citizens. If one citizen loses his rights, if one citizen is mistreated by the justice system, then all citizens will be mistreated by the justice system. So even though Alfred Dreyfus is a Jew, for the French he is first and foremost a French citizen, because the French nation exists to protect the rights of all those who are citizens of France. That's why this was a huge deal in France, and it lasted for about ten years.

The German Response: The Holocaust

Of course the German response to the Jewish question was the Holocaust. These are two different conceptions of nationalism, the French and the German.

Nationalism Unleashed: Imperialism, Racism, and Eugenics

Before 1848 the nation-state, nationalism, was contained in Europe because nationalism was actually a threat to the monarchy, because nationalism would reduce a lot of their powers. But in 1848 there are too many revolutions and rebellions throughout Europe, and monarchs at this point recognize that they can't really hold back the tide of social change. So certain nations like Germany start to embrace nationalism as a way to contain these social changes.

Once the nation-state came into being, they needed a certain philosophy about culture, and this man Charles Darwin provides that in The Origin of Species. He presents a new theory of human development that contradicts all Christian teaching, which is the idea of evolution. The idea of this is that God has no design. We are who we are by random chance through the process of evolution. This will give birth to the idea of scientific racism. Because if it's true that God has no say in how we develop, if it's true that we develop by chance, then we can also extrapolate from this that, well, there are certain people that must be inherently superior to others. There are certain people that must have evolved to be more intellectual, to be more scientific, to be more brave. Because Europe at this time is the wealthiest and strongest and most advanced part of the world, then we're going to also reason that Europeans must also be superior as a people to everyone else, the Africans, the Asians.

So this introduced the idea of racism. This is a really popular thing to do back then. One thing that they were really interested in is the skull, because they figured out if they can measure the skull, then they can make generalizations about the different brains of different cultures. Of course the entire point of this exercise was to prove that in fact Europeans were superior.

This also leads to the idea of eugenics. This is Francis Galton, who is a cousin of Charles Darwin, and both Charles Darwin and Francis Galton were concerned about the gene pool. Because for Darwin evolution meant that bad genes were systematically eliminated from the system. But in a time of improved sanitation, of improved hospital care, then people who should have died are living, and this is going to dilute the quality of your gene pool. So Francis Galton proposed the idea of eugenics, that a nation, the society, should systematically eliminate bad genes from the gene pool in order to maintain its purity. There are three ways that you can do this.

The first is you can do forced sterilization. People who might be handicapped, or they are criminals, you sterilize them to prevent them from reproducing. That's one solution.
Another solution is, well, execution. So if you're a criminal or you are physically violent, or if you are low IQ, then we should just execute you to prevent you from polluting the gene pool.
The third solution is to limit migration. Limit immigration and limit migration.

This is an extremely popular idea in the United States because at this time in history you have all these Europeans from low genetic stock, the Polish, the Irish, the Italians, the Eastern Europeans, coming into the United States at this time. This was posing a real threat to the WASP elite. That's why in the United States this eugenics movement really takes off. Really the center of the eugenics movement in the world at the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century, is really the United States. There are many, many states in the United States that passed forced sterilization laws.

This is Madison Grant. He wrote a very popular book about how there are different races, and the Nordic race, the Germans, the Scandinavians and the British, they are the dominant race. They are the superior race. But over time the numbers are diluting, and therefore the Nordic people must work together. Guess who really enjoys his idea, who was a big fan of Madison Grant? Hitler. The Nazis will translate his book and spread his book, and a lot of his ideas will become the basis for Nazi eugenics policy. The Nazis were notorious for taking the disabled, the handicapped, and basically forcing them into gas chambers. This is what he says.

A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit would solve the whole question in 100 years 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 is a really widespread idea in America, in Britain and in Germany. Extremely widespread among the elite. In fact in 1935, if you ask me what was most likely to happen, then I would tell you that America, Britain and Germany would ally themselves because they saw themselves as one people, and they would attack the Soviet Union because the Soviet Union was a Slavic country that was communist. Both the Slavs and the communists were a threat to the Nordic people who are capitalistic. In 1935 that was the most likely scenario. In fact there were a lot of people proposing this scenario. So why is it that it would be America and Britain who would support the Soviet Union in destroying Germany? Because it's a huge mystery why that happened, when in reality it should have been America, Britain and Germany versus the Soviet Union.

The Path to Global War

This now gives us the age of imperialism. The Europeans now need more resources, but they're also spreading their cultural mission to civilize the entire world because they are the master race. They have the white man's burden to civilize all others. Now they didn't go into Africa before because of malaria issues. If you're European, you went into Africa, you're going to die. But with major advancements in medicine they now had medicine against malaria, and very quickly they basically carved up Africa amongst themselves. They had a conference, and they decided who would get who.

Their imperialism in Africa was notorious. It was one of the worst atrocities in human history, especially in the Congo, which was controlled by Belgium. Basically the king of Belgium, Leopold, had a mercenary army go in, enslave the people and extract all the resources from the Congo, and it was his own personal property, his own personal estate. Also China. China was basically carved up by the Europeans. The Americans negotiated something called the Open Door Policy, and everyone agreed to carve China up into different sections. We call these the treaty ports.

The Japanese Anomaly

Now the problem for the Europeans though are the Japanese. In the European understanding of the world the Europeans are superior, especially the northern people, so everyone else should submit and surrender to the Europeans. That's what happened in Africa, and that's what happened in China, but not Japan. Japan underwent tremendous social change called the Meiji Restoration to go from a feudal society into a modern industrial nation that in 1905 was able to defeat a major European power, the Russians, in a war. This was shocking because this went against all understanding of the world at this time.

What really surprised people was the rapid pace of transformation in Japan. It was as though everyone decided that we as a people needed to change, and we're going to change today. That's what Japan did. So you look at politics. In 1890 they will establish basically the parliament, and by 1928 you had universal male suffrage. Basically in 1928 every man in Japan could vote. Economically the Japanese economy exploded.

If you go to Japan today, you'll be amazed by how well-organized the society is. Almost everyone in Japan reverse parks. If you look at this picture, maybe there's this one guy for whatever reason who decides not to reverse park, but everyone else reverse parks. There's no law that says you must reverse park. Everyone just does it because of a sense of social cohesion.

In the 13th century the Mongols, having conquered Korea and China and most of Asia, launched two invasions of Japan, which both fail. Now the myth is the kamikaze, the divine wind, which saved Japan from the invasion. That's not true. That's just part of Japanese mythology. The real reason, what really happened, is the Mongols were able to land forces both times. But what they discovered was they could not divide and conquer. Usually the policy of an invader is to find local allies, establish a beachhead on the island and then slowly expand outwards. That's a policy. But in Japan the Mongols could not find any local allies. The people were united against the invaders, and as a result it became too expensive and too burdensome for the Mongols to take over Japan.

This creates the sense of national identity and national unity that still persists today. That's why I just say this, but the strongest nation in East Asia is not China, it's Japan. You have to look at social cohesion. You have to look at how willing people are to fight and die for the nation. Historically the nation with the most patriotism has always been Japan, not China. So please keep this in mind.

The Collapse of the Old Empires and World War I

Now we go into World War I and World War II. In 1871 the German Empire is proclaimed. The Prussians unite all Germany into one political entity, and now they're a threat to Britain because remember, the British foreign policy is we must always ensure a balance of power in Europe. If one power arises, we must fight it. So when Napoleon arose, Britain spent an infinite amount of money and resources to defeat Napoleon, which it ultimately did. Now with Germany in power in Europe, Britain is now going to challenge it and ensure a balance of power in Europe.

At the same time what's happening is the spread of nationalism throughout the Ottoman and Austria-Hungary Empire. Remember the Ottomans and the Austria-Hungary Empire are these multiethnic empires that don't really have any reason to exist anymore in an age of the nation-state and of nationalism. This is the Ottoman Empire. They're based in Istanbul, but they also occupy what we call the Balkans, Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia. So the Greeks rebel against the Ottomans, and they're successful in doing so in the Greek War of Independence.

Now we talk a lot of the Greeks, and it may surprise you to hear, for most of its history the Greeks didn't consider themselves as one people, as one culture, as one nation. That's why the Greeks never were able to expand that far. The Athenians, the Spartans were too busy fighting each other to deal with others. Ultimately it was the Macedonians who conquered Persia, not the Greeks. This is the Italian War of Independence. The Italians rebelled against the Austria-Hungary Empire. So the Austria-Hungary Empire comes into threat as well. Again the Austria-Hungary Empire, it is a multiethnic state, and the different ethnicities in the Austria-Hungary Empire are clamoring for independence.

The Austria-Hungary Empire, there are lots of Slavs, Slavic people, within it, and they are calling to Russia for aid. As you know, what starts World War I is assassination of the heir to the Austria-Hungary Empire by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, which brings the Austria-Hungary Empire into direct conflict with Russia, which then brings in Britain and Germany as well. This creates World War I. World War I and World War II are the deadliest wars in human history by far. Millions and millions of people are killed.

Fascism: The Apogee of Nationalism

After World War I you have the rise of extreme nationalism, which is what we call fascism. Fascism is just the extreme version of nationalism. This is Mussolini, who was the founder of fascism, and he explains fascism in this way.

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

Fascism is a belief that the nation, the people, is in an eternal struggle of the fittest. It must defeat other nations if it is to survive. Even though the nation looks weak, as long as we stick together, as long as we believe in each other, as long as we fight together, we will be invincible. This is the Romantic nationalism driving both Italy as well as of course Germany. This is a fascist, Filippo Marinetti, and he says:

We want to glorify war the only cure for the world and militarism patriotism and the beautiful ideas which kill.

For fascists war is a good thing because war automatically unites people together in the final struggle for survival. War is a process that you can use to remold people into the most extreme nationalists. This of course leads to the rise of Hitler in Germany as well as Stalin in the Soviet Union. He's that important of a historical figure.

After the Catastrophe: Building the Post-War World

After World War II people started to look at the tremendous carnage, catastrophe of what had happened. This is Hannah, and she wrote a book called The Origins of Totalitarianism. It is a fantastic book, by the way. It's one of my favorite books. Definitely considered the greatest work of political philosophy in the 20th century. It's basically required reading in university when you go there. In it she basically tries to explain why the Holocaust happened, why World War II happened. How was it possible for the Nazis to rise in power in Germany and for the communists to rise in power in the Soviet Union? What she explains is this.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.

What she argues is that these regimes systematically eroded people's capacity to judge for themselves. Basically these regimes destroyed the idea of the individual, and that's what allowed for totalitarianism to arise in these states. This is Karl Popper, and Karl Popper is, like her, Hannah Arendt, a European Jew who escaped the devastation of the Holocaust and the war. They both went to America. He wrote a very famous book called The Open Society, and he argues:

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.

What he argues is for peace to happen, for peace to ultimately thrive in this world, we need to celebrate the individual rather than the nation. Also we need to be skeptical of these grand theories of human history. We need to avoid Hegel. We definitely need to avoid Marx, but also Plato. These are the three baddies of the Western tradition. Plato, Hegel and Marx, because they're anti-democratic, they're anti-individual, but also they have a teleological view of history, of things that's moving towards the final end. That is a megalomaniacal view to understand the world. We need to be skeptical. We need to incrementally change society.

So what he's really doing is he is proposing that Anglo-American civilization is far superior, far more scientific, far more advanced than both Russian and German civilization. That's what he's really doing. That's why Karl Popper's Open Society has become an intellectual basis for the American Empire.

Very quickly let's understand the difference between World War II and the Pax Americana, which is the age we live in today. World War II was about the nation-state, the rise of nationalism and fascism. The Pax Americana is about the international rules-based order, the United Nations, human rights, the Geneva Convention, all these things. It's what they call the rules-based international order.

Another difference is World War II was about mercantilism. Mercantilism is basically you have your own separate trading zone, and you only trade within this zone. So that creates an incentive for Britain, for Germany, for France to go and conquer other colonies in order to facilitate their own industrial production. America is saying, no guys, let's just focus on global free trade. Let's have everyone trade together, and if everyone trades together there is going to be peace.

That's what fascism is, the unity of will. We as a people, if we come together we will be this invincible, inevitable historical force that will overwhelm the whole world. Today we just focus on consumerism. Just go buy things, guys. Buy things, be happy, we're good. This is an introduction.

New Trends and a Potential Backlash

Popper's Open Society rubric and the American Empire create these new trends in society that really weren't there before. For example, identity politics. Identity politics is one such trend. Identity politics is really the celebration of individual helplessness. We're all individuals, and we all require the state to help us. So the state is fundamentally about protecting the vulnerable, including minorities, including women, including immigrants. That's what identity politics is really.

You also have mass immigration. Mass immigration is celebrated in America and in European nations right now. Historically this was not true. Maybe they had immigration, but it was more of an academic need, and there's a lot of political pushback against mass immigration. Today it's celebrated. But when you do that, when you have identity politics and mass immigration together, that ultimately creates a conservative pushback, which is what we're seeing today. The Trump era, which started only a few months ago, there's mass deportations going on. It's possible that you guys will not be allowed to go to the United States. All this is possible because of this conservative pushback.

In other words, even though the nation-state created a lot of problems that the Pax Americana is trying to resolve by focusing on more individual rights, the focus on individual rights is going to create more problems that may also allow for a return of nationalism in the future. I think that's a very strong possibility. What's really important for us to remember is that this is all just background information for you guys.

What Is the Difference Between Nationalism and a Cult?

What is the difference between nationalism and a cult?

What's the difference between nationalism and a cult? There's really little difference between nationalism and religion, but a cult is something that we mean is much more limited, much smaller, and it requires rituals as well. But I think you're right. I think you can make the argument that nationalism is a form of religion. Definitely.