[RD] National Sovereignty and its enemies

[innonimatu]

I have been noticing that one recurring theme in political discussion since at least the mid-19th century has been whether "nations are outdated".

As you all probably know, by the time of World War I most of the world was claimed by handful of huge empires. The British Empire, French Empire, Russianth centu Empire ,and USA, between them claimed over half the planet.
The remnants of the Ottoman and Chinese Empires, the smaller Belgian, Portuguese and Dutch empires, Brazil (itself a kind of empire still effectively occupying the native lands of its interior), and a few new Empires (Japan, Italy and Germany) seemed about to cover whatever these 4 big ones didn't take. Or be taken over by them.

"The days are for great empires, and not for little states", Joseph Chamberlain proclaimed from his role as british colonial secretary. Many small sovereign states were being suppressed, as had happened in Germany and Italy by that time.

Then WW1 started a reversal of this imperial march. But it took World War II and the Cold War competition to finally break them and produce the hundreds of different states we have now.
The world became again more like it had been prior to the 1860s, smaller nation-states governed themselves according to their local peculiarities. Each had its own bureaucracy, its own currency, its economic priorities, its social organization, free from imposition by others. Or at least was supposed to have.

Critics of this situation keep arguing, as Joseph Chamberlain did, that such sovereignty is outdated, that it cannot be maintained. Nation-states must give way to empires. Cease to be, either willing or forcefully. As one german commissary mentioned regarding Italy leaving the Euro, "the markets will correct them"... echoes of a colonial secretary from the past century.

I mention Chamberlain because I read a very good article on the history of this idea last year, that stuck in my mind. The kind of speech we hear about the nation-state is basically the same since the 19th-century: it is outdated because it cannot compete against the big empires. But the empires keep rising and falling despite this argument. The 19th century liberals invented the argument, the Nazis used it to justify their conquest of Europe, the soviets applied it to keep the old Russian Empire territories, the european colonial powers fought colonial wars to keep it going... and despite all this the empires fell and post ww2 Europe had its 30 glorious years nevertheless when its own population advanced economically, freed from the millstone of maintaining empires and the attaining bureaucracy and inflexibility.

What do you think of the argument, as it applies to out present time?

 

[mitsho]

I don‘t really understand what your argument is actually?

I highly doubt simple analogies over the centuries work. Non-Governmental Actor don‘t really seem to play into your narrative for example. I thereby mean of course mainly Multinational Corporations or the high finance system by itself, but also the question whether cooperation between the states hasn‘t brought us forward and would be an alternative to your sovereignty?

 

[innonimatu]

My question is whether you find this idea is valid now, or not: are the small nation-states outdated?

I'm not trying to present a narrative above beyond pointing out that the fight over this issue is already long. Though I do have my own ideas and may be letting some of those through when writing above...

 

[mitsho]

Well no, globalization and the liberal world order (in the IR sense, the UN and co.) has made modern borders much more stable than ever before. We mainly quibble over smaller issues and re-state old claims, but we don‘t start a war over it (at least before Trump...). But of course, the same globalization and shared sovereignty takes away a bit of leeway from the single state WITHOUT compensating this with new democratic tools we are used to on the national level (which is btw. the difference between the globalization of today and the nation building of the 19th century). So, the small states get weaker you could say, but they will continue to exist....

Of course, the above paragraph is centered on the Western and especially the Democratic World. I could see arguments for the same or for completely different experiences in other regions of the Globe, so I don‘t want to try an analysis here...

 

[Berzerker]

nukes will further erode the power of empire

even city states can become independent if they have them...

 

[Lohrenswald]

I think nation states are actually very old, the only thing that has lasted longer is I think like tribes

Anyway, saying "thing I don't like is outdated, thing I like is the future" is one of the easiest and laziest things one can say. There's nothing well reasoned behind it, just propaganda.

It's also a stupid way to look at things "what can change" instead of "what is good"

 

[Ferocitus]

It's also a stupid way to look at things "what can change" instead of "what is good"

Because humans know what is good. We're like that, except the bozos over there.

 

[Lohrenswald]

Because humans know what is good. We're like that, except the bozos over there.

I don't understand what you're trying to say, could you clarify?

 

[Cheetah]

Larger states are stronger when opposing smaller states, that is self-evident. As such, large empires are more powerful than mere chiefdoms.

Size gives many benefits, such as a larger population to draw on, more natural resources from a larger area, laws and regulations can be standardised to facilitate trade, travel and coordination, and standards enables a stronger economy because diversification and specialisation can be reinforced by a larger internal market.

Size also has costs, usually from trying to control and dominate a diverse populace with many cultures and customs, and time consuming travel. The dangers of corruption is also enhanced, as a greater domain can lead to more distance (both real and imaginary) in geography, as well as socially and politically.

I don't think there is any special time for any size of state though, except for noting that as communication and transportation becomes better and easier, larger states are easier to support and maintain. The large ancient empires usually grew up around seas, plains and major rivers, which all facilitated transportation and communication.

As such, as long as technology keeps improving, I'd say that every new day is ever more for great empires.

It should be noted that an empire doesn't have to be at the expense of little states, however. Little states banding together and forming their own empires in the interest of their protection and prosperity has always happened. It is hard to say that the constituent states were ever harmed by forming such unions, though the empires they formed didn't always last long, or prosper as much as they could have: The Greek city states created and joined leagues both against each other and against the Persians, the Gauls threw their lot together to oppose the Romans, the Holy Roman Empire consisted of many smaller states with varying degrees of liberties and duties, the Hanseatic League consisted of many smaller states, and in the early modern period both several of the British colonies in North America and many of the German states joined together to form the United States and the German Confederation(s). The European Union is the latest example of such an empire forming peacefully and voluntarily.

Whether or not the nation-state is a significant unit in the debate between empire and tribe is, however, a detour, I think. A nation-state draws its legitimacy from a nation -- a group of people differentiated from others by some markers such as language, culture, geography or ethnicity -- and that would seem to require those people to be nationalists. Nationalism didn't come into existence until the 17th century, and I'm unsure how long it may last as a popular political ideology.

 

[Peuri]

If by empire you mean a polity that rules over a variety of peoples, then I've got to say that empire has been the golden standard for polities since for ever. It's only after the French revolution of 1789, that the idea of a single language speaking nation being the motivation for the polity came to be realised in actual politics. But were the great nation states of central Europe ever really anything but empires masquerading as nation states? The French for example committed cultural genocide on the Occitans and Bretons etc. through expecting standardised French. And the rest followed suite, by redefining local languages as dialects, and creating the "correct" form of the languages of the elites as being the proper way to speak. You could say that Eastern Europe after WW I was a place for nation states, but there too the dominant version of speaking created by local nationalists pushed the dialects aside, creating the nation instead of the nation "waking up" from it's slumber. And there too were minority nations within the borders of those countries. Maybe it could be said that after WW 2 Europe was closest in having true nation states.

Where are today's nation states then? Increasingly nowhere. African, American and Asian states are (almost?) all empires, by the above definition, and increasingly European nation states are becoming empires too through immigration. So no, there is no future for nation states. There might be a future for small polities.

 

[luiz]

Yeah the line between nation-state and empire can be rather thin. Most nation-states were formed by empire-building. And it's not self-evident that the era of "nation-states" is more peaceful than the era of "empires" - the opposite claim can also be made.

Don't get me wrong, I do agree with the OP that nation-states are not obsolete and are still the best way to organize societies we got. But there are many "imperial-states" out there, from the US to China and Russia and even Brazil as the OP said. And they aren't inherently less stable or more violent than more classical nation-states.

 

[Cutlass]

There are advantages to being a large nation state. But there are problems with it as well. Some peoples just can't live as part of the same polity.

 

[Lexicus]

The world became again more like it had been prior to the 1860s, smaller nation-states governed themselves according to their local peculiarities.

I'm confused by this because the vast majority of world history prior to the 1860s is populated by polities that cannot remotely be described as nation-states.

What do you think of the argument, as it applies to out present time?

The nation-state is contingent and was the result of political project. The main problem with your OP is the apparent assumption that nation-states are natural and eternal and empires ephemeral and artificial.

 

[stinkubus]

There's nothing less natural than a nation-state. The fact they didn't appear until after thousands of years of recorded history should be one clue. Another should be that national borders, and the groups of people who are able to claim each nation as their "homeland", changes frequently.

In the United States Jews and Catholics were once the usurpers who had no claim to being "real" Americans. Now both groups are fully enshrined members of the White People (tm) club and almost no one even questions it.

 

[Cutlass]

There's nothing less natural than a nation-state. The fact they didn't appear until after thousands of years of recorded history should be one clue. Another should be that national borders, and the groups of people who are able to claim each nation as their "homeland", changes frequently.

In the United States Jews and Catholics were once the usurpers who had no claim to being "real" Americans. Now both groups are fully enshrined members of the White People (tm) club and almost no one even questions it.

Jews are increasingly being questioned recently.

 

[Dachs]

The world became again more like it had been prior to the 1860s, smaller nation-states governed themselves according to their local peculiarities. Each had its own bureaucracy, its own currency, its economic priorities, its social organization, free from imposition by others. Or at least was supposed to have.

Bolding mine. This is the sticking point for me. As originally constructed, sovereignty is something customary and not at all universally applied. Its founding myth was the Treaties of Münster and Osnabrück, which created no such thing as "free from imposition by others" and indeed enshrined the old German notion of Landeshoheit, a graduated sort of authority, throughout the Empire and even outside of it. At no point did the Westphalian treaties enshrine the notion that individual blocks of territory were completely sovereign over themselves - in fact, quite the opposite.

The notion that every national government should be fully sovereign over its own territory and no other territory is a very new and very transient notion. That doesn't make it a bad notion, but I think it might be worth interrogating why theory and practice diverge so much. Do we really have to settle for explanations like the ethic of success or the claim that small countries have no future?

 

[innonimatu]

I think that outside the HRE the only "supra-national" authority was the pope anyway, and outside Italy that authority has very much disregarded (it was kind of an intervention SG of the UN) since the late middle ages.
A medieval kindom is not a nation-state of course, but some have been remarkably cohesive early on. Even some city-states may be regarded as "nation-states". The intellectual idea of nation-state was preserved all the way down from the city-states of antiquity, not every place in Europe was an unholy mess like the HRE?

 

[Dachs]

I think that outside the HRE the only "supra-national" authority was the pope anyway, and outside Italy that authority has very much disregarded (it was kind of an intervention SG of the UN) since the late middle ages.
A medieval kindom is not a nation-state of course, but some have been remarkably cohesive early on. Even some city-states may be regarded as "nation-states". The intellectual idea of nation-state was preserved all the way down from the city-states of antiquity, not every place in Europe was an unholy mess like the HRE?

Supra-national, maybe. But individual polities had relationships with territories inside other countries that look odd from the standpoint of national sovereignty. The existence of Ducal Prussia, Papal Avignon, the County of Zips, and others clearly shows that sovereignty wasn't really exclusive. Then there's the issue of the relationship between the various composite parts of the Habsburg, Danish, Swedish, and British monarchies, where the monarch him- or herself might be the "supra-national" authority in question and where the various parts of the monarchies' domestic politics intertwined in sometimes confusing ways.