The nation-state arose to satisfy a very specific goal. In order to wage war on a massive scale, it was necessary to find a way to get people to die enthusiastically and for free. This goal was achieved, and the warfare that followed the creation of the nation-state was waged on a scale not known to humanity before.
A state’s greatest power lies in exercising violence and causing death. A state does that externally (by waging war) and internally (by turning its weapons on the citizens when they misbehave.) This is great power. Citizens should be in agreement that, for all its faults, the state must have the right to exercise violence on their behalf internationally and domestically. This means that there should be something that legitimates, in citizens’ eyes, this power of the state to cause death.
Since God has been taken out of the equation as a legitimating force (do you know anybody who sees the President and the Congress as God-given agents whom we should not dare to question?), a different sort of contract between the state and the individual had to be worked out. As we discussed before on this blog, a nation-state buys the citizens’ allegiance by promising to create the best possible kind of existence for them, to take care of them, protect them, satisfy their needs.
There is not a nation-state that hasn’t tried to deliver on this promise. Even North Korea is making every effort to convince the citizens that the state is looking out for them. And the citizens seem to believe the message, which is all that counts. Remember that the USSR fell the moment the overwhelming majority reached the conclusion that the Soviet model was not providing for their welfare as successfully as other states were providing for their citizens. Remember also that Franco had to swallow his ideology and go beg the hated Americans to teach him how to feed his citizens as well as the American state was feeding its people. The nation-state model simply doesn’t offer a choice: people need to be content.
We are so used to this model that we don’t even really notice it. For us, it is the only thing we know, and we rarely stop to think how historically recent and extremely innovative the nation-state is. The way people organized themselves into states before the nation-state was manufactured in the XVIII-XIX centuries was radically different.
The nation-state model was extremely successful. There is no place on our planet where people are not either organized into a nation-state or struggling to organize into one. Everybody wants a nation-state because it is the first state model ever where the state derives its entire legitimacy from caring about the welfare of the citizens. It is a pity that this model is dying but it brought about its own demise. The seeds of a nation-state’s destruction were present in the model itself from the very start.
P.S. I know most of you got this part already, but I need to make a recap for those who are just joining us now. This is not a subject that one can process easily by approaching it in medias res. Questions are welcome. New readers, don’t be shy.
Clarissa's Blog 
“Seeming to be searching for the right word during a prerecorded television interview, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested Sunday that one of the issues to be resolved in the Ukrainian conflict is “statehood” for the eastern regions now controlled by separatists.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/european-leaders-step-up-rhetoric-against-russia-as-ukraine-urges-tougher-sanctions/2014/08/31/8e0d6ba8-30fd-11e4-a723-fa3895a25d02_story.html
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\\ The way people organized themselves into states before the nation-state was manufactured in the XVIII-XIX centuries was radically different.
Could you write something about that too, please?
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Louis XIV famously said “L’État, c’est moi”. He was literally right. The form of state that existed at that time derived its legitimacy from the figure of the king who was God-given. The legitimacy of the state was guaranteed by God. It is impossible to imagine Ivan the Terrible, Carlos V or Louis even remotely interested in the welfare of the people they ruled. The whole idea is bizarre. But at the same time, they couldn’t and didn’t expect their people to die joyfully and happily to defend their state. Mercenaries had to be hired or, in the case of Ivan the Terrible, slavery had to be consolidated to ensure that there were actual soldiers to fight.
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“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (Horace)
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Fits in well with my last post.
http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2014/09/on-kazakh-statehood.html
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‘So while one can clearly point to earlier Kazakh state formations perhaps as early as the 16th century, these forms of statehood were very different from the modern nation state that is the model for present day Kazakhstan.”
– Of course. And the same goes for Ukraine or for any modern nation-state. The really funny thing here is that any nation-state needs to convince everybody that it was eternal in order to survive. So all kinds of mythology of the “this land was ours since times immemorial and we had a nation-state here even 1,000 years ago” variety arise.
The nation-state is so artificial that it has to use all kinds of myth-making activities in order to survive.
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What about republics like Rome? Cicero: “the welfare of the people is the supreme law” (“salus populi suprema lex”, De leg. III.8. (Apparently this is a reference to a maxim in the 12 Tables.) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-political/
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In Rome, most people were not even considered people. The welfare of women and slaves was of zero interest to anybody.
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True of US too for a large part of its history.
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Arm Ukraine or Surrender
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I got to the part of “Putin us not rational” and couldn’t continue. Putin’s approval ratings have soared to 86%. Obama can’t even dream of such approvals. What exactly is irrational in doing what the citizens who elected you want you to do? The idea that Putin should be terrified of the non-existent Western sanctions – this is what’s irrational.
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Several paragraphs after that one are good. I linked the article because of those two paragraphs, look:
“A few more months without meaningful Western help and Ukraine will have lost the fighting core of its army — and its infatuation with the West. This will be replaced by a sense of betrayal, and there will be no way for Ukraine’s pro-European liberals to survive the backlash. The far-right extremists now on the fringe will ride into Kiev’s parliament on the lids of the caskets being shipped back from the front. Ukraine will become a ravaged conflict zone: a European Syria, or a hideously enlarged Bosnia.
We cannot let this happen. If we believe that Ukraine will one day become a member of the European Union and NATO, then we should be ready to arm it. We must face the fact that the costs of unlimited European Union and NATO expansion have meant war with Russia by proxy — and then fight the war. Having reignited the hottest moments of the Cold War, we must deal with the consequences of encouraging democratization in Eastern Europe.”
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“The far-right extremists now on the fringe will ride into Kiev’s parliament on the lids of the caskets being shipped back from the front. Ukraine will become a ravaged conflict zone: a European Syria, or a hideously enlarged Bosnia.”
– This is precisely what Putin’s propaganda says, precisely. The whole conflict started with Putin declaring that he needed to fight against the non-existent “brown threat” in Ukraine. Instead of worrying about “far-right extremists now on the fringe” in Ukraine, let’s worry about the far-right extremists now firmly ensconced in the Kremlin.
Ukrainians are massively against becoming part of the EU and the NATO. This was the reason the current president won the elections by such a majority. The myth that the current war is a result of Ukraine trying to join the NATO is also Putin’s invention. The whole article is a puff piece for Putin because it validates every lie he ever told about Ukraine. Putin’s propaganda is very smart. People believe they are actually being anti-Putin when in reality they are saying exactly what Putin wants them to say.
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I just started reading a book that argues that Qadaffi engaged in constructing a stateless society in Libya by negating the development of a nation-state in favor of treating the country as one large extended tribe based upon kinship relations.
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Very interesting! Of course, such a plan is totally doomed to failure in the contemporary world.
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Like communism, the more the planners succeed, the more the society fails.
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Exactly.
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Like the pathetic ISIS shindig that will destroy enormous populations in its process of abject failure.
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“Like the pathetic ISIS shindig”
I’ve said it before, but political islam seems to be the new communism. It’s followers are utterly uninterested in it’s 100% proven track record of not working.
If Libertarians ever get their wish for a (US) state then it will also fail, but they’re not there yet.
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It did ultimately fail. But, due to oil wealth it managed to function from the late 1960s (Qaddafi took power in 1969) all the way up into the 1990s before encountering serious problems and even then it survived until 2011.
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\\ Ukrainians are massively against becoming part of the EU and the NATO. This was the reason the current president won the elections by such a majority.
Against? Wasn’t Maidan begun by people who supported joining EU and were protesting against the president suddenly going back on his promises for future in EU? The blogs from Ukraine I read are all pro-EU. Had Ukrainians changed their views on EU and why are they against it, in your opinion?
May be, you could write a post about it since this info is hard to find. American blogs say “Ukraine is pro-EU.”
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Oh Lordy, Lordy, Lordy. No, there was never any question of Ukraine joining the EU. The EU is about to lose members. How would it ever integrate such a broken economy?
Initially, there was a small peaceful protest in the Maidan against Yanukovich unilaterally choosing to go back on a promised trade agreement with the EU and joining one with Russia. But the Maidan started when Yanukovich started shooting at peaceful protesters, students, young kids. The Maidan is about changing things in Ukraine.
Now bloggers. All of the Russian bloggers I read are more pro Ukraine and anti-Putin than I am. But bloggers are a tiny percentage of well-off and highly educated people both in Ukraine and Russia. Back in May, polls showed that Ukrainians were overwhelmingly against joining the EU and NATO. Which is why they didn’t vote for Timoshenko. Putin is simply lying when he says otherwise. The war isn’t about the EU or NATO at all. At all.
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I made a mistake. All FSU bloggers I read were definitely for trade agreement with the EU and pro-West in general. Don’t remember whether all of them hoped for joining EU one day, I could’ve supposed it to be so.
Could you point at the causes of Ukrainians opposing joining the EU?
So, are most Ukrainians for trade agreement, but against joining the EU?
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“So, are most Ukrainians for trade agreement, but against joining the EU?”
– It wasn’t about the trade agreement per se. It was about people being fed up with Yanukovich, his constant lies and corruption. The cause of the outrage could have been anything.
“Could you point at the causes of Ukrainians opposing joining the EU?”
– From what people have told me, they see what the membership in the EU has done to the Baltic and other Eastern European countries and they don’t want that. The EU allows rich central countries to feed off the poorer countries on the geographical margins. Ukrainians are not very interested in helping Germans get even fatter.
Of course, now after the invasion, the mood might end up changing. Being robbed by Germany might be more attractive than being murdered by Russians.
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