Yes, the nation-state didn’t exist until the 19th century. Penicillin is even younger. Computers are younger still. Yet we greatly enjoy the benefits of young technology. The newness of something isn’t reason enough to ditch it especially since the post-nation state is even younger than the nation-state. So we aren’t talking about going back to some time-hallowed tradition but embracing something even newer.
I would love to participate in a serious discussion of the nation-state but all I ever get are the same two very vapid objections. One is that the nation-state is an imaginary community, meaning, a recent invention. Which, duh, but so bloody what? As if the post-nation state were a form of government that spontaneously arose in nature thousands of years ago. Whatever comes after the nation will be just as invented and even newer, which in and of itself is neither good nor bad.
The second objection is invariably that the nation-state made the two world wars possible. Again, yes, obvs. The Stating the Painfully Obvious Prize goes to everybody who makes this observation. One would think that if we already paid this humongous price for the nation-state model, then let’s keep it around to reap the benefits. Especially since nobody is advancing an argument that warfare will end once the nation is gone. The nation-state didn’t come into existence because there was no war. To the contrary, it was invented in response to endless warfare that was consuming Europe. War is the natural state of humanity, which sucks bullets (no pun intended), but any fantasy about a complete elimination of warfare is just simply dumb.
No interesting, meaningful objections to the nation-state are being advanced by anybody anywhere. Nobody is trying to list the benefits of the new form of statehood. It’s all childish, inane talk.
Clarissa's Blog 
Ok, the way I see it:
They way I understand the term “imagined” in Anderson’s book is not “fake”, or “imaginary” or otherwise not real. It is real by now. But making it happen required national elites to imagine certain things that did not exist at the time of the imagining. And the second aspect of it refers to citizens of the nation-state accepting the idea that some other people in the same state, whom they have never seen, and will not ever see, are still part of the same unified entity called nation.
As far as the connection with wars goes, new ways to wage wars (or, more precisely, to raise functional large armies) was one of the main driving forces. The elites needed an idea that would unite the free farmers (as opposed to peasant-serfs whom their feudal lords could whip into submission) either for wars of independence (the Americas) or regular wars (Europe). Printing press played a role in it, allowing mass production of reading materials in the languages people were actually speaking (as opposed to Latin). Then mass education came. Social secrtity was much later invention, a product of organized labor and Russian revolution scaring the capitalists. Nation-states existed before social security.
I actually do agree that nation-states are better functioning in the case of ethnically/linguistically/ religiously/ideologically homogeneous populations. And that any kind of a country reguires “inside” and “outside”, or it is meaningless. Me and you just make different conclusions from that. I basically believe that one cannot push the toothpaste back into the tube once it is out. Once the state has lost the homogeneity and there is a sizable minority (or several, and the reasons do not matter, and it does not matter even if that was some kind of “historic injustice”) one cannot force the situation back to homogeneity without employing methods that are so harsh that they will be too unpopular and are a slippery slope towards violent dictatorships. The only way to preserve the unity is to abandon at least several components of the ethnic/linguistic/ religious/ideologic uniformity and seek for some other unifying values. It seemed to be working relatively well in North America, until recently.
Returning back to the printing press – forced uniformity is much more difficult to achieve because the elites no longer control the modern equivalent of the prining press, a.k.a. the Internet.
LikeLike
I actually don’t disagree. I think that recent events clearly demonstrate that we’d all happily kill off the elderly and the disabled and accept any sort of evisceration to ourselves in the name of neoliberal freedom and choice. Yep, that toothpaste isn’t going back into the tube. Let’s unify ourselves around the values of markets in everything and everybody being free to be as free as possible. I’m sure that will be fun for all of us.
My depressed tone is not about you, by the way, but the fact that I had a job interview today and now I’m in a funk. I’ll be more enthusiastic about embracing neoliberalism tomorrow.
LikeLike
I actually did not mean the values of the markets, or some sort of freedom not limited by “my rights end where others’ rights begin” when I mentioned “alternative values”.
Why wouldn’t we try inventing them?.. Imagining them (in the spirit of this post). The history has not ended yet…
Maybe there are some useful things outside of both conservative and neoliberal frameworks that could be mixed together in intrersting ways.
P.S. What happened at the interview?
LikeLike
It wasn’t bad or anything. Great people. I’m already very attached to them, which shows the depths of my complete loneliness. But they aren’t interested in research at all. I got zero questions about research. Plus, they are kind of struggling with enrollments, which in a Hispanic-serving institution in a heavily Hispanic area is very strange.
Lovely people, though. But is it worth creating all this upheaval, moving and stuff, to get kind of more of the same?
I want to be in a place where nobody knows the word enrollments and you are supposed to publish a book every three years or you are a loser.
LikeLike
Why did we have before nation-states, at least in Europe? The feudal state, where the lord doesn’t care what language the peasants speak, provided they pay their taxes and give young men to serve as soldiers in his army. Incidentally, that’s why the French-speaking kings of England, between William the Conqueror and the One Hundred Years War, did nothing to teach French to their English subjects. Pay your taxes, and only those of you who will have the honour to serve as my servants and soldiers will have to learn a little French (and that was enough to fill the English language with thousands of Norman-French words).
In Europe, the local dukes and princes were happy to rule their micro-states and saw no compelling reason to create a larger unit with other micro-states sharing the same language. It wasn’t in their personal interest. That’s why Germany and Italy were made of several hundred micro-states. France was a different case, since the rulers of the Paris region were able to conquer most of the other French-speaking micro-states, and some where non-French languages, such as Breton, Flemish, Occitan and Basque, were spoken.
The nation-state began with industrialization, when the industral economy needed crowds of literate techniciens and engineers, which entailed a common, standardized language known to all to make the factories work. Maybe it will end when the exhaustion of natural resources means the end of industrial economies, I don’t knnow. I’m not sure what will exist after the nation-state has ceased to exist will be in the interest of the average person.
LikeLike
The original X poster, Dale Partridge – incidentally, a crank fundamentalist pastor who denounces Christian Zionism among many other things – wrote “…why all nations before 1965 were homogeneous and not diverse.“
Even though his statement is patently and egregiously wrong, one can learn plenty by picking it apart. I’ll start from the end. “Diverse” is not a content-neutral word. The fact that this pastor, who is so obviously against the concept of “diversity” uses it, shows how ideologically captured he already is.
“Diverse” and “diversity” are Wokespeak for ethnically heterogeneous country or society, without using the word ethnic which, in many Woke contexts is considered pejorative or even offensive [departments of Humanities at US universities really do have a lot to answer for]. Woke liberalists (“Wokerists”) are not interested in nations, nor in states: the world is their country (“Mother Earth”) and markets (in the widest sense) its prophet (or promise: it’s the same thing to them).
All nations are – by definition – homogeneous, or else they would not be nations. There are a few quirky exceptions – the Swiss, for example, where the ethnic nations of French Swiss and Italian Swiss subordinate to the real Swiss ethnic group, the Alamans, subsume their differences into a supraethnic “Willensnation”, but they are few and far between. The nation-state arises in Europe – as an ideal – after the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) and it will take between one and three centuries for it to become reality in most of Europe, with a lot of quirks in any case: see the Basques and Catalans in Spain, or the Corsicans in France, the Flemings in Belgium, and so on.
However, the main point stands: when people from Kosovo talk about themselves they say they are Albanians, not Kosovars. Kosovo may well be a state (albeit not recognised by six EU member states), but they think of themselves in terms of their nationality, not of their citizenship. Most people tend to conflate the two terms, and therefore, tend to misunderstand the two concepts.
Anderson’s term imagined communities is misleading. Ethnic communities have always existed, at least since the day when humans started organising themselves into communities which were homogeneous in terms of genetics, language, habits and customs. Of course “nation” is an imagined concept, but so is any other human concept, including identity, sexual orientation and yes, diversity. That’s what we humans do, we conceptualise and then we verbalise in a constant, cross-fertilising dialogue between these two activities, conceptualising and verbalising.
States, however, were not, and in fact are not, ethnically homogeneous in most parts of the world. What any intelligent and non-partisan observer may notice, however, is that most if not all of the really successful countries and societies in the world for at least the past one hundred years and in some cases much longer, have been mono-ethnic states. The United States was, for the most part and until relatively recently, one of those countries.
1965 is often evoked by people on either side of the immigration debate as the year when things started to change as a result of the Hart-Celler Act which dismantled national quotas for immigration purposes. Prior to 1965, the US was not a monoethnic country strictly speaking, but US society was: it was called WASP for a reason, and it was. What many Americans are starting to discover, slowly and painfully, is that they no longer have a nation, which they had been used to think of themselves as neing part of. There are nowadays many different nations, and I’m not referring to ethnicity per se, in what used to be a great country. And Americans are learning this, some of them at least, at bitter cost to themselves and their loved ones. What’s worse, most of the elected officials who make up their government at all levels, are directly complicit with, and actively encouraging, what is happening.
Now, I’m not an American and therefore I have no horse in this race. However, it would be disingenuous to dismiss this nonchalantly. We in Europe are at this very moment in many of our countries going through the experience of seeing our traditional, centuries-old societies being transformed radically, often violently and at speed, against the will of the population, from mono-ethnic, homogeneous, high-trust societies into multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual heterogeneous formless blobs which provoke revulsion and rejection in most law-abiding native nationals, and I insist, nationals, NOT citizens.
Still, I would not underestimate Europeans – the adjective white is quite redundant here, a superfluous and unnecessary pleonasm – since they have a way of dealing with extraneous aliens that leaves no prisoners: it took about five centuries – seven hundred and eighty-one years in total – for the expulsion of the Islamic invaders from the Iberian peninsula, and a few years more for their complete eradication (achieved in 1614); similarly, with the collapse of Mongol rule in Russia in 1480, where they had had the upper hand since 1223. Now, I certainly will not be here to witness it, if it ever happens at all, in which respect I also have very serious doubts; and even if it were to happen it may well be a very bad thing, but it has happened, and it may happen again.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you, Avi, for this excellent essay.
I think that the end of the nation-state has been on full view in recent days. People have heard that mass migration is destroying the welfare in MN. And right after that they came out in droves, willing to get beaten, arrested and even die to prevent even the most criminal migrants from being deported. Nobody came out on defense. What’s worse, the only response from the Right is deeply neoliberal in that this should be done by a hired manager. We are done, people have made their choice. Let’s discuss decluttering and individual advancement because countries and nations are dead and gone.
LikeLike
“We are done, people have made their choice.”
Who is this we, that choice is being made by our would-be elites. You are missing an important part of Avi’s story; the removal of the Muslims from Spain, and the reduction of their influence in eastern Europe for that matter, took years, literally centuries. In Canada, and I suspect the States, the mixing largely took place when troops fought alongside in WW2, because many came home to intermarry.
And the latter, the intermarrying is critical, think of your own marriage. But free rather than forced marriage between Muslims and other religions appears to be a different matter, read the Koran and the Hadiths — honour killings happen.
LikeLike
My friend, this thing about the elites imposing their agenda is a cope to end all copes. It’s the mother cope. It’s the queen bee cope.
LikeLike
C’mon, Kid, do you really believe that the Minneapolis anti-ICE supporters are somehow simply a spontaneous gathering ;-D
LikeLike
“Minneapolis anti-ICE supporters are somehow simply a spontaneous gathering”
I think it’s synergy… some are paid some are sincere (the ones doing things that lead to deaths are almost certainly sincere). Most telling, no counter protesters. People in Minneapolis think deportation is mean or some shit… and they’re willing to die so that Somalis can drain the state of funds.
LikeLike
I want to quote Matt Walsh who gives the perfect encapsulation of the actual American feelings about mass deportations:
https://x.com/i/status/2016280651972874729
LikeLike
Yeah, it seems to be too well organized to be spontaneous, but numbers are reinforced by joe/joan average whenever there is a serious incident, while as usual, the media leaps from Pravda to Der Stürmer and back to… ;-D
LikeLike
Have you found many people who want actual mass deportations with everything that it entails? The weeping children, people getting slammed into the sidewalk, protesters throwing themselves under the wheels? Because who are those people and where are they hiding?
LikeLike
Are you seeing those scenes anywhere outside of the sanctuary cities? Trust me, Kid, you want to see what happens when joe average has had enough of the horseshit² ;-D
https://www.google.com/search?q=hard+hat+riot+in+cicago&rlz=1C1GCEA_enCA991CA991&oq=hard+hat+riot+in+cicago&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIJCAEQIRgKGKABMgkIAhAhGAoYoAEyCQgDECEYChigATIHCAQQIRiPAjIHCAUQIRiPAtIBCjE5MDM2ajBqMTWoAgiwAgHxBXhCqthaNzUF8QV4QqrYWjc1BQ&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:af6205a6,vid:0UGKrp9EyYo,st:0
LikeLike
LOL, you do not want to see…;-D
LikeLike
SA has always been a multinational state, created out of the unification of former colonies. This was a problem for the apartheid government, whose simplified black/white model was imposed by the center on the provinces despite their different demographics.
https://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/what-if-there-had-been-no-south-africa-ii
LikeLike