Nationalism Vs. the Nation-State

It's sometimes hard to distance myself far enough from the modern nation-state to truly contemplate its relative benefits, because the nation-state is all I have ever grown up with. The United States, Canada, Mexico, and most every modern nation follows the nation-state model. The reason is simple: although obviously the cyclical nature of political forms means that eventually modifications will be applied to the nation-state, it is a better form of government and state organization than the ones the preceded it.

For example, take the city-state. When you think of a city-state, you tend to imagine ancient Greece, with its advanced culture and burgeoning democracy. You then further recall the Peloponnesian War between the city-states, and the years of city-state warfare and jostling for supremacy that followed. You recall the Italian city-states, like Pisa and Venice, and how they annihilated each other. By now, the culture has faded into distant memory. Why did city-states destroy each other?

The answer, of course, is nationalism.

When an entire culture is compacted into one minute, exposed area, Napoleonic complexes are inevitably going to rise up. Nationalism - intense, focused nationalism - is the result of having to defend against threats, real or perceived, on your territory or sovereignty, which is exactly what city-states always had to be on guard against. Whether Athens-Sparta or Pisa-Padua, city-states were so fiercely defensive about their own land that they engaged in preliminary, devastating warfare to stop threats before they stopped. Combine that with the fact that, by definition, a city-state is limited to the resources within its borders, and you have a nation desperate enough to fight to the point of self-destruction to paradoxically try to save its own identity. Too much nationalism is the problem with city-states - and if a city-state or many city-states conglomerate into one cogent nation, that nationalism can be diffused through a much larger, more powerful organ that alleviates the need to be so defensive. For example, when the Italian city-states merged into the nation-state of the Kingdom of Italy, peace took on a much more prominent role in the peninsula.

Ancient Greece, of course, lost its abilities to warmonger when the Roman Empire swallowed it. However, while empires like those of the Romans, Spanish, and English may have been mighty and stable for a time, nation-states succeeded them for a reason. Actually, they didn't SUCCEED empires; they were CARVED OUT of them, and nationalism is again the reason for the paring. Take the English empire as an example. Here you have an empire with a direct "sphere of influence" of the British Isles. It also has myriad extremely far flung holdings - India, Africa, North America - and in many of these places, the inhabitants don't consider themselves British at all, or are feeling salutary neglect/taxation to the point that they are a subclass of Brittery. With such a cultural and geographical gap between home-base and empirical outpost, nationalism takes hold in force. So much nationalism - so much desire to be known as Indian, Zulu, or American instead of the false title of "English" - comes, that independence is the only thing for the natives to do. The empire is thus slowly undone by nationalism, chunks of empire being turned into independent nation-states until England is left with just one nation-state left - England itself. The empire cannot defeat nationalism.

Finally, the tribe is a curious case. Tribes are the opposite of the above - tribes are inferior to nation-states because they possess not enough nationalism. For example, take the classic case of Native American tribes. I just read a great book, Indians & English: Facing Off in Early America, by Karen Kupperman, which focuses on Narragansett and Algonquin Indians. They lived in "tribes" in that they had family and blood ties to land, were loosely allied, and each tribal outshoot had a separate "chief". However, even BEFORE the Europeans came, tribes were beginning to centralize their power...come together...for a unifying government. In short, they were becoming like a nation-state. I postulate that when a tribe centralizes its power enough in order to live in the way, say, the modern Iroquois nation lives - peacefully and securely - that tribe needs to have nationalized enough that they are much more nation-state than tribe; and so the tribe cannot be a valid state at all.

On a final note, in between the 1815 Napoleonic Wars and World War I, Europe went through one hundred years of peace. These were the years that nation-statehood became the norm. This is not a coincidence. Nation-statehood, most off all, keeps nations from constantly warring and ensures their development as autonomous powers in a way no other system can.