The nation-state is here to stay | Dan Mikhaylov
As much as your cosmopolitan professors and friends in the transnational finance sector would want you to surmise otherwise, nation-statehood has not succumbed to oblivion in our interconnected world. Our era’s unprecedented loss of local identity, underscored by the twin phenomena of globalisation and digitalisation and exemplified in more than 5 million Britons residing abroad and conniving at their motherland’s cultural implosion, may initially appear to refute my original point, but closer inspection reveals a diametrically opposite picture.
Herein, this is not to say that multiculturalism has made considerable inroads into our conscience. Of course it has. Fuelled by domestic (though increasingly multinational) firms’ quest for cheaper labour and higher earnings and propagated under the polysemous guise of “global citizenship”, it has drastically altered and, with a degree of success, manipulated our politics.
These forces have even pushed the Conservative Party, which historically fought against mass immigration and backed the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, to scorn anything beyond a purely cosmetic reform of Britain’s immigration policy.
Yet, if those elusive concepts, nationality and national consciousness, really were dead in the water, we would not expect to find reputable pundits circulating alarmist visions of the nation’s future or asserting that Enoch Powell’s contentious xenophobic rhetoric had some genuine truth to it.
If the nationalist project did not still have a powerful resonance amongst and enamour the masses, it is unlikely such volatile discussions would have been held over Scottish independence or Catalan secession either. Nor would the ongoing brinkmanship between Kosovo and Serbia, and between Israel and Palestine, recrudesce persistently in public discourse. Equally indefeasible is the contemporary upsurge in the popularity of national collectivism, manifested as much in non-conventional right-wing populist parties, such as France’s Rassemblement National and Italy’s Lega Nord, as in the reactionary communitarians governing India and Turkey.
Even Donald Trump’s Republican Party, whose pitch emphasises job creation, patriotism, and Christian ethics over any reductive ideological capitalism, and the nationalist behemoth of the Chinese Communist Party seemingly paradoxically share many of these characteristics in this regard, their mutual disagreements notwithstanding.
Would Donald Trump have risen to prominence in an era permissive and passive towards the forces of globalisation?
There are two reasons why nation-statehood has outlived the world, in which it was birthed, survived two world wars combined with an ideological struggle between communism and capitalism, and is resurfacing today with novel vigour and endorsement. Firstly, its visionary outlook on social interactions arguably adds meaning to one’s life and shapes it directly, whilst remaining ostentatious and pervasive throughout this process.
Secondly, such politics simultaneously incorporates pragmatic thinking, insofar as it is seen as socially unifying. It is precisely the remainder of this article’s aim to explore these and explain why the nation-state is yet to fall victim to its neoteric nemesis, multiculturalism.
It would be too reductive to posit that humans constitute social creatures. As the coronavirus lockdown has demonstrated, we require social interactions and shun solitude. Both religion and the classical sociological theory hold that our self-actualisation depends on living and operating within the framework of society. Thus, the former emphasises neighbourly love and dedicates as much time to human relationships in the Ten Commandments and The Sermon on the Mount as to addressing the divine, suggesting that society is neither discardable nor undesirable for a devout Christian.
The French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, went a step further and proposed that the collective is greater than the sum of its parts in his writing on collective consciousness. In his 1895 publication, The Rules of Sociological Method, he furthered this concept by pioneering the idea of social facts, which are external to, and frequently coercive on, the individual, but whose absence renders impossible human sociability and personal development. These social facts may either take material form, such as architectural styles and laws, or non-material form, as illustrated by languages and differences in mores across communities worldwide. According to him, it is how humans interact with these, rather than the human beings per se, which define societies.
His subsequent work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), examined Australian aboriginal societies and introduced another important term – collective effervescence – to denote the outcome of accumulated group energy, associated with rituals as well as other manifestations of communal cohesion and localised universality.
By this logic, one could argue that nation-states act as platforms for collective effervescence’s amalgamation and amplification, while also helping distribute the corresponding concrete and metaphysical social facts within a particular group. Owing to this, they entice individuals, who are naturally interested in partaking of that social energy to develop a sense of belonging and self-actualise.
Nation-states stand out in volume, as they involve entire populations, in intensity, as membership in a nation remains full-time and quotidian, and in rigidity that binds members together, as nationalism presupposes some cultural, linguistic, and historic coherence and shared heritage. These three parameters are precisely what determines how much collective conscience is produced and how resilient it is, writes the renowned British sociologist, Anthony Giddens. In short, it cultivates personality among the generations, as well as providing a more abstract identity.
Besides culminating in a profound sense of pertinence to something transcendent and seemingly more valuable than individual humans and that in many respects chimes well with the Burkean understanding of society (to which many conservatives adhere), nation-statehood helps cultivate values of sacrifice and solidarity. This function is becoming increasingly important nowadays, with religiosity in decline, but with the popular demand for these qualities still in place. Arguably, as Durkheim had predicted, nation-statehood has taken over the task of teaching these values in many instances, and consequently, it has re-emerged today.
For this reason, it is not Christianity but the American dream, epitomised in the supposedly inextricable nexus between the US constitution and social mobility, and the concomitant notion of American exceptionalism that politicos invoke during elections to appeal to voters’ commonality. Similarly, Israeli statehood, and the Zionist weltanschauung at large, have also become despoiled of their religious connotations. To many Jews, the hope to inhabit the land of Zion and Jerusalem, as per their national anthem, is largely secular, whereas the more radical worshippers have consistently been at the Israeli state’s crossheads.
In short, one of the reasons why nation-statehood continues to flourish is the decline in worldwide religiosity. Nationalism has become the prime beneficiary of this change by arrogating for itself elements of the religious professionals’ purview and filling the void, especially when it comes to inculcating communitarian values in people and making them feel included.
And yet, nation-statehood is not without pragmatism. Whether intentionally or accidentally, humans benefit from joining their forces, and this principle is outlined in the theory of circumstantial advantage by the Chinese scholar, Shen Dao, who lived in the fourth-third centuries BC and drew on the country’s longstanding Taoist and Legalist traditions in his works. His reasoning was as follows: all humans are individually deficient and end up somewhere in the middle, when compared to others. In other words, some of us may be very talented academically, but struggle with physical activity, whereas others might boast enormous strength, but lack astuteness and critical thinking. The selfsame is true for the distinction between introverts and extraverts. To address this, Shen Dao proposed joining forces and forming a state, thereby developing circumstantial advantage and utilising multiplicity to delegate tasks to those who are most suited.
Although nation-states did not exist in his era, this notion is just as, if not more, relevant to them. It undergirds the bureaucratic structure, characteristic of, and thought indispensable to, the workings of modern societies. It may likewise be appropriated to understanding competition. Whereas classical liberals separate human interactions into those between atomised individuals and Marxists merely amplify these to encompass the whole characterless cohorts of such individuals, conservative proponents of nation-states outline an indisputably fairer system of competition.
After all, even the father of capitalism – Adam Smith – admitted that while dividing labour enables different talents and careers, which, in turn, explain the discrepancies between social ranks, one is born with a certain pre-existing division of labour. Thus, one’s social location in a stratified world also militates against the gamut of talents one could subsequently develop. By living within a coherent nation-state, these individuals acquire another dimension of identity, however. National collectivism and the resultant emphasis on communitarian capitalism and charity may remedy these inequalities by encouraging people to consider each other’s interests, dissuading exploitation on the grounds of potential social marginalisation, and enabling individuals with different talents and shortcomings to join forces and compete not against each other, but against other collectives.
Certainly, nation-states are ambiguous, and mean different things to different people. To some, it is distinct from nationalism, and ends at buying British and flaunting your United Kingdom passport. To others, meanwhile, its meaning might be profound and multifaceted. Many more, still, are somewhere along this spectrum of national-cultural immersion.
We completely understand this. Hence, our objective was to provide a comprehensive overview of why the contemporary form of the nation-state, no matter the concept’s malleability and lack of definition, remains relevant even in the light of globalisation and the increasing eradication of borders. It could not have been described as either idealistic or pragmatic exclusively. Rather, it is akin to Erwin Schrödinger’s cat: it could be both, and even a mixture of the two, depending on how you perceive it.
What matters is that the nation-state is clearly alive and well, as evidenced by its resurgences across Europe and the entrenched positions this political modus operandi enjoys in China and India, arguably the future leaders of our world. Whether its viability stems from its deeper psychological meaning, its system of fairer competition and communitarian redistribution, or the popular desire to socialise, it is highly likely that its relevance vis-à-vis globalism and multiculturalism will only be reinforced in due course.
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