Two people with whom I usually agree tweeted recently as follows:
Paul from Fintona @paulfmuldoon
"I can't wait for the concept of the nation state to be relegated to the pages of history where it belongs"
Duncan Stott @DuncanStott
"Guy Verhofstadt: 'We are suffering from having invented nation states and the nationalism that goes with them in the 18th Century'"
That's all well and good, nobody says they are perfect, any more than democracy is. They just appear to be the end result of lots of other forces, the desire to 'belong' (on the part of the masses), the desire to expand the area under their control (on the part of the ruling class - people like Guy Verhofstadt, for example) and the desire to feel 'sovereign' on the part of both masses and ruling class.
I don't see any realistic alternative, anarchy doesn't work; micro-states work but only if they are surrounded by larger countries; empires always collapse, even if they worked in the first place; most people resist the idea of supra-national government (UN, EU, TTIP etc).
As has been said before, democracy only works if there is a sense of a single national identity (however artificial, it cannot be denied there is such a thing) and tends to flourish more in economically developed countries.
Wiki says:
A nation state is a type of state that conjoins the political entity of a state to the cultural entity of a nation, from which it aims to derive its political legitimacy to rule and potentially its status as a sovereign state…
A state is specifically a political and geopolitical entity, whilst a nation is a cultural and ethnic one. The term "nation state" implies that the two coincide, in that a state has chosen to adopt and endorse a specific cultural group as associated with it. "Nation state" formation can take place at different times in different parts of the world.
So in the same way as land-ownership and the state are synonymous, I suppose we just have to accept that democracy, the nation-state and capitalism go hand in hand and are the least bad ways of organising things. Nothing which LVT and a Citizen's Income won't sort out.
Unless somebody has any better ideas?
Debate Magazine
