The nation-state: invention, natural category, or trap?

The nation-state is so familiar that it is easy to mistake it for a natural feature of the political landscape, like a mountain or a river. It is not. The nation-state -- a sovereign political unit in which a single nation, defined by shared language, culture, or ethnicity, coincides with the boundaries of a state -- is a historical invention, and a relatively recent one. For most of human history, political organization looked nothing like it. The idea that every people should have its own state, and that every state should correspond to a single people, would have struck most pre-modern political thinkers as bizarre.

The nation-state is also, arguably, the most consequential political invention of the modern era. It has been the primary unit of political organization for the last two centuries, and it has shaped -- and been shaped by -- war, colonialism, industrialization, democracy, and virtually every other major development of the modern world. Whether it is stable, desirable, or in the process of dissolving is one of the central questions of contemporary political thought.

Before the Nation-State

Before the rise of the nation-state, human political organization took many forms, none of which corresponded to the modern ideal of a nation-state. Empires -- the Roman, the Chinese, the Ottoman, the Mughal, the Inca -- ruled over diverse populations without attempting to make them culturally homogeneous. City-states -- Athens, Venice, the Yoruba city-states of West Africa -- were small, autonomous political units that did not claim to represent a nation. Feudal systems -- medieval Europe, Japan -- organized political authority through personal bonds of loyalty and obligation rather than through territorial sovereignty. Tribal territories, clan-based societies, and acephalous (stateless) societies -- found across Africa, the Americas, and Southeast Asia -- maintained political order through kinship, customary law, and consensus rather than through centralized state authority.

The historian Anthony Pagden, in Peoples and Empires (2001), argued that empires, not nation-states, were the default form of large-scale political organization for most of human history. Empires ruled diverse peoples through a combination of coercion, accommodation, and co-optation. They did not demand cultural uniformity. The Roman Empire, at its height, encompassed peoples of dozens of different languages, religions, and ethnic identities. The Ottoman Empire similarly ruled over Muslims, Christians, and Jews, Arabs, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and Slavs, through a system of communal autonomy known as the millet system.

The medieval European political order was characterized by overlapping and competing authorities. A medieval king did not exercise the kind of sovereign control over his territory that a modern state does. His power was limited by the privileges of the nobility, the Church, and the chartered cities. Political boundaries were fluid and often contested. Loyalty was personal -- to a lord, a dynasty, or a faith -- rather than territorial or national.

The Peace of Westphalia and Sovereignty

The conventional starting point for the modern state system is the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years' War and the Eighty Years' War. The treaties of Westphalia did not create the nation-state -- the concept of the nation as a political community was still in its infancy -- but they did establish the principle of territorial sovereignty: that each ruler had the right to determine the religion and internal affairs of his own territory without interference from outside powers.

The historian Derek Croxton, in Westphalia: The Last Christian Peace (2013), cautioned against reading too much into Westphalia. The treaties did not use the term "sovereignty" in its modern sense, and they did not create a system of equal, independent states. The Holy Roman Empire continued to exist, in a weakened form, for another century and a half. The principle of non-interference was honored more in the breach than in the observance. But the idea that political authority should be territorial and exclusive -- that there should be no higher authority within a given territory than the sovereign -- did take root, and it became one of the foundations of the modern state system.

The political scientist Stephen Krasner, in Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (1999), argued that the Westphalian model of sovereignty has never been an accurate description of how the international system actually works. States have routinely violated each other's sovereignty through intervention, coercion, and economic pressure. The principle of sovereignty is a norm -- an ideal that states invoke when it serves their interests and ignore when it does not. Nevertheless, as a norm, it has been remarkably powerful, providing the basic framework for international law and diplomacy.

The Rise of Nationalism

If the state is the institutional form of the nation-state, the nation is its ideological content. And nations, as the historian Benedict Anderson argued in Imagined Communities (1983), are constructed through collective imagination. They are "imagined" because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, yet each imagines a deep, horizontal comradeship with them. They are "communities" because, regardless of inequality and exploitation, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.

Anderson's account of the rise of nationalism emphasized the role of print capitalism -- the commercial production and distribution of printed material in vernacular languages -- in creating the shared linguistic and cultural space within which national consciousness could develop. Print capitalism, he argued, allowed people who had never met to imagine themselves as members of the same community, united by a shared language and a shared body of printed material.

The sociologist Ernest Gellner, in Nations and Nationalism (1983), offered a different but complementary account. Gellner argued that nationalism was a product of modernization. In pre-modern agrarian societies, he contended, there was no need for cultural homogeneity across large populations. Most people lived and died within a few miles of their birthplace, and political authority was exercised through local intermediaries. Industrialization changed this. An industrial economy required a mobile, literate workforce that could communicate in a standardized language. The state, seeking to mobilize the population for industrial development and military competition, promoted cultural homogeneity through universal education, military conscription, and the suppression of regional languages and dialects. Nationalism was the ideology that legitimated this process, presenting cultural homogeneity as the natural expression of a pre-existing national community.

Gellner's theory was elegant, but it had limitations. The historian Anthony D. Smith, in National Identity (1991), argued that Gellner's account was too dismissive of the pre-modern roots of national identity. Nations, Smith contended, were not purely modern inventions. They drew on pre-existing ethnic communities -- what he called "ethnies" -- that had their own myths, memories, and symbols. The modern nation did not create these ethnic identities from nothing; it transformed and politicized them.

Hobsbawm and Invented Traditions

The historian Eric Hobsbawm, in The Invention of Tradition (1983), co-edited with Terence Ranger, argued that many of the traditions that nationalists invoked as evidence of ancient national heritage were in fact recent inventions. The Scottish kilt, Hobsbawm noted, was not an ancient Highland garment but an eighteenth-century invention, designed by an English Quaker industrialist. The British royal ceremony of trooping the colour, similarly, was a nineteenth-century creation, designed to give the monarchy an air of timeless tradition.

The concept of invented traditions was not limited to trivia. It extended to the core claims of nationalist ideology: that the nation had existed since time immemorial, that its members shared a common ancestry, and that its territory was a natural and indivisible unit. These claims, Hobsbawm argued, were not accurate descriptions of the past but political constructions designed to serve the needs of the present. The invention of tradition did not make nationalism false -- all political communities are constructed -- but it did reveal the gap between nationalist mythology and historical reality.

Hobsbawm's own history of nationalism, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (1990), emphasized the role of the state in creating nations, rather than the other way around. In many cases, he argued, it was not that pre-existing nations demanded their own states, but that states, seeking to consolidate their power, created nations through education, military service, and the promotion of national languages and cultures. The French nation, for example, was in significant part the creation of the French state, which, over the course of the nineteenth century, imposed standard French on a linguistically diverse population that spoke a variety of regional languages -- Breton, Occitan, Basque, Alsatian, Corsican -- and redefined them as French.

Postcolonial Nation-States and Artificial Borders

The nation-state model was exported to the rest of the world through colonialism, and the results were often catastrophic. The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, at which the European powers divided Africa among themselves, drew borders that bore no relation to the political, ethnic, or linguistic realities of the continent. These borders, drawn by European diplomats who had never set foot in the territories they were dividing, cut across ethnic groups, merged rival communities into single states, and created countries that had no pre-colonial precedent.

When African nations achieved independence in the mid-twentieth century, they inherited these colonial borders. The Organization of African Unity, founded in 1963, adopted the principle of uti possidetis -- the preservation of existing colonial borders -- as a means of preventing territorial disputes and interstate conflict. The result was the perpetuation of borders that many Africans regarded as arbitrary and illegitimate, but the alternative -- redrawing borders along ethnic lines -- was considered even more dangerous, given the intermingling of ethnic groups and the potential for endless fragmentation.

The political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, in Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (1996), argued that the colonial state was a "bifurcated" apparatus that ruled through a combination of direct rule in urban areas and indirect rule through customary authorities in rural areas. The postcolonial state inherited this bifurcation and with it the tension between the universalist claims of citizenship and the particularist claims of ethnic identity. Many of the conflicts that have plagued postcolonial states -- from the Nigerian Civil War to the Rwandan genocide to the ongoing crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo -- can be traced, at least in part, to the mismatch between the nation-state model and the social and political realities of the territories it was imposed upon.

The Indian subcontinent presents a similar case. The partition of British India in 1947 into the Hindu-majority state of India and the Muslim-majority state of Pakistan was an attempt to apply the nation-state principle -- one nation, one state -- to a subcontinent of extraordinary diversity. The result was one of the largest mass migrations in history, with approximately 15 million people displaced, and between one and two million killed in communal violence. The borders drawn by the British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe, who had never been to India before and had five weeks to draw them, proved disastrous. Pakistan itself later split, in 1971, when East Pakistan became the independent nation of Bangladesh, demonstrating the difficulty of maintaining a nation-state built on religious identity alone.

Current Challenges to the Nation-State

The nation-state is not what it was. The European Union has created a form of political and economic integration that transcends the nation-state model, pooling sovereignty in areas ranging from trade to immigration to human rights. Globalization has eroded the ability of nation-states to control their economies, as capital, goods, and information flow across borders with increasing ease. Climate change, pandemics, and other transnational challenges require forms of cooperation that the nation-state is poorly equipped to provide.

At the same time, the nation-state is proving resilient, and in some contexts, it is experiencing a revival. The rise of populist nationalism in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere represents a backlash against globalization and a reassertion of national sovereignty. Brexit -- the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union -- was motivated in significant part by the desire to restore national control over immigration, trade, and law. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was, among other things, a violent assertion of the principle that national identity should determine political boundaries -- though the application of that principle was selective and contested.

The political scientist David Miller, in On Nationality (1995), defended the nation-state as a legitimate and valuable form of political organization. National identity, he argued, provided a basis for solidarity and mutual obligation that was necessary for the functioning of a welfare state and a democratic polity. People were more willing to support redistribution and social provision when they perceived the beneficiaries as fellow members of a national community. The cosmopolitan alternative -- a global community without national boundaries -- was, in Miller's view, neither feasible nor desirable.

The political philosopher Yael Tamir, in Liberal Nationalism (1993), argued that nationalism and liberalism were not incompatible. National communities, she contended, provided the cultural context within which individuals developed their identities and exercised their freedom. A liberal nationalism would respect individual rights while recognizing the importance of national culture and community.

Critics of the nation-state point to its inherent exclusivity. The nation-state defines itself by who belongs and who does not -- by the distinction between citizens and aliens, members and outsiders. This distinction, they argue, has been a source of discrimination, exclusion, and violence, from the persecution of ethnic minorities to the refusal to accept refugees. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), argued that the nation-state system, by tying human rights to national citizenship, had created a class of people -- stateless persons, refugees -- who had no rights at all, because no state was obligated to protect them.

Invention, Natural Category, or Trap

The nation-state is an invention, but it is not merely an invention. It has been so successful -- so widely adopted, so deeply institutionalized, so thoroughly naturalized -- that it functions as if it were a natural category. People experience national identity as a fundamental part of who they are, not as a historical construction. They feel loyalty to their nation and its symbols -- the flag, the anthem, the national story -- with a passion that is difficult to explain if the nation is "merely" invented.

But the nation-state is also a trap. It traps people into identities that they did not choose. It traps minorities into states that do not represent them. It traps states into defending borders that were drawn arbitrarily. It traps the international system into a framework that may be inadequate for addressing the challenges of the twenty-first century.

The historians who have studied the nation-state -- Anderson, Gellner, Hobsbawm, Smith, and many others -- have shown that it is not natural, not inevitable, and not permanent. It is a specific historical formation with specific origins, specific characteristics, and specific limitations. Whether it will endure, evolve, or be replaced by some other form of political organization is an open question. What is clear is that the answer will depend not on the inherent logic of the nation-state but on the choices that people make -- and the forces, from climate change to artificial intelligence to mass migration, that will shape those choices in the decades to come.

Sources

• Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.
• Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951.
• Croxton, Derek. Westphalia: The Last Christian Peace. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
• Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983.
• Hobsbawm, Eric. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
• Krasner, Stephen D. Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
• Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
• Miller, David. On Nationality. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
• Smith, Anthony D. National Identity. London: Penguin, 1991.