The Purpose of a Nation State - I

Nation states have been powerful actors on the world stage for almost 500 years now. The nation state gave a political continuity along with a sense of belonging to a particular geographic area. These two combined factors unleashed energies that overwhelmed older style countries whose identities were linked largely to their ruling class.

Nation states developed gradually and fitfully in response to a need to remain on top of constantly shifting alliances in Europe. The initial impetus was almost certainly a desire by the ruling class to triumph over their adversaries and this particular solution was eventually the winning one. The state tried to monopolize the use of force within its boundaries. At the same time, it ensured that internal barriers to trade were dismantled thereby creating a unified national market. While these factors and others like them were linked to a basic desire for greater control, they ended up ensuring a political stability and continuity for the state. This meant that the people living in the geographic boundaries of a state started identifying closely with it thereby eventually ensuring that their desires were at least listened to by a previously aloof ruling class. These conditions also made industrialization possible. What was so unique about Britain that the process of industrialization started there? The answer can be found in the far greater political stability and continuity that the island state had.

Nation state also have a dark side. The very forces that unleashed the energies of industrialization also made possible increasingly powerful weapons of destruction. These weapons first made the subjugation of other parts of the world and then they were turned on the advanced states themselves twice. These wars were also accompanied by severe xenophobic reactions among the population. Thus Japanese Americans were interred in concentration camps after Pearl Harbor simply because of their racial origin. There was no protest among the general population despite the fact that vast majority of the people interred had been living in the US for several generations and identified themselves as Americans and not Japanese. The same xenophobia was exploited by the Nazis to keep the general population quiet while they went about the task of implementing their final solution against the Jews. The same xenophobia is at the root of the Hindu-Muslim riots that regularly strike several parts of India.

Today however a question needs to be asked: what is the purpose of the nation state now? Is it still a vital force on the world stage or has it become an anachronism that is hampering our political and social development as individuals, as groups and as a species.