Nation-States

[Ernie]

Whilst in our Constitution Presidents have a great deal of authority and autonomy, I don't really believe in any individuals somehow having the "right' to be a law unto themselves, but the current system of the nation-state pioneered by Napoleon Bonaparte seems to have become just that, reserving near absolute authority for the nation-state itself and its de facto head. Democracies can only do so much to regulate the actions of these types of leaders:

Here is an article about this.
https://www.europeansources.info/record ... tion-state

This is a thread to discuss this topic.


Please keep partisan comments/debates out of this thread - avoid comments that reflect negatively on either right-leaning or left leaning political persuasions or characters. Please do not engage in promoting left wing/right wing ideology or critiquing the actions or viewpoints of a particular current political party. Please keep this thread focused on the topic.

[Ernie]

Can someone please write a nice summary of the difference between the worldview prior to Nation-States, and the worldview since.

[Ken]

Prior to the age of Nation States, most of the world was governed by empires that crossed national boundaries.

The Roman Empire during the time of Christ was an obvious example but there were empires before that: The Hittites, Persians, Egyptians, Babylonians. They all followed the same basic pattern of conquering weaker states and administering them as vassal states, usually with some level of local control and local authorities would owe fealty to the empire and pay taxes to it. So a Jew during the time of Christ owed fealty to both the Jewish nation centered on Judea but also the Roman Empire. And such a person might have been an actual Roman citizen like Paul, or simply a subject like the vast majority of people living in Judea at that time.

Up into the 19th century this pattern continued in Europe with the British Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russian Empire, Ottoman Empire, etc. Overseas imperialism was a particular version of this with the Spanish Empire in the Americas and the French and British partitioning up of Africa and much of Asia. But those were not really different from the empires that expanded on land such as the Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires. They just required a strong navy.

So if you were say Indian or Vietnamese or even Hungarian in the 19th Century you owed dual loyalties to your own local magistrates and people, but also to the colonial empire that laid claim to the territory in which you lived.

It wasn't really Napoleon that ended the age of empires as well as monarchies. It was WW1. Before WW1 most of Europe was governed by imperial monarchies. After WW1 it was really only the British, Spanish, and Italians left with a monarchy.

After the experience of WW2 the United Nations was formed basically to say, no more empires will be formed by conquest. National boundaries will be sacrosanct. And that has pretty much remained the case with a few exceptions such as Ukraine, Israel, and Tibet.

[Ernie]

Thanks Ken, that is helpful!

[Josh]

Prior to the nation state, many nations did exist which weren’t subject to any empire at all, although they might have relations with one or more empires. This was still common even in Europe in the 1500s. Going back to the pre-1000s (prior to the Norman invasion), Great Britain and Ireland was effectively quite a few different kingdoms which had absolute sovereignty over their respective lands.

The older pre-nation state was significant less “hierarchical” as well. There might be a king, but there were many lords who, if really unhappy, might decide to switch allegiances to a different king. And then there was the Roman Catholic Church which had a degree of influence over both lords and kings including the ability to moderate disputes or wars. (The Eastern Orthodox regime was somewhat different but also had a moderating effect.)

Warfare was far less total and affected the common man much less. In some places, a peasant might barely notice a war was going on or that allegiances to an empire or to kings had changed. Soldiers were recruited either from local elites or were hired as mercenaries and armies were much smaller. An object of war was to obtain the conquered’s economic resources, including peasants, intact, not to utterly destroy the common people’s will to support a government, as is often the case with warfare in the modern era.

[Ken]

Prior to the nation state, many nations did exist which weren’t subject to any empire at all, although they might have relations with one or more empires. This was still common even in Europe in the 1500s. Going back to the pre-1000s (prior to the Norman invasion), Great Britain and Ireland was effectively quite a few different kingdoms which had absolute sovereignty over their respective lands.

The older pre-nation state was significant less “hierarchical” as well. There might be a king, but there were many lords who, if really unhappy, might decide to switch allegiances to a different king. And then there was the Roman Catholic Church which had a degree of influence over both lords and kings including the ability to moderate disputes or wars. (The Eastern Orthodox regime was somewhat different but also had a moderating effect.)

Warfare was far less total and affected the common man much less. In some places, a peasant might barely notice a war was going on or that allegiances to an empire or to kings had changed. Soldiers were recruited either from local elites or were hired as mercenaries and armies were much smaller. An object of war was to obtain the conquered’s economic resources, including peasants, intact, not to utterly destroy the common people’s will to support a government, as is often the case with warfare in the modern era.

The deadliest war in history (or rather European history) was the 30 years war which was fought from 1618-1648 in an era that long preceded the modern nation state. Direct deaths numbered in the millions (from a much lower starting point) and some parts of Germany and Europe saw their populations decreased by over 50%. Depending on how you look at it, the 30-years war was a religious war between Catholics and Protestants or war between two imperial alliances (in fact it was both). But what it wasn't was a war between modern nation states.

The Punic wars, the wars of conquest waged by Rome such as Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul, the Mongol wars of conquest by Genghis Kahn, and many other pre-modern wars were also as deadly and devastating as anything modern nation-states did. War looked pretty total if you were a civilian in Carthage when it was under siege by Rome. Or one of the Germanic or Gallic tribes completely extinguished or sold into slavery by Julius Caesar. Or in the path of Genghis Kahn and his Mongol armies. One estimate is that about 10 percent of the world's population was killed either during or immediately after the Mongol invasions, around 38–60 million people in Eurasia. That equals the total death toll from WW2 when the world's population was vastly larger and killing was mechanized rather than by sword, spear, and arrow.

[Josh]

The deadliest war in history (or rather European history) was the 30 years war which was fought from 1618-1648 in an era that long preceded the modern nation state. Direct deaths numbered in the millions (from a much lower starting point) and some parts of Germany and Europe saw their populations decreased by over 50%. Depending on how you look at it, the 30-years war was a religious war between Catholics and Protestants or war between two imperial alliances (in fact it was both). But what it wasn't was a war between modern nation states.

The 30 Years' War is often viewed as an example of the emerging consciousness of the nation-state, but the nation-state concept was not fully incarnated until the French Revolution. But nonetheless, the deaths from the 30 Years' War were mostly not military deaths:

Based on local records, military action accounted for less than 3% of civilian deaths, with the major causes being starvation (12%), bubonic plague (64%), typhus (4%), and dysentery (5%). Although regular outbreaks of disease were common for decades prior to 1618, the conflict greatly accelerated their spread, due to the influx of soldiers from foreign countries, the shifting locations of battle fronts and displacement of rural populations into already crowded cities.

Whilst famine was a major cause, disease was the most significant cause. The war simply had an unintended consequence of greatly accelerating the spread of fatal diseases.

The Punic wars, the wars of conquest waged by Rome such as Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul, the Mongol wars of conquest by Genghis Kahn, and many other pre-modern wars were also as deadly and devastating as anything modern nation-states did. War looked pretty total if you were a civilian in Carthage when it was under siege by Rome. Or one of the Germanic or Gallic tribes completely extinguished or sold into slavery by Julius Caesar. Or in the path of Genghis Kahn and his Mongol armies. One estimate is that about 10 percent of the world's population was killed either during or immediately after the Mongol invasions, around 38–60 million people in Eurasia. That equals the total death toll from WW2 when the world's population was vastly larger and killing was mechanized rather than by sword, spear, and arrow.

I phrased what I did to refer to the period in history after the Roman Empire; but wars in the classical era and antiquity were rather different than they are now, and the ancient empires (and their wars) looked nothing at all like the modern nation-state and her wars.

[Josh]

I would argue the seeds of the nation-state were sown a little earlier, in the fertile ground of the Protestant Reformation - Luther innovated the idea of a unitary church and state, and Henry VIII took it to its logical conclusion, anointing himself as “Head of the Church”, making himself both king of England and pope of England.

The next step was de-Christianisation, but retaining the idea of the nation-state being the ultimate spiritual and moral authority for its people. Any churches it tolerates are necessarily subordinate to that.

We now accept this as a seemingly normal state of affairs. The church is effectively just a federal subject of the all powerful nation state - whether the Orthodox Church in Russia, with Caesar as effectively its Pope, the modern evangelical church in America, slavishly begging the state to please make immoral things illegal, or the modern liberal mainline church in America, whose morality is basically dictated by whatever the current national consensus is, and has precious little to do with God’s law as the Bible commands it.

The nation-state mocks God’s authority, and in its most absurd incarnations makes claims such as that it will reign 1,000 years. In reality, God is the ultimate authority and the nations of the world must and will eventually submit to him “every knee will bow and every tongue confess”.