Nation-State

History

Morgoth:

"The birth of the modern nation-state in Europe is commonly held to be the Peace of Westphalia, which predates the French Revolution by 141 years. Moreover, it can also be argued that the Peace of Westphalia, which formalised boundaries, created the conditions for the Enlightenment and, therefore, the French Revolution rather than being a product of it. De Jouvenel writes that, far from diminishing the state, the French Revolution supercharged it by claiming everything within it as a resource to such an extent it would have made the kings of old blush. Thus, Napoleon was able to raise army after army and confront nigh-on all other great powers alone.

In place of the “Great Chain of Being” would be patriotism, rights, and a constitution. Identity would be inextricably intertwined with the nation rather than religion, province, or a local baron or lord. In the French National Assembly, the revolutionaries sat on the left side of the chamber and the monarchists on the right; our modern understanding of left and right originates here and forms the basis of the argument that Nationalism is left-wing.

It is worth highlighting here that establishing the modern nation-state with a bureaucracy and colossal quantities of men and equipment at its disposal incentivised neighbouring nations to form yet more formalised national states lest they be crushed. Slowly but surely, the pieces were being placed on the board for the cataclysmic wars of the 20th Century — and, therefore, the modern liberal disdain for Nationalism. Yet, it is commonly forgotten that, for much of that era, the liberal and “progressive” view was to carve out sovereign states for particular ethnic groups because such policies were the most rational and trouble-free.

There is, then, more than an element of truth to the claim that Nationalism is, historically, a left-wing ideology.

Yet it also remains the case that today, Nationalism is regarded as far-right, and framing Nationalism as left-wing does not reflect the reality of the 21st Century."

(https://morgoth.substack.com/p/nationalism-in-the-21st-century)

Discussion

Origins of the Nation-State

Kojin Karatani, chapter nine:

"The nation-state is a coupling together of two elements with different natures: nation and state. The nation-state’s emergence, however, requires the previous appearance of capital-state — that is, a coupling of capital with state. This was achieved with the absolute monarchies. I have already described the situation of the social formation under absolute monarchies, in which previously dominant mode of exchange B was transformed by the impact of the emerging dominance of mode of exchange C. The nation appeared after this in the bourgeois revolutions that toppled the absolute monarchy.

To put this somewhat schematically, the nation is something that appears within the social formation as an attempt to recover, through imagination, mode of exchange A and community, which is disintegrating under the rule of capital-state. The nation is formed by capital-state, but it is at the same time a form of protest and resistance to the conditions brought about by capital-state, as well as an attempt to supplement for what is lacking in capital-state.

The sensibility of the nation is grounded in blood-lineage, regional, and linguistic communities. None of these, however, possesses the secret of the nation: the nation does not form simply because of the existence of such communities. The nation appears only aft er the emergence of capital-state."

See: Evolution of the Structure of World History Through Modes of Exchange