Characteristics

Richard Hames:

"The Westphalian model, formalised in Europe in the seventeenth century and then exported, rests on three deeply embedded axioms.

First, that the ultimate unit of political life is the sovereign state, bounded by borders and entitled to exclusive authority within them.

Second, that legitimate power flows from the top down – from anointed representatives to passive populations.

Third, that progress is measured in economic growth, with the industrial machine as its engine and the planet as feedstock."

(https://richarddavidhames.substack.com/p/beyond-the-mausoleum)

History

1. 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

The Nation-State vs Subsidiarity

< A thick anthropological understanding of subsidiarity is simply not compatible with the cultural hegemony of the modern nation or the political hegemony of the modern state. >

Andrew Willard Jones:

"we must explore

the historical genesis of the modern “nation” itself.

As historians have definitively demonstrated, the construction of the modern nation was integral to the construction of the modern, sovereign, administrative state and the industrial economic system that accompanied it. The modern nation was formed not only through the destruction of the unifying structures of Christendom, but also through the destruction of the diversity of sub-cultures that made up the complex structures of pre-modern societies. Divorce from supra-national order was simultaneously homogenization of intra-national order. It was these two movements that created the cultural thing that is the modern nation and both these movements occurred through the construction and agency of the modern state. The fragmentation of Christendom and the consolidation of the nation-states was one historical dynamic. The modern nation as a self-sufficient cultural unit is inseparable from the modern state as a self-sufficient political unit; they are the same historical phenomenon. In modern nationalism, the individual’s relationship to the nation is not mediated by “thick” social structures – such as the family – which always have cultural content native to them. Rather, the individual as Frenchman, as Englishman, as German, is formed in direct relationship with the nation as a whole, a formation that is accomplished through centralized educational, political, economic, and media apparatuses.[28] Real cultural structures that subsist within the nation must be either derivative of and subsidiary to the nation or else a threat to the nation’s claim to seamless extension across the social and geographical field. What we might call the nation’s “cultural sovereignty” is directly parallel to its corresponding state’s political sovereignty, which ultimately must be unitary and logically prior to all other nodes of authority.

To the extent this description is accurate, then “the nation” cannot be treated as a synonym for “the people” as understood by the Church. I began this talk with the foundational observation of John Paul II that both the family and the people are natural to humanity as such. What we mean by “the people,” then, must include essentially what we mean by “the family.” And the family is certainly not posterior to the state. Rather, a proper people and a proper politics flows out of proper families without competition between them. And the same holds true of other forms of social solidarity that stand between the family and the state.

A thick anthropological understanding of subsidiarity is simply not compatible with the cultural hegemony of the modern nation or the political hegemony of the modern state."

(https://newpolity.com/blog/is-christianity-nationalist)

Going Beyond the Nation-State

Richard Hames:

"The nation‑state colonises identity by convincing us that being Australian, Thai, Brazilian, Kenyan or French is the primary filter through which we must interpret the world. Or else! This is reinforced on a daily basis: in constitutional rituals, media narratives, sporting spectacles, war memorials, and even schoolbooks. Yet in practice most of us live with layered, intersecting allegiances. A young woman in Lagos might feel more solidarity with other coders around the world than with the political elite governing Nigeria. A Rohingya refugee in Cox’s Bazar may feel deep belonging to a people who have no recognised state at all. A farmer in the Mekong delta may feel their truest loyalty is to the river whose cycles their community has followed for generations. The more we name and honour those other forms of belonging, the weaker the emotional monopoly of the passport becomes. That does not require abolishing national identity. It requires relativising it – admitting it into a larger ecology of attachments.

Here grassroots activism has a crucial role to play: not as softly sentimental community work, but as the practice through which people remember that they are members of watersheds, food webs, languages, crafts, faiths and cultures long ignored by the sterility of official geopolitics. When residents assemble to protect a neighbourhood from predatory development, when Indigenous nations defend ancestral lands against extractive projects sanctioned in distant capitals, when youth movements take their cues from the atmosphere rather than the electoral cycle, they are not merely petitioning power. They are asserting alternative identities that no state can finally contain.

If identity begins to unhook from the state, the next logical step is for decision‑making to follow. The Westphalian imaginary insists that serious choices must be taken at the top, preferably in the capital city, by people who belong to a recognised political class. Local authorities, communities and associations are treated as subordinate – useful when they conform, disposable when they do not.

Reality no longer matches that script. Cities decide how people move, how buildings perform, how waste is handled, what gets planted, paved or preserved. Regions determine land use, water allocation, energy mix. Indigenous and local communities often manage forests, fisheries and soils with a subtlety and zeal no central ministry can match. Translocal networks share practical knowledge faster than any intergovernmental committee.

These are not simply “implementation arms” of national policy. Increasingly they are sources of original initiative. When mayors set their own emissions targets, when regions design cross‑border river compacts, when communities invent their own monitoring systems for pollution or biodiversity, they are relocating the locus of authority.

That relocation needs to be made explicit and durable. One way is through what some have begun to call State‑Determined Contributions set at sub‑national levels: city and regional commitments, anchored in their own fiscal and legal capacity, not as derivatives of national plans but as drivers in their own right. Another is through what I have started calling People‑Determined Contributions: citizens, cooperatives, neighbourhoods and movements specifying the changes they need and are undertaking – in energy, diet, mobility, care, education – and insisting that these count, politically and financially, rather than being invisible volunteerism propping up a failing order.

Neither move abolishes the state. But both diminish its monopoly on agenda‑setting."