For the conservative, of course, the nation (like the family) has also a profound and positive social value; around its traditions and symbolism individuals with conflicting interests can be encouraged to cooperate and make sacrifices for the common good. Nationhood provides us with that most essential psychological anchor against the disorientating storms of change — an identity which gives us a sense of continuous existence. Consequently the man who shrugs off his nationality, like the man who discards his family background or (as G.K. Chesterton famously observed) who abandons his religious faith, is a potential danger to society for he is apt to become the victim of every half-baked ideology or passion he encounters.
Some nationalisms, it is true, are disagreeable and even dangerous because some nations have committed historic crimes. Even then it is questionable whether a nation which has deliberately turned its back on its entire past is any more reliable a neighbour than one which dwells on it. A more mature response is to discover in one’s history those noble episodes and themes on which a more decent and open sense of nationhood can be built. Otherwise, it is the unbalanced revolutionaries who are left to take up the national cause.
Even the artificial states, which take in different nations with different languages and traditions, pay a kind of involuntary tribute to the power of nationhood by seeking to forge a new national identity. This was tried in the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia; it is now being attempted in the European Union. Such enterprises cannot work, and generally break down amid acrimony and mutual hatred. But their very artificiality often inspires the ideologues to extremes of doctrinaire chauvinism, alternately ruthless and ridiculous, from Stalin’s mass deportation of peoples to the promotion of a European version of Dallas.
It is therefore wrong to argue, as diplomats are still prone to do, that striving to keep large multinational, multicultural states together by all possible means makes for stability. It is, of course, quite possible that several distinct peoples will live within the frontiers of a single state for a variety of reasons — security, economic resources, geography, or lack of any alternative. Developing a liberal political and economic system is the best way to persuade them to do this, as Switzerland’s extraordinarily decentralized structure illustrates. But in the artificially constructed states — founded on an ideology (like the Soviet Union) or a mixture of diplomatic convenience and fear of greedy neighbours (like Yugoslavia) — it is all too likely that centralized power and the use of force will be relied upon to keep the unit together. And this — again as with the USSR and Yugoslavia — only increases national fervour and the aspiration to national independence on the part of the component peoples.
So while it is not inevitable that nation states should everywhere succeed multinational states — for example, the Kurds seem unlikely for many years to gain statehood because of the number of other states this would adversely affect — that is bound to be the trend. Or at least it will be the trend as long as the two other current trends, those towards democracy and open trading, themselves continue.
Both of these make for the emergence and viability of smaller units. Democracy is the political system that most comfortably fits the nation state. It requires a common language if it is to function really effectively — and this the nation state provides. Once established in a multinational state, moreover, democracy fosters the drive towards national self-determination. That helps explain why most multinational states are not democracies or, if they are, are perennially disturbed by linguistic and cultural disputes, as in Canada and Belgium. Similarly, free trade means that political boundaries need not be co-terminous with economic boundaries. We can thus combine political decentralization with economies of scale. As Adam Smith pointed out two hundred years ago: ‘Were all nations to follow the liberal system of free exportation and free importation, the different states into which a great continent was divided would so far resemble the different provinces of a great empire.’
There are two main practical arguments advanced against regarding the nation state as the basis of the international political system. The first is that the concept of the ‘nation’ is something which makes little or no sense outside Europe, because it is itself rooted in and a construct of a long and distinctive European history. This has some force. It is clear, for example, that nationhood has to be understood in a somewhat different way in the Middle East or Far East or Africa — or even in North and South America — from in Europe. In some cases religion, in other cases tribe, and in still others ‘culture’ (as Samuel Huntington has argued) will shape and mould identity. Moreover, nations can slowly emerge as, for example, in India. And they can equally disintegrate and die.
But the failure of attempts to ignore national identity when putting together diplomatically convenient artificial states or dividing a nation into several states on ideological grounds is a common feature of our times in every continent. In Europe Yugoslavia was destined to fail, and even Czechoslovakia, where the tension between the constituent nations was not as great, has now been peacefully dissolved. In Africa, the Central African Federation was assembled from Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland; the Sudan was put together ignoring the ethnic and religious differences between the majority Arab and Nubian population of the north and the Nilotic and Bantu people of the south; and Nigeria was created out of three constituent peoples, the Hausa, the I bo and the Yoruba. Each of these has been riven with difficulties. In the Middle East, attempts to create a unified Arab state based on an Arab nationalism that owed too much to socialism and not enough to Islam have always come to nothing. In the Far East the division of Vietnam was ultimately unsustainable as, in all probability, is the division of Korea. By contrast, in every continent it is the states which most closely correspond to national identities — and are thus able to mobilize them — which are likely to prove the most successfuclass="underline" that is true from Britain and France in Western Europe, to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in Central and Eastern Europe, to Egypt and Iran in the Middle East, to Japan in the Far East. Not that a sense of national identity is necessarily enough to ensure peace, prosperity and stability: but without it states will be faced with even more serious — and perhaps terminal — difficulties.
The second and perhaps the most frequent practical argument deployed against making nation states and nationalism the basis of our international political system is the problem of ethnic minorities. But in arguing for nation states I am not suggesting that it is possible, or even desirable, to seek to ensure that frontiers correspond exactly to boundaries of nationhood, let alone, of course, implying that national minorities or other groups should be shifted from one area to another to make politicians’ lives simpler. In a well governed, reasonably prosperous state in which individual rights and, where appropriate, local autonomies are respected, there is no reason why national minorities should suffer oppression or have a destabilizing effect. And international conventions and bodies like the Council of Europe could ensure this.