In Defence of the Nation State: Part One

Nations and nation states make up the international community. Globalisation and the development of supranational institutions such as the European Union affect the environment of Europe’s nation states but do not make them out of date.

Nationhood, shared membership of a national community, is the normal basis of democratic states in the modern world. This is shown by the advent of many new European nation states to the international community since 1989, and the likely advent of many more, in Europe and across the globe, as the 21st and 22nd centuries unfold. The following democratic principles are proposed as rational ways of approaching questions of nationhood, state sovereignty, internationalism and supranationalism. They are presented as expressing the classical approach of democrats to these issues.

1) INTERNATIONALISM, NOT NATIONALISM, IS THE PRIMARY CATEGORY

We are internationalists on the basis of our solidarity as members of the human race. As internationalists we seek the emancipation of mankind. The human race is divided into nations. Therefore we stand for the self-determination of nations. The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 laid down the principle that sovereign states should not interfere in one another’s internal affairs and should check one another’s ambitions through an equilibrium of power. The right of nations to self-determination inspired the 18th century American Revolution. The French Revolution proclaimed this right as a democratic principle of universal applicability in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. The right of peoples to national self-determination is now recognized as a basic principle of international law, enshrined in the United Nations Charter.

As democrats and internationalists we assert the right of those nations that wish it to have their independence, sovereignty and a nation state of their own, so that they may relate to one another internationally on the basis of political equality. The democratic principle of internationalism does not mean that one is required to urge people of other nations to assert their right to self-determination; but rather that one respects their wishes and shows solidarity with them if they should do that. It is as true of the life of nations as of individuals that separation, mutual recognition of boundaries and mutual respect based upon that – namely political equality, neither dominance nor submission – is the prerequisite of free and friendly cooperation between nations, of internationalism in other words. Good fences make good neighbours.

2) NATIONS AND NATIONALITY COME BEFORE NATIONALISMS AND NATION STATES

Nations exist as communities before nationalisms and nation states. To analyse nations and the national question in terms of “nationalisms” is philosophical idealism, looking at the mental reflection rather than the thing it reflects. Nationalism developed as an ideology legitimising the formation of nation states in the 18th century, although its elements can be found centuries before in some of the world’s oldest nation states, for example Denmark, England, France, China, Japan. Nations evolve historically as stable, long-lasting communities of people, sharing a common language and territory and the common culture and history that arise from that. On this basis develop the mutual identifications, solidarities and shared interests that distinguish one people from another.

Some nations are ancient, some young, some in process of being formed. Like all human groupings, for example the family, clan, tribe, they are fuzzy at the edges. No neat definition will encompass all cases. The empirical test is to ask people themselves. If people have passed beyond the stage of kinship society where the political unit is the clan or tribe, they will know themselves what nation they belong to. This is the political and democratic test too. If enough people in a nation wish to establish their own independent state, they have the right to do that, for political democracy can normally exist only at the level of the national community and the nation state. The reason is that it is principally within the national community that there exists sufficient solidarity and mutuality of identification and interest among people as to transcend other social divisions and induce minorities freely to consent to majority rule and to obey a common government based upon that.

Such mutual identification and solidarity characterise the demos, the collective “We” which constitutes a people that possesses the right to national self-determination. If that people is incorporated into a state with its own government, this mutual identification and solidarity underlie that people’s sense of shared citizenship of that state and their allegiance to its government as “their” government, possessing democratic legitimacy, and their willingness to finance that government’s tax and income-transfer system, thereby tying the richer and poorer regions and social classes of that nation state together.

When people speak of the “common good” which it is the duty of the state to uphold, it is the community of the nation, the people, the demos, whose welfare they refer to. The solidarities that exist within nations do not exist between nations, although other solidarities may exist, international solidarity, which becomes more important with time as modern communications, trade, capital movements and common environmental problems link all nations together in international interdependence as part of today’s “global village”.

3) MANKIND IS STILL AT THE RELATIVELY EARLY STAGE OF THE FORMATION OF NATION STATES

Only a dozen or so contemporary nation states are more than a few centuries old. The number of member states of the United Nations has grown from some 60 in 1945 to some 200 today. The number of European states has grown from some 30 to 50 since 1989. This process is not ended even in Western Europe where people have been at the business of state formation for centuries. It is ongoing in Eastern Europe. It has scarcely begun in much of Africa and Asia, where the bulk of mankind lives, where large numbers of people are still members of clan-tribal societies based on kinship and have not yet developed a national consciousness, and where state boundaries were drawn by the colonial powers following World Wars 1 and 2 with little consideration for the wishes of indigenous peoples.

At the start of this century there were over 6000 different languages in the world and hundreds of families of languages, of which the Indo-European, although the largest, was but one. At their present rate of disappearance there should still be 600 or so left in a century’s time. These will probably survive because in each case they are spoken by a million or more people. There clearly are many embryonic nations. There are also many long-established nations without their own nation states, which have a national identity but are not independent – for example the Scots, Catalans, Kurds, Palestinians, Chechyns, Tibetans, Tamils, Ibo. A nation can keep its identity in servitude as well as in freedom. Many new nation states, dozens and possibly hundreds, are likely to come into being during the 21st century and 22nd. In so doing they will acquire the two classical pillars of independent statehood, the sword and the currency: the monopoly of legal force over a territory embodied in an army and police force, and the monopoly of the issue of legal tender for that territory. A world of several hundred nation states will be a world of several hundred national currencies.

4) MULTINATIONAL STATES, WHETHER UNITARY OR FEDERAL, MUST RESPECT THE RIGHT TO SELF-DETERMINATION OF THE NATIONS COMPOSING THEM IF THEY ARE TO BE STABLE AND ENDURE

The right to self-determination of nations does not require that a nation must seek to establish a separate state. Nations can co-exist amicably with other nations inside a multinational state, as for example the English, Welsh and Scots did for three centuries inside the British state, or the many Indian nationalities inside India. They can do this, however, only if their national rights are respected and the smaller nations do not feel oppressed by the larger ones, in particular culturally and linguistically.

If this condition is not observed, political pressure is likely to develop to break-up the multinational state in question. Some multinational states are the legatees of colonial conquest – for example, India, Indonesia, most of the states of Africa. Others have been formed by the governments of large nationalities extending their power over smaller ones and incorporating the latter into either a unitary or a federal state – for example Britain, Spain, Russia, Turkey. The historical tendency seems to be for multinational states to break up into national ones, mainly because of the breakdown in solidarity between their component nationalities and the development of a feeling among the smaller ones that they are being put upon by the larger.

Shared civic nationality is the political basis of multinational states, shared ethnic nationality the political basis of nation states. In both cases, if the state is a democratic one, all citizens will be equal before the law and the rights of minority nationalities in multinational states and of national minorities in nation states will be equally respected. Historically, multinational federal states are all twentieth century creations – the Russian Federation, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Malaysia etc. Some lack the stability and popular legitimacy that come from centuries of tradition. Some have disappeared – Czechoslovakia, the USSR, Yugoslavia – others may well do in time, as various peoples within them assert their right to self-determination and national independence.

5) INTERNATIONALISM AND SUPRANATIONALISM ARE OPPOSING VALUES. INTERNATIONALISM IS PROGRESSIVE, SUPRANATIONALISM IS REACTIONARY

Internationalism and supranationalism are opposing concepts. Supranationalism – from the Latin “supra”, “above” – is where nation states surrender their authority to a superior entity which rules them and has legal primacy over them, at least in the policy areas surrendered. The term can refer to a multinational Federation where sovereignty is divided between a superior federal level and subordinate regional or national states, as in such federal states as India, Pakistan, Russia or Nigeria. It can refer to imperial arrangements like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where different nations were ruled by a centralized bureaucracy in a distant imperial capital. It can refer to the inter-state dispute settlement mechanisms now being incorporated into some commercial treaties, which establish tribunals that enable foreign private investors to sue states unless they alter their domestic laws to accommodate investor interests. It can refer to the contemporary European Union where national powers have been shifted to unelected supranational institutions, the EU Commission, Council of Ministers and Court of Justice, bodies that are collectively responsible to no-one. In these different supranational spheres cosmopolitan elites and a global nomenclatura hold sway, their stewardship safe from the judgement of citizen-voters and their policies beyond democratic control.

Internationalism – from Latin “inter”, “between” – implies the pre-existence of nations and nation states. It refers to relations of co-operation between the nations and nation states that constitute the international community, but with each controlling and deciding its own domestic and external affairs. Internationalism implies legal and political equality between the parties. Supranationalism by contrast implies a hierarchy, with the supranational level having primacy. Properly understood, internationalism is opposed to all forms of chauvinism and xenophobia. It implies coexistence among progressive “nationalisms” – a broad nationalism rather than narrow – using the sense of that word in English which implies patriotism and love of country, combined with respect for the many national communities into which humanity is divided and recognition of their cultural and other achievements. Internationalism delights in the diversity of nations. Supranationalism seeks to erase or minimise national differences, either because they threaten the dominance of a particular ruling group, or they make it more difficult for transnational big business to establish a world of homogenized consumers or employees. Supranationalism implies the erosion of State sovereignty. Internationalism seeks to establish and defend it.

The glory of European civilisation has been the diversity of its national components – in culture, science, political institutions, economic actors, legal systems, education systems, tax codes, fashion. Classically in Europe emulation and competition between nations, communities and individuals spurred cultural creativity. The peak cultural achievements of Europe occurred when its political units were numerous and small – in Athenian Greece, Renaissance Italy, 17th century Netherlands, 18th and early 19th century Germany. This classical Europe, which is synonymous with much of what is best in human civilization, is the opposite of the centralised “Europe” of the Brussels bureaucracy, with its mania for uniformity and “harmonization”.

6) THE EUROPEAN UNION IS FUNDAMENTALLY UNDEMOCRATIC AND CANNOT BE DEMOCRATISED, FOR THERE IS NO SUPRANATIONAL EUROPEAN “COMMON GOOD” WHICH PEOPLE REGARD AS SUPERIOR TO THAT EMBODIED IN THEIR OWN NATIONAL STATES

It is the absence in the European Union of anything like the underlying national solidarity which binds Europe’s nation states together that makes the EU integration “project”, and especially the euro-currency scheme, so problematic and therefore unlikely to endure. The EU is a creation of powerful political, economic and bureaucratic elites, without popular legitimacy and authority. It is directed from the top down rather than the bottom up and is therefore fundamentally undemocratic. There is no European people, no European “demos“, no European “We,” that is bound together by solidarities comparable to those that bind nations and nation states together. Rather the EU is made up of a plurality of Europe’s nations and peoples. The links binding its member states are essentially legal, institutional and bureaucratic. They are artificial and external, not organic and internal. There is therefore no EU “common good” comparable to that underlying its component member states, whose achievement could be regarded as justifying the establishment at supranational level of state-like governmental institutions.

All independent states are monetary and fiscal unions as well as political unions. As monetary unions they have their own currency, and with that the capacity to control either the domestic price of that currency, the rate of interest, or its external price, the rate of exchange. As fiscal unions states have their own taxation, public spending and social service systems. By virtue of citizens paying common taxes to a common government in order to finance common public spending programmes throughout the territory of the state, there are automatic transfers from the richer regions and social classes of each state to its poorer regions and classes. This sustains and is sustained by a shared national solidarity, a mutual commitment to the common good of the national community in question.

By contrast, the euro-currency project, European Economic and Monetary Union, is a monetary union but not a fiscal union. Never in history has there been a lasting monetary union that was not also a fiscal union and political union, in other words a fully-fledged state, deriving its legitimacy from a shared national solidarity and common good which its government existed to serve and which in turn underpinned a common fiscal transfer system. History, however, shows many examples of monetary unions that have broken up because the solidarity that is necessary to sustain a supporting fiscal and political union was non-existent or broke down.

The euro-currency scheme deprives the poorer EU states and the weaker EU economies of the ability to maintain their competitiveness and to compensate for their lower productivity, poorer resource endowment or differential economic shocks, by adopting an exchange rate or interest rate that suits their special circumstances. It fails to compensate them economically for that loss by the automatic transfer of resources from the centre which membership of a fiscal union entails. Compensatory fiscal transfers at EU level to the extent required to give the EU monetary union long-run viability are impossible, in view of the sheer size of the resources required and the unwillingness of the richer EU countries to provide them to the poorer because of the absence of the shared solidarity that would compel that. Currently expenditure by Brussels in any one year amounts to little more than 1% of EU annual gross domestic product, a tiny relative figure. This contrasts with expenditure on public transfers by the EU’s member states of between one-third and one-half of their annual national products.

Thus the fiscal solidarity that would sustain an EU political union and an EU multinational state does not and cannot exist. Democratising the EU in the absence of a European “demos” is impossible. The EU’s adoption of such traditional symbols of national statehood as a flag, an anthem, passport, car number plates, driving license, Olympic games, youth orchestra, history books, motto, annual “national” day, citizenship, fundamental rights charter and Constitution, are so many doomed attempts to manufacture a European “demos” artificially, and with it a bogus EU supranational quasi-nation and related “national” consciousness. They leave the ordinary people of Europe indifferent, whose allegiance remains to their own countries and nation states. The more European integration is pushed ahead and the more the national democracy of the EU member states is undermined in the process, the more the EU loses legitimacy and authority in the eyes of ordinary citizens. Consequently the greater and more certain the eventual popular reaction against it. To align oneself with such a misguided, inevitably doomed project is to be out of step with history. It is to side with a supranational elite against the democracy of one’s own people, to spurn genuine internationalism for the intoxicating illusion of building a superpower.

- By Anthony Coughlan, Emeritus Professor, Dublin

The National Platform EU Research and Information Centre is based in Ireland at 24 Crawford Avenue, Dublin 9.