This article from the New Scientist is fantastic. Reposted here so that it can be accessed without a subscription.
Nation states cause some of
our biggest problems, from civil war to climate inaction. Science suggests
there are better ways to run a planet
Map: Norman Kirby; Photograph:
Tatsuro Nishimura
By Debora MacKenzie
Try, for a moment, to envisage a
world without countries. Imagine a map not divided into neat, coloured patches,
each with clear borders, governments, laws. Try to describe anything our
society does – trade, travel, science, sport, maintaining peace and security –
without mentioning countries. Try to describe yourself: you
have a right to at least one nationality, and the right to
change it, but not the right to have none.
Those coloured patches on the map may
be democracies, dictatorships or too chaotic to be either, but virtually all
claim to be one thing: a nation state, the sovereign territory of a “people” or
nation who are entitled to self-determination within a self-governing
state. So says the United Nations, which now numbers 193 of
them.
And more and more peoples want their
own state, from Scots voting for independence to jihadis declaring
a new state in the Middle East. Many of the big news stories of the day, from
conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine to rows over immigration and membership of the
European Union, are linked to nation states in some way.
Even as our economies globalise,
nation states remain the planet’s premier political institution. Large votes
for nationalist parties in this year’s EU elections prove nationalism remains
alive – even as the EU tries to transcend it.
Yet there is a growing feeling among
economists, political scientists and even national governments that the nation
state is not necessarily the best scale on which to run our affairs. We must
manage vital matters like food supply and climate on a global scale, yet
national agendas repeatedly trump the global good. At a smaller scale, city and
regional administrations often seem to serve people better than national
governments.
How, then, should we organise
ourselves? Is the nation state a natural, inevitable institution? Or is it a
dangerous anachronism in a globalised world?
These are not normally scientific
questions – but that is changing. Complexity theorists, social scientists and
historians are addressing them using new techniques, and the answers are not
always what you might expect. Far from timeless, the nation state is a recent
phenomenon. And as complexity keeps rising, it is already mutating into novel
political structures. Get set for neo-medievalism.
Before the late 18th century there
were no real nation states, says John Breuilly of the London School of
Economics. If you travelled across Europe, no one asked for your passport at
borders; neither passports nor borders as we know them existed. People had
ethnic and cultural identities, but these didn’t really define the political
entity they lived in.
That goes back to the anthropology,
and psychology, of humanity’s earliest politics. We started as wandering,
extended families, then formed larger bands of hunter-gatherers, and then,
around 10,000 years ago, settled in farming villages. Such alliances had
adaptive advantages, as people cooperated to feed and defend themselves.
But there was one important reason to
have more friends than that: war. “In small-scale societies, between 10 and 60
per cent of male deaths are attributable to warfare,” says Peter Turchin of the
University of Connecticut at Storrs. More allies meant a higher chance of
survival.
Turchin has found that ancient Eurasian empires grew largest where
fighting was fiercest, suggesting war was a major factor in political
enlargement. Archaeologist Ian Morris of Stanford University in California
reasons that as populations grew, people could no longer find empty lands where
they could escape foes. The losers of battles were simply absorbed into the
enemy’s domain – so domains grew bigger.
How did they get past Dunbar’s
number? Humanity’s universal answer was the invention of hierarchy. Several
villages allied themselves under a chief; several chiefdoms banded together
under a higher chief. To grow, these alliances added more villages, and if
necessary more layers of hierarchy.
Hierarchies meant leaders could
coordinate large groups without anyone having to keep personal track of more
than 150 people. In addition to their immediate circle, an individual
interacted with one person from a higher level in the hierarchy, and typically
eight people from lower levels, says Turchin.
These alliances continued to enlarge
and increase in complexity in order to perform more kinds of collective
actions, says Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. For a society to survive, its collective behaviour
must be as complex as the challenges it faces – including competition from
neighbours. If one group adopted a hierarchical society, its competitors also
had to. Hierarchies spread and social complexity grew.
Larger hierarchies not only won more
wars but also fed more people through economies of scale, which enabled
technical and social innovations such as irrigation, food storage,
record-keeping and a unifying religion. Cities, kingdoms and empires followed.
But these were not nation states. A
conquered city or region could be subsumed into an empire regardless of its
inhabitants’ “national” identity. “The view of the state as a necessary
framework for politics, as old as civilisation itself, does not stand up to
scrutiny,” says historian Andreas Osiander of the University of Leipzig in
Germany.
“The
view of the state as a necessary framework for politics does not stand up”
One key point is that agrarian
societies required little actual governing. Nine people in 10 were peasants who
had to farm or starve, so were largely self-organising. Government intervened
to take its cut, enforce basic criminal law and keep the peace within its
undisputed territories. Otherwise its main role was to fight to keep those
territories, or acquire more.
Even quite late on, rulers spent
little time governing, says Osiander. In the 17th century Louis XIV of France
had half a million troops fighting foreign wars but only 2000 keeping order at
home. In the 18th century, the Dutch and Swiss needed no central government at
all. Many eastern European immigrants arriving in the US in the 19th century
could say what village they came from, but not what country: it didn’t matter
to them.
Before the modern era, says Breuilly,
people defined themselves “vertically” by who their rulers were. There was
little horizontal interaction between peasants beyond local markets. Whoever
else the king ruled over, and whether those people were anything like oneself,
was largely irrelevant.
Such systems are very different from
today’s states, which have well-defined boundaries filled with citizens. In a
system of vertical loyalties, says Breuilly, power peaks where the overlord
lives and peters out in frontier territories that shade into neighbouring
regions. Ancient empires are coloured on modern maps as if they had firm
borders, but they didn’t. Moreover, people and territories often came under
different jurisdictions for different purposes.
Simple societies
Such loose control, says Bar-Yam,
meant pre-modern political units were only capable of scaling up a few simple
actions such as growing food, fighting battles, collecting tribute and keeping
order. Some, like the Roman Empire, did this on a very large scale. But
complexity – the different actions society could collectively perform – was
relatively low.
Complexity was limited by the energy
a society could harness. For most of history that essentially meant human and
animal labour. In the late Middle Ages, Europe harnessed more, especially water
power. This boosted social complexity – trade increased, for example– requiring
more government. A decentralised feudal system gave way to centralised
monarchies with more power.
But these were still not nation
states. Monarchies were defined by who ruled them, and rulers were defined by
mutual recognition – or its converse, near-constant warfare. In Europe, however,
as trade grew, monarchs discovered they could get more power from wealth than
war.
In 1648, Europe’s Peace of Westphalia
ended centuries of war by declaring existing kingdoms, empires and other
polities “sovereign”: none was to interfere in the internal affairs of others.
This was a step towards modern states – but these sovereign entities were still
not defined by their peoples’ national identities. International law is said to
date from the Westphalia treaty, yet the word “international” was not coined
until 132 years later.
By then Europe had hit the tipping
point of the industrial revolution. Harnessing vastly more energy from coal
meant that complex behaviours performed by individuals, such as weaving, could
be amplified, says Bar-Yam, producing much more complex collective behaviours.
This demanded a different kind of
government. In 1776 and 1789, revolutions in the US and France created the
first nation states, defined by the national identity of their citizens rather
than the bloodlines of their rulers. According to one landmark history of the
period, says Breuilly, “in 1800 almost nobody in France thought of themselves
as French. By 1900 they all did.” For various reasons, people in England had an
earlier sense of “Englishness”, he says, but it was not expressed as a
nationalist ideology.
By 1918, with the dismemberment of
Europe’s last multinational empires such as the Habsburgs in the first world
war, European state boundaries had been redrawn largely along cultural and
linguistic lines. In Europe at least, the nation state was the new norm.
Part of the reason was a pragmatic
adaptation of the scale of political control required to run an industrial
economy. Unlike farming, industry needs steel, coal and other resources which
are not uniformly distributed, so many micro-states were no longer viable.
Meanwhile, empires became unwieldy as they industrialised and needed more
actual governing. So in 19th-century Europe, micro-states fused and empires
split.
These new nation states were
justified not merely as economically efficient, but as the fulfilment of their
inhabitants’ national destiny. A succession of historians has nonetheless
concluded that it was the states that defined their respective nations, and not
the other way around.
France,
for example, was not the natural expression of a pre-existing French nation. At
the revolution in 1789, half its residents did not speak French. In 1860, when
Italy unified, only 2.5 per cent of residents regularly spoke standard Italian.
Its leaders spoke French to each other. One famously said that, having created
Italy, they now had to create Italians – a process many feel is still taking place.
“At
the revolution in 1789, half of France’s residents did not speak French”
Sociologist Siniša Maleševic of University College Dublin in
Ireland believes that this “nation building” was a key step in the evolution of
modern nation states. It required the creation of an ideology of nationalism
that emotionally equated the nation with people’s Dunbar circle of family and
friends.
That
in turn relied heavily on mass communication technologies. In an influential
analysis, Benedict Anderson of Cornell University in New
York described nations as “imagined” communities: they far outnumber our
immediate circle and we will never meet them all, yet people will die for their
nation as they would for their family.
Such nationalist feelings, he argued,
arose after mass-market books standardised vernaculars and created linguistic
communities. Newspapers allowed people to learn about events of common concern,
creating a large “horizontal” community that was previously impossible.
National identity was also deliberately fostered by state-funded mass
education.
The key factor driving this
ideological process, Maleševic says, was an underlying structural one: the
development of far-reaching bureaucracies needed to run complex industrialised
societies. For example, says Breuilly, in the 1880s Prussia became the first government
to pay unemployment benefits. At first they were paid only in a worker’s native
village, where identification was not a problem. As people migrated for work,
benefits were made available anywhere in Prussia. “It wasn’t until then that
they had to establish who a Prussian was,” he says, and they needed bureaucracy
to do it. Citizenship papers, censuses and policed borders followed.
That meant hierarchical control
structures ballooned, with more layers of middle management. Such bureaucracy
was what really brought people together in nation-sized units, argues
Maleševic. But not by design: it emerged out of the behaviour of complex
hierarchical systems. As people do more kinds of activities, says Bar-Yam, the
control structure of their society inevitably becomes denser.
In the emerging nation state, that
translates into more bureaucrats per head of population. Being tied into such
close bureaucratic control also encouraged people to feel personal ties with
the state, especially as ties to church and village declined. As governments
exerted greater control, people got more rights, such as voting, in return. For
the first time, people felt the state was theirs.
Natural state of affairs?
Once Europe had established the
nation state model and prospered, says Breuilly, everyone wanted to follow
suit. In fact it’s hard now to imagine that there could be another way. But is
a structure that grew spontaneously out of the complexity of the industrial
revolution really the best way to manage our affairs?
According to Brian Slattery of York
University in Toronto, Canada, nation states still thrive on a widely held
belief that “the world is naturally made of distinct, homogeneous national or
tribal groups which occupy separate portions of the globe, and claim most people’s
primary allegiance”. But anthropological research does not bear that out, he
says. Even in tribal societies, ethnic and cultural pluralism has always been
widespread. Multilingualism is common, cultures shade into each other, and
language and cultural groups are not congruent.
Moreover, people always have a sense
of belonging to numerous different groups based on region, culture, background
and more. “The claim that a person’s identity and well-being is tied in a
central way to the well-being of the national group is wrong as a simple matter
of historical fact,” says Slattery.
Perhaps it is no wonder, then, that
the nation-state model fails so often: since 1960 there have been more than 180
civil wars worldwide.
But for every Syria or Iraq there is
a Singapore, Malaysia or Tanzania, getting along okay despite having several
“national” groups. Immigrant states in Australia and the Americas, meanwhile,
forged single nations out of massive initial diversity.
What makes the difference? It turns
out that while ethnicity and language are important, what really matters is
bureaucracy. This is clear in the varying fates of the independent states that
emerged as Europe’s overseas empires fell apart after the second world war.
According to the mythology of
nationalism, all they needed was a territory, a flag, a national government and
UN recognition. In fact what they really needed was complex bureaucracy.
Some former colonies that had one
became stable democracies, notably India. Others did not, especially those such
as the former Belgian Congo, whose colonial rulers had merely extracted
resources. Many of these became dictatorships, which require a much simpler
bureaucracy than democracies.
Dictatorships exacerbate ethnic
strife because their institutions do not promote citizens’ identification with
the nation. In such situations, people fall back on trusted alliances based on
kinship, which readily elicit Dunbar-like loyalties. Insecure governments
allied to ethnic groups favour their own, while grievances among the disfavoured
groups grow – and the resulting conflict can be fierce.
Recent research confirms that the
problem is not ethnic diversity itself, but not enough official inclusiveness.
Countries with little historic ethnic diversity are now having to learn that on
the fly, as people migrate to find jobs within a globalised economy.
How
that pans out may depend on whether people self-segregate. Humans like being
around people like themselves, and ethnic enclaves can be the result. Jennifer
Neal of Michigan State University in East Lansing has used agent-based
modelling to look at the effect of this in city neighbourhoods. Her work
suggests that enclaves promote social cohesion, but at the cost of decreasing
tolerance between groups. Small enclaves in close proximity may be the solution.
But at what scale? Bar-Yam says
communities where people are well mixed – such as in peaceable Singapore, where
enclaves are actively discouraged – tend not to have ethnic strife. Larger
enclaves can also foster stability. Using mathematical models to correlate the
size of enclaves with the incidences of ethnic strife in India, Switzerland and
the former Yugoslavia, he found that enclaves 56 kilometres or more wide make
for peaceful coexistence – especially if they are separated by natural
geographical barriers,
Switzerland’s 26 cantons, for
example, which have different languages and religions, meet Bar-Yam’s spatial
stability test – except one. A French-speaking enclave in German-speaking Berne
experienced the only major unrest in recent Swiss history. It was resolved by
making it a separate canton, Jura, which meets the criteria.
Again, though, ethnicity and language
are only part of the story. Lars-Erik Cederman of the Swiss Federal Institute
of Technology in Zurich argues that Swiss cantons have achieved peace not by
geographical adjustment of frontiers, but by political arrangements giving
cantons considerable autonomy and a part in collective decisions.
Similarly, using a recently compiled
database to analyse civil wars since 1960, Cederman finds that strife is indeed
more likely in countries that are more ethnically diverse. But careful analysis
confirms that trouble arises not from diversity alone, but when certain groups
are systematically excluded from power.
Governments with ethnicity-based
politics were especially vulnerable. The US set up just such a government in
Iraq after the 2003 invasion. Exclusion of Sunni by Shiites led to insurgents
declaring a Sunni state in occupied territory in Iraq and Syria. True to
nation-state mythology, it rejects the colonial boundaries of Iraq and Syria,
as they force dissimilar “nations” together.
Ethnic cleansing
Yet the solution cannot be imposing
ethnic uniformity. Historically, so-called ethnic cleansing has been uniquely
bloody, and “national” uniformity is no guarantee of harmony. In any case,
there is no good definition of an ethnic group. Many people’s ethnicities are
mixed and change with the political weather: the numbers who claimed to be
German in the Czech Sudetenland territory annexed by Hitler changed
dramatically before and after the war. Russian claims to Russian-speakers in
eastern Ukraine now may be equally flimsy.
Both Bar-Yam’s and Cederman’s
research suggests one answer to diversity within nation states: devolve power
to local communities, as multicultural states such as Belgium and Canada have
done.
“We need a conception of the state as
a place where multiple affiliations and languages and religions may be safe and
flourish,” says Slattery. “That is the ideal Tanzania has embraced and it seems
to be working reasonably well.” Tanzania has more than 120 ethnic groups and
about 100 languages.
In the end, what may matter more than
ethnicity, language or religion is economic scale. The scale needed to prosper
may have changed with technology – tiny Estonia is a high-tech winner – but a
small state may still not pack enough economic power to compete.
That is one reason why Estonia is
such an enthusiastic member of the European Union. After the devastating wars
in the 20th century, European countries tried to prevent further war by
integrating their basic industries. That project, which became the European
Union, now primarily offers member states profitable economies of scale,
through manufacturing and selling in the world’s largest single market.
What the EU fails to inspire is
nationalist-style allegiance – which Maleševic thinks nowadays relies on the
“banal” nationalism of sport, anthems, TV news programmes, even song contests.
That means Europeans’ allegiances are no longer identified with the political
unit that handles much of their government.
Ironically, says Jan Zielonka of the
University of Oxford, the EU has saved Europe’s nation states, which are now
too small to compete individually. The call by nationalist parties to “take
back power from Brussels”, he argues, would lead to weaker countries, not
stronger ones.
He sees a different problem. Nation
states grew out of the complex hierarchies of the industrial revolution. The EU
adds another layer of hierarchy – but without enough underlying integration to
wield decisive power. It lacks both of Maleševic’s necessary conditions:
nationalist ideology and pervasive integrating bureaucracy.
Even so, the EU may point the way to
what a post-nation-state world will look like.
Zielonka
agrees that further integration of Europe’s governing systems is
needed as economies become more interdependent. But he says Europe’s
often-paralysed hierarchy cannot achieve this. Instead he sees the replacement
of hierarchy by networks of cities, regions and even non-governmental
organisations. Sound familiar? Proponents call it neo-medievalism.
“The future structure and exercise
of political power will resemble the medieval model more
than the Westphalian one,” Zielonka says. “The latter is about concentration of
power, sovereignty and clear-cut identity.” Neo-medievalism, on the other hand,
means overlapping authorities, divided sovereignty, multiple identities and
governing institutions, and fuzzy borders.
“The
future exercise of power will resemble the medieval model”
Anne-Marie
Slaughter of Princeton University, a former US assistant
secretary of state, also sees hierarchies giving way to global networks
primarily of experts and bureaucrats from nation states. For example,
governments now work more through flexible networks such as the G7 (or 8, or
20) to manage global problems than through the UN hierarchy.
Ian Goldin, head of the Oxford Martin School at the
University of Oxford, which analyses global problems, thinks such networks must
emerge. He believes existing institutions such as UN agencies and the World
Bank are structurally unable to deal with problems that emerge from global
interrelatedness, such as economic instability, pandemics, climate change and
cybersecurity – partly because they are hierarchies of member states which
themselves cannot deal with these global problems. He quotes Slaughter:
“Networked problems require a networked response.”
Again, the underlying behaviour of
systems and the limits of the human brain explain why. Bar-Yam notes that in
any hierarchy, the person at the top has to be able to get their head around
the whole system. When systems are too complex for one human mind to grasp, he
argues that they must evolve from hierarchies into networks where no one person
is in charge.
Where does this leave nation states?
“They remain the main containers of power in the world,” says Breuilly. And we
need their power to maintain the personal security that has permitted human violence to decline to all-time lows.
Moreover,
says Dani Rodrik of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced
Study, the very globalised economy that is allowing these networks to emerge
needs something or somebody to write and enforce the rules. Nation states are
currently the only entities powerful enough to do this.
Yet their limitations are clear, both
in solving global problems and resolving local conflicts. One solution may be
to pay more attention to the scale of government. Known as subsidiarity, this
is a basic principle of the EU: the idea that government should act at the
level where it is most effective, with local government for local problems and
higher powers at higher scales. There is empirical evidence that it works:
social and ecological systems can be better governed when their users
self-organise than when they are run by outside leaders.
However, it is hard to see how our
political system can evolve coherently in that direction. Nation states could
get in the way of both devolution to local control and networking to achieve
global goals. With climate change, it is arguable that they already have.
There is an alternative to evolving
towards a globalised world of interlocking networks, neo-medieval or not, and
that is collapse. “Most hierarchical systems tend to become
top-heavy, expensive and incapable of responding to change,” says Marten Scheffer of Wageningen University in the
Netherlands. “The resulting tension may be released through partial collapse.”
For nation states, that could mean anything from the renewed pre-eminence of
cities to Iraq-style anarchy. An uncertain prospect, but there is an upside.
Collapse, say some, is the creative destruction that allows new structures to
emerge.
Like it or not, our societies may
already be undergoing this transition. We cannot yet imagine there are no
countries. But recognising that they were temporary solutions to specific
historical situations can only help us manage a transition to whatever we need
next. Whether or not our nations endure, the structures through which we govern
our affairs are due for a change. Time to start imagining.
