Concluding the
discussion on migration featured in the current issue of the New Scientist
At one time countries used to worry more about keeping
people in than keeping them out. Then came the nation-state and the need to
control citizens. Governments only started to control who entered their country
relatively recently. Roman and medieval laws kept peasants bound to their
farms. In the 1600s, English labourers needed locally issued passes to travel
for work, partly to stop them “benefits shopping” for parish poor relief. But
controls were largely internal. External passports were mere requests for safe
conduct, rather than restrictive documents determining where you could go, says
John Torpey at the City University of New York. The passport as an instrument
of state regulation was born of the French revolution of 1789. At first,
ordinary people were issued passes to control internal movement, especially to
Paris. But after the king tried to escape, and foreign aristocrats attacked the
revolution, the authorities started requiring such papers for exit and entry to
the country. The revolution created one of the world’s first “nation-states”,
defined by the “national” identity of its people rather than its monarchs’
claims. “This novel importance of the people and their nationality made
identity papers integral to creating the modern state,” says Torpey.
As the idea of the nation-state spread, so did passports.
But as the industrial revolution snowballed in the 19th century, there was
pressure to allow free movement of all the factors of production – money, trade
and labour. Passport requirements were widely relaxed across Europe – in 1872,
the British foreign secretary, Earl Granville, even wrote: “all foreigners have
the unrestricted right of entrance into and residence in this country”. The
situation was similar in North America. In the early 20th century, European
legal experts were divided over whether states even had the right to control
people’s international movements. But the nationalism that was propelling
Europe towards war changed that. Among other things, it meant foreigners might
be spies.
Nation states cause some of our biggest problems, from civil
war to climate inaction. Science suggests there are better ways to run a planet
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. 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 caliphate Islamic
State. Many of the conflicts, from Palestine to the Ukraine and from rows over
immigration to 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. The nation-state model also fails often: since 1960 there have
been more than 180 civil wars worldwide.
Yet there is a growing awareness 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. The
nation state is a dangerous anachronism in a globalised world.
For most of the past thousand years, there were no nations
in Europe. It was a hotchpotch of tribal groupings, feudal kingdoms, autonomous
cities and trading networks. 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.
Humanity 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. 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. These
alliances continued to enlarge and increase in complexity in order to perform
more kinds of collective actions. 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 won
more wars, 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.
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. Such loose controlmeant 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. 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.
The tipping point was the industrial revolution. This
demanded a different kind of government. 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. 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
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. 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 circle of family
and friends. That in turn relied heavily on mass communication technologies. Benedict
Anderson of Cornell University 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.
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.
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. 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. Insecure governments allied to ethnic groups favour their own, while
grievances among the disfavoured groups grow – and the resulting conflict can
be fierce.
People self-segregate. Humans like being around people like
themselves, and ethnic enclaves can be the result. 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.
Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, using mathematical models to correlate the size of
enclaves with the incidences of ethnic strife in India, Switzerland and the
former Yugoslavia, 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. 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. Cederman’s analysis
confirms that trouble arises not from diversity alone, but when certain groups
are excluded from power (The US set up just such a government in Iraq after the
2003 invasion.) Bar-Yam’s and Cederman’s research suggests one answer to
diversity within nation states: devolve power to local communities.
“We need a conception of the state as a place where multiple
affiliations and languages and religions may be safe and flourish,” says
Slattery.
“The future structure and exercise of political power will
resemble the medieval model more than the Westphalian one,” Jan Zielonka of the
University of Oxford 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.
Now that the nation’s time may be drawing to a close, the World
Socialist Movement advances the concept of world socialism, a planet without
borders and without the State. We argue for forms of free associations of producers and world-wide federated communes.
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