Conceptualizing Politics

4.   State and nation
We are used to thinking of the state as a nation state or even, as in American poli-
tics and journalism, to speak of states in terms of nations.
24
 This is not only confus-
ing, because actors of international politics and law are states, not nations, while 
states can be multinational, as the old Soviet Union or the post-national European 

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68  How politics works
Union, which is not a traditional state although it is a major player in international 
politics. It is misleading as well, in as much as it suggests an ontological coinci-
dence of state and nation that is stranger to what happened in history and may 
happen in the future. The state, especially the modern one, is the main political 
actor in power games, has legal clothes and more or less defined goals to uphold, 
but acts primarily on strategic considerations with regards to winning or losing 
in front of impersonal challenges or recognisable adversaries: these are the coordi-
nates within which citizens are kept together and recognise themselves as united 
in statehood. The nation is a rather ‘communitarian’ artefact, its internal bonds are 
of ethnic and/or cultural character, that is referred to philosophy, religion, lan-
guage, tradition, life-forms; its existence is value-based rather than strategic, emo-
tional and not merely argumentative.
25
 The Romans spoke of natio, which comes 
from the same root as nascere (to be born) and does not overlap with the modern 
notion of nation, while they dubbed Rome itself civitas or patria (commonwealth 
or homeland). Later in the Middle Ages, things went into flux, and later Jeremy 
Bentham (1748–1832) first used the term ‘international law’ to denote what was 
theretofore known as the ‘law of nations’, or ius gentium, regulating the interaction 
among states (1970); the new word was to stay, though in 1999 John Rawls more 
traditionally, but with good reasons titled his work on international relations The 
Law of Peoples. We shall look here at the nation in the framework of the modern 
state’s evolution, leaving aside questions such as the possible application of this 
term to biblical Israel or ancient Egypt.
In the context of modernity, the nation can be conceived of in two fairly dif-
ferent ways: either as an organic product of ethnicity that pre-existed, and also may 
survive the state, or as a political construct built up by political and intellectual ‘elites’, 
who select and put together elements already existing in the historical evolution 
and start a struggle for recognition in whose course the nation first becomes what 
those actors pretend it always was. The first view is called primordialism or essential-
ism and has been largely marginalised in the studies on nation and nationalism of 
the last forty years, while the second one, known as modernist, should be rather 
dubbed evolutionary. It sees the idea of the nation as having come up in the con-
text of the European bourgeoisie’s struggle aimed at enlarging the basis of existing 
territorial (France, Britain, Spain) or hoped-for (Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary 
and others in Eastern Europe) states by transferring the source of sovereignty and 
legitimacy from the monarch’s divine right to the people: popular sovereignty. The 
ignition of this processes came for all of Europe and later Latin America from the 
French Revolution, whose goal was – in the words of Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès 
(1748–1836) – ‘fonder la nation contre la noblesse/to found the nation against the 
nobility’. At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the idea of nation 
was very successful because it gave concrete shape to the more abstract political 
and juridical notion of the people as bearer of sovereign statehood – in the next 
chapter we shall see how consequential the merging of the demos/people with the 
ethnos/ethnic group was. That idea gave the new constitutional architecture roots in 
a community of living people that everybody could feel they belonged to. In this 

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The state  69
version, which is the antechamber of democracy, the idea of nation must be distin-
guished from nationalism, as it can be seen in the works and deeds of its most famous 
representative, Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872), who was a Europeanist in addition 
to being a leading figure of the Italian Risorgimento. Still in this light, the nation did 
not come up in politics without a measure of planned nation-building: by literary 
debates and exemplary action, sometimes in form of ‘martyrdom’, before it was 
established as nation state and recognised in the world, by education (elementary 
school in the first place) and military conscription afterwards.
Was the successive sliding of the idea of nation into nationalism, the most 
unfortunate event in modern history, inscribed in the nation’s DNA, or was it the 
consequence of occasional factors or voluntary choices made by the ruling elites? 
I do incline towards the second answer, but again we cannot enter a philosophical 
inquiry in counterfactual history. That slipping move was energetically promoted 
by Europe’s élites in a time of enhanced international competition and upcoming 
internal unrest due to the growing workers’ movement, against which national-
ism and military or colonial adventures were a welcome safety valve. Beyond the 
outspoken nationalistic ideologues and parties, the turn to nationalism included 
nearly all of the mainstream bourgeois (liberal) politicians and left the very workers’ 
movement not unaffected. Unaware of the new destructiveness of industrial war-
fare, European ‘nations’ entered like sleepwalkers
26
 into what later turned out to be 
the First World War, some of them even seeing in it ‘the war to end all wars’, which 
instead, left the continent and the world pregnant with the Second World War; in 
the course of this process, nationalism, the prime motivational force, was enriched 
with ideological conflict, xenophobia and state-operated racism in the Shoah.
27
 At 
the end of this process in 1945, everywhere in Europe the nation states had lost 
their credibility and were supplanted by two empires, of which the Soviet Union 
was multinational and driven by a universalist ideology, while American exception-
alism cannot be seen as just another version of nationalism.
Among developing countries, nationalism has been and still is the unlucky road 
companion in the national liberation era and later in the often failed stabilisa-
tion of post-colonial regimes, sometimes accompanied by religious hatred; this has 
led, once again, to an arms race among developing countries that has gone so 
far as to not see the nuclear threshold as morally and politically insurmountable. 
India-Pakistan is the case in point, but nationalism has recently retaken the stage 
in post-communist states such as Russia, Poland, Hungary, even in states within 
the European Union, to date the most innovative and successful endeavour to get 
rid of its poison. Nationalist mobilisation also remains a tool of the art of govern-
ment in the Russian Federation as well as the People’s Republic of China. While 
globalisation has, in fact, further decreased the strength of nation states, its backlash 
on the subjective side of politics, the defensive appeal of nationalism, has been and 
will still be considerable. To strike a balance between global constraints, traded self- 
identification in local terms, weak universalist ideals and the temptation of resorting 
to the consensus-winning, if impotent appeal of nationalism remains difficult. Even 
more so in times in which liberal democracy, a valid vaccine against nationalist 

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70  How politics works
seclusion and hatred, is eroded by another problematic phenomenon: populism, 
which will be discussed in the next chapter.