Conjectures on the Nation‐State

Abstract

WHAT FOLLOW ARE LESS ‘THESES’ THAN ‘CONJECTURES’, speculations both tentative and disjointed. Like a mathematician's conjectures, however, they admit of being systematically ordered into a larger theory as well as being elaborated more fully, one-by-one. Here I shall, without elaboration, at least sketch the outlines of that larger theory.The general tenor of all these conjectures is to query an ethos, prevailing for the past two centuries or more, effectively encapsulated in the slogan, ‘Every state a nation, every nation a state’. Starting with the American and Latin American revolutions and continuing through the twentieth century's own wars of national liberation, the continuing motif has been one of freeing ‘a People’ from ‘alien rule’. Champions of ‘political unification’, from Mazzini's Italy to Kohl's Germany, have likewise taken as their rallying cry the uniting of a single people under a single government. That is the ‘every nation a state’ side of the story.