Nation-States and the Globalization of the Westphalian System
(written by Lancelot Finn, September 2003)
To kowtow or not to kowtow? That was the question faced by the representatives of European governments in China around the turn of the 19th century. On the one hand, to refuse the gesture would disrupt relations to this great empire and its huge market, where countless opportunities might await. And diplomats were accustomed to follow the protocol of and show respect to their hosts. Yet the kowtow was a gesture, not of respect, but of submission, perhaps even of subjection. This was awkward for Europeans. In Europe by that time, a concept of international relations prevailed by which states had a certain legal equality.
The modern European state system is usually dated from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Why? Most of the polities that formed that system—France, Spain, Sweden, England, Habsburg Austria—existed well before 1648; none were created (though Switzerland and Holland had their de facto independence formally recognized) and none were destroyed. Nor was there a general peace: France continued to fight Spain, Cromwell the Scots, and the English and the Dutch were soon at war again. (It was the effectively the end of the road for one polity, however: the Holy Roman Empire.)
1648 marked the abandonment, as a compromise solution after the catastrophic Thirty Years' War, of aspirations that had rendered borders and sovereignties transitory and provisional in the minds of many men. The Protestants had wanted a religious and political revolution, and longed for the fall of the Roman Church and of all the Catholic powers. In turn, the Catholic Church wanted to roll back the Protestant Reformation, and the Habsburgs envisioned themselves as masters of a Christian version of the Roman Empire. As long as enthusiasts for these dream-empires marched and counter-marched the continent, many of them glad to martyr themselves on behalf of unattainable causes, there could be no peace. The Peace of Westphalia exorcised the dream-empires. The rule of cuius regio, eius religio (first introduced earlier, in 1555) laid down that the prince could establish the religion of his state—peace was established, from a modern point of view, at the cost of religious freedom. But this resolved the problem of divided loyalties, and borders became fixed, agreed upon and real.
Even as firm, fixed, realist borders were settling into place within Europe, the absurd and fantastic land-grabs of the age of imperialism were underway overseas. The papacy took the lead by dividing the world between Portugal and Spain with the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. While the Protestants did not feel themselves bound to honor this, they made equally absurd claims, in North America for example. The vast expanses of North America were partitioned long before they were even mapped. Later a similar development took place in Africa. One of the ways in which the age of imperialism and colonialism contrasts with the present is the degree of confusion about borders and sovereignties. Different cultures had different ideas of what borders and sovereignty meant. Among the Amerindians of North America, for example, the idea of a border was little developed, which is why chiefs were sometimes willing to sell their ancestral lands for trifles. The British were especially adept at insinuating themselves into local power arrangements, then converting their influence into sovereignty. This sort of manipulation led to conflicts in which each side was convinced that it was playing fair and the other was cheating. But since the Europeans enjoyed superior force, their ideas of sovereignty generally came out on top, and everyone else gradually got used to and adopted them. Stronger cultures were more able to resist the European paradigm; thus the venerable empire of China managed to preserve its independence and traditional form of governance until 1911.
So if the dream of universal empire was gone, if legitimacy no longer looked like the Roman Empire, what was its basis? The Europeans staggered through the divine right of kings, the “enlightened despots” and the French Revolution, and finally arrived at an answer: nationality was the basis of allegiance, and people looked to strong nation-states like England and France as the best model of a state.
National self-determination seems like a simple, natural idea to anyone habituated to the comparatively recent but now ubiquitous idea of the nation. France and England became nation-states early. Each had been a coherent kingdom since medieval times (though there was an awkward overlap of claims that led to the Hundred Years’ War). Each had a national language and literature (though dialects persisted). Each had a coherent territory with natural boundaries (except in each’s northern marches, which tapered off vaguely into Scotland and the Low Countries). They contrasted with the multi-national, traditional autocracies to the east, seemingly for the better.
Nation-states had the advantage that loyalty was not only vertical—to a monarch, for example—but also horizontal—to one’s countrymen. And they were “countrymen” because Englishmen felt English and Frenchmen felt French, and proud of it, as no one felt Austro-Hungarian. This additional, horizontal loyalty made a country stronger: the people would defend their country vigorously even if at some point in time they disliked the government; and the state acquired an ally, patriotism, which could stir the passions of a mob in the street or a soldier on the battlefield. Nation-states had another advantage too: because the national glue that held a country together lay deeper than politics, it was more possible to stand in “loyal opposition” to the government without suspicion of being an enemy of the state. And loyal opposition was the prerequisite for democracy. Conservatives liked the nation-state model for its strength, liberals for its democratic potential. (And it is no paradox to like the nation-state model for both reasons, just as it is no paradox to be both conservative and liberal; on the contrary, liberty is healthiest when it is a tradition.)
The trouble is that history does not usually deposit people in homogeneous, discreet nations with nice natural boundaries. Generally it mixes them up. Maybe one nationality dominates the cities, another the countryside; then again, two nations that inhabit neighboring regions have a broad overlap where both live; and meanwhile there are nations in diaspora like gypsies and Jews that further confuse the picture.
Indeed, what is nationality exactly? Shared customs, a common language, and a common religion are the most conspicuous traits of nations. But none of these is either necessary or sufficient. England, America and Ireland share a language and many customs, yet are separate nations, while Indians speak dozens of languages and yet are one nation. Europe has a dozen separate Catholic countries, while America and India each have many religious represented in the same country. Nationality resides not in these but in the imagined community, in the individual’s personal sense of identity. Yet there are many forms of identity, many imagined communities: class, rank, religion, profession, city, town, village, family; some (village) smaller than the nation, others (Europe, Islam) larger, still others (membership of the Jesuit order, or the international proletariat) cross-sectional, joining part of the nation with parts of other nations. There is no reason a priori that, of all these identities, people should place much importance on nationality or see it as a basis for statehood, or, for that matter, that there will be consensus on how the national community is imagined. History is full of counter-examples to such consensus: should inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies imagine themselves as British or “American”; should North Irish Protestants imagine themselves as British or Irish; should Barcelona conceive itself as Spanish or Catalan, etc. Making nationality the chief criterion for statehood raises the stakes and invites bloodshed.
So when Woodrow Wilson made national self-determination part of this Fourteen Points for peace, thus establishing it central to a new conception of legitimate sovereignty, he sowed a field of dragon’s teeth for the 20th century. Yet he had little choice. The American creed was democracy. He could not become a partisan of the Hapsburgs. Democracy was “rule by the people,” so there had to be a “people.” And a people is a nation. Nationalism is democracy’s unfortunate prerequisite, its necessary but sometimes vicious companion. Wilsonian national self-determination, in the decades after World War I, dissolved all the world’s empires, first the ancient autocracies of Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Russia (though Russia soon re-emerged in a new form); then, after World War II, the colonial empires; then the Soviet Union. Leaders of these “new nations” had to hammer national consciousness into their people, often through crude propaganda that debased the culture, and at the expense of minorities who came to be seen as “foreign.” Indeed, none of these phases of imperial dissolution took place without large-scale displacement of peoples and genocide in its wake.
But they resulted in the modern system of international relations, in which a map of the world is neatly partitioned into upwards of 180 sovereign nations, having (with a few exceptions) compact territories and well-defined borders; national flags, constitutions, passports, laws, languages and currencies; seats at the United Nations and other international organizations; and “sovereignty.”