The Rise and Rise of the Nation State, by Nigel Holloway
(Nigel Holloway is a former senior editor at The Economist and now runs The Holloway Forum for the creation of reports primarily designed for decision makers.)
It seems like an age ago, but in the early years of the 21st Century, the economic trend of globalization was so strong that many at the time wondered whether national borders would eventually disappear altogether. The Berlin Wall had fallen and we entered a unipolar world led by American ideas, military might and investment flows. Yet here we are now in the midst of a global pandemic and nationalism bestrides the world stage.
Admittedly, recent events could have pushed the needle in the opposite direction. In March 2020, at the start of widespread lockdowns in Europe and the Americas, there was a glimmer of hope that Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping might base their policies on the fact that the world faced a common enemy in the form of the novel coronavirus. There was a possibility that world leaders would see it in their national interests to work together to defeat COVID-19. The pandemic might, therefore, have pushed geopolitics into an era of cooperation, not just in the search for a coronavirus vaccine and treatment but also toward tackling climate change together.
In fact, the opposite has occurred, as governments have competed for scarce medical resources. The US administration has blamed China for the outbreak and has pulled out of the World Health Organization. Russia is alleged to have hacked into the vaccine research conducted in the US, UK and Canada. China has sought to use the pandemic to advance its geopolitical agenda. Indeed, nationalism is riding high.
Another way to gauge the significance of the nation state is to compare the response to the pandemic, for it is clear that the impact of COVID on individual countries has varied to an extraordinary extent. This may seem surprising, given the fact that the disease is highly contagious, moves rapidly and does not respect national boundaries. Compare the number of deaths from the novel coronavirus per 100,000 population. Among sizeable, open economies, Belgium comes top with 85.8 deaths per 100,000 people and the UK second with 68.2. At the opposite end of the scale, Taiwan’s equivalent statistic is 0.03 and Thailand’s 0.08. For comparison, the US rate is 42.8 and Canada, right next door, is 24.0.
Granted, the rankings will change somewhat over the course of the pandemic, but what they show in the starkest terms is that national differences count tremendously when it comes to the relative success in containing the disease. The reasons for these differences include culture and the quality of governance, but the point here is to emphasize that nationality remains a paramount factor in people’s everyday lives.
Why did the nation-state not fade away in the 21st century, demolished by digital technology, global investment flows and unprecedented levels of cross-border migration? It is worth remembering that the roots of the nation-state can be traced to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War. A new system of political order arose in Europe based on peaceful co-existence among sovereign states, replacing a system of multiethnic empires dating back to the 13th century. As a means of organizing power, nation states have outlasted the global expansion of European empires, the Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the atom bomb and not one, but two surges of economic globalization (at the end of the 19th and 20th centuries).
These convulsions and revolutions were not able to kill off the nation state, because alternatives have proven harder to sustain and organize. The Communist International (Comintern) was intended to replace capitalist nation states with a global Soviet Republic and lasted only from 1919 to 1943. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed in 1991. The United Nations has continually struggled to reconcile the national interests of its diverse membership. The European Union has faced a series of economic and political crises in the past 10 years.
Now, at a time of resurgent nationalism, will this method of organizing power that has lasted nearly 400 years survive the pandemic, an economic crisis and, above all, climate change? All three of these require global solutions and stronger international institutions if the human race is to prosper. If nationalism becomes even stronger, we may face a poorer, sicker, more insecure future. One way forward may be to create new, international institutions that can reconcile divergent national interests to solve global problems. Faced with the triple threat from disease, mass unemployment and environmental disaster, the world may yet forge new ways to organize and move forward.