Why do people live in countries?
And what's the big deal about patriotism?
Humans have always lived on earth, but we haven't always been attached to the earth. In our million years before agriculture, humans roamed around in search of edible plants and animals. The buffalo-hunting tribes of the Great Plains in America suggest a model for this style of existence. Competition among tribes involved access to the moving resource rather than attachment to a particular plot of ground.
The adoption of agriculture changed things. Plants don't move. The people who sowed a crop wanted assurance they would be the ones to reap it. For the first time, specific lines in the ground mattered. Not coincidentally, the agricultural revolution gave rise to a revolution in social organization, leading to the creation of states and governments. Bands and clans of hunters were transformed into nations—what we call countries, denoting the attachment of peoples to parcels of geography.
In time the situation was formalized. The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia established for Europe the rules for modern politics there. Three centuries later, the United Nations adopted the model for the world at large. The fundamental principle of organization of the United Nations was territorial sovereignty.
According to this model, the fundamental connection of individuals to larger groups was via nationality—meaning attachment to a nation-state. Nations are, in a fundamental sense, black boxes to other nations. What goes on inside one nation is the business of that nation only.
There are exceptions to the rule. The concept of human rights aims to transcend national sovereignty. But this concept remains vague and flimsy compared to the stubbornly robust idea of national sovereignty and geographical exclusivity.
The claim of governments over individuals is stronger than any other claim. Governments can legitimately seize the property of individuals, through taxes, and they can deprive individuals of liberty, through court action and imprisonment. In some countries, they can deprive individuals of life, via the death penalty. In all countries, they can put individuals at risk of death via military service.
Governments and the societies they represent reward loyalty, calling it patriotism. The greatest heroes are those who put love of country ahead of love of self. The greatest villains are traitors, who place another country ahead of their own. Flags and the rituals surrounding them, including national anthems, remind individuals where their loyalty must lie.
In certain respects, this all seems very natural, having been the norm for hundreds of years. Yet the agricultural roots that gave rise to the existing system have attenuated dramatically. The great majority of people in wealthy countries are no longer farmers and have no direct attachment to the soil. Moreover, agricultural products are commonly traded across borders. Control of the soil is no longer a prerequisite for being fed, nor a guarantee of it.
Perhaps it's time to reconsider the territorial organization of the human race. Twice in the last two centuries, ambitious starts have been made in this direction. The first age of globalization, led by Britain after the abolition of grain tariffs there in the 1840s, and the second age, promoted by the United States after 1945, went far toward detaching economics from national politics. In the first age of globalization, European socialists were so bold as to predict that should their governments declare war, the workers would refuse to fight, preferring solidarity with their fellow workers in other countries. In the second age of globalization, optimists imagined that territorial wars had become a thing of the past.
The First World War exploded the idea of socialist solidarity. The war in Ukraine has challenged the notion that territorial wars won't happen anymore.
On the other hand, the European Union has successfully eroded the claims of national governments within its sphere. National laws coexist with union-wide regulations. National governments have surrendered control of their borders regarding passage of goods and people within the union.
Two other factors have undercut the claims of national governments. The last quarter-millennium has witnessed unprecedented movement of peoples from one country to another. This began with the industrial revolution, which drew scores of millions from countries with many people and few jobs to countries with few people and many jobs. The wars of the 20th and 21st centuries displaced scores of millions more, who often wound up in countries not of their birth.
The migrants themselves had no attachment to the land of the countries they were going to; their children had a bit more but nothing like the connection of families long in place. A country like the United States has been more a creation of will and imagination than of rootedness. American patriotism was as much an assertion of faith and hope as a reflection of innate feeling.
The second erosive factor was the emergence of issues that transcended national borders. Climate change was one; the risk and reality of pandemics was another. The first responsibility of governments—their original raison d'etre—was the provision of security to those they governed. When attacks came overland, national borders made security sense. But walls and armies can't keep out the most recent threats. Some different mode of organization is required.
The European Union offers one alternative. But it’s still based on geography. You’re either inside the EU or out, depending on your GPS coordinates. Human rights offer another. But they’re honored more in the breach than in the observance, and are subject to national veto, as China and the United States demonstrate, the former by stonewalling investigations of Uyghur treatment and both by boycotting the International Criminal Court.
Patriotism—from patria, the fatherland—dies hard. It’s a youngster in human history, yet older than any individuals. It’s bound to outlast a few more generations of us. But it might not last forever.
Prof. Brands asks the question "why do people live in countries," and suggests that maybe it is "time to reconsider the territorial organization of the human race." When I read the essay, I thought back on a book I read some 21 years ago by Phillip Bobbitt suggesting what might lie ahead, the alternatives for the future and their relationship to war.
Prof. Bobbitt, then of the University of Texas School of Law faculty, now of Columbia Law School, had written (mostly before September 11, 2021, but published in 2002) about the history of the modern state and its constitutional orders, the Long War (1914-1990), the society of nation-states and the international order, and the society of market states. Bobbitt, Philip; "The Shield of Achilles War, Peace, and the Course of History"; Alfred A. Knopf (2002). There he recounts the relation of violence to the legitimacy of rulers and governments, the evolution of the state through the wars and peace conferences and treaties ending those wars, from Augsburg to Westphalia to Utrecht to Vienna to Versailles. He discusses what might lie ahead for statehood in the following decades and what future alternatives might be available in our present and future world in which economies are global, where states have become so interrelated, and where much of the world infrastructures are in private hands, with more and more nations now possessing or close to possessing the potential for limitless destruction. He claims that the United States' national security is no longer limited to defense of our borders, but requires taking on "new national security partners drawn from the private sector in order to protect the public good." He further claims that "those states that defy this development by attempting to hold on to state-owned enterprises will steadily impoverish themselves at a rate that is slower, perhaps, but surer than those that risk vulnerability through competition and growth."
His words are better than mine so I shall just quote them (pp. 813 823, 825 827):
There will be no final victory in such a war. Rather victory will consist in having the resources and the ingenuity to avoid defeat.
So long, however, as states rely on a deterrence-and-retaliation model for their strategic paradigms---- that is, a model that requires a threat-based analysis---- they will inevitably neglect those steps, including enhanced intelligence collection, pre-emption, the development of defensive systems (including sensors), vaccinations, the prepositioning of medical supplies, and advanced methods of deception that provide the basis for operating within a different paradigm, one that relies on a vulnerability analysis. So long as states rely on a nation-state model for their international order, fruitlessly attempting to cope with new problems by trying to increase the authority of treaties, multistate conventions, or formal international institutions like the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, the society of states will fail to develop practices and precedents for regional, consensual, and market-driven arrangements that do not rely on law for enforcement. Constitutional orders that protect human rights and liberties can coexist with the consequences of the Long War only if they revolutionize their military strategies; states will only be able to pursue military strategies that enable collaboration and international consensus if they revolutionize their constitutional orders, away from the national, law-centered methods of the nation-state and toward the international, market operations of the market-state.
We are at the beginning of the sixth great revolution in strategic and constitutional affairs. The revolution in military affairs and the market-state are entering the twenty-first century together. For every state there are profound choices to be made: which military revolution to pursue (because this will affect the nature of market-state one gets, whether it is repressive or protective or aggressive); and which kind of market-state to pursue (managerial, entrepreneurial, or mercantile) because this will affect what kind of strategic capability is sought (nurturing collective goods and defensive systems, developing ever more lethal retaliatory abilities, or equipping large standing forces with global power projection). As in the past, revolutions in military affairs are symbiotically connected to transformations in the constitutional order, but neither are mechanical. Each depends on human decisions.
Because the nation-state puts so much reliance on law, one might conclude that in the coming era the market will replace law as the partner of strategy. That conclusion would be a mistake. Law will change, and the use of law as regulation, so favored by the nation-state, will lessen. Nevertheless the State will continue to rely on law to shape its internal order, even if the legal rules derived tend to be rules that recognize a larger role for the market. Only the State can promulgate laws. Therefore it will be crucial to develop legal processes that provide orderly and peaceful means of reflecting the popular will. Otherwise, the operations of the market-state will be reduced to the market itself. This will invite revolt.
The central point in recognizing the emergence of the market-state is not simply to slough off the decayed nation-state. It is also to emphasize the importance of developing public goods [footnote omitted] ---- such as loyalty, civility, trust in authority, respect for family life, reverence for sacrifice, regard for privacy, admiration for political competence---- that the market, unaided, is not well adapted to creating and maintaining. The market-state has to produce public goods because that is precisely what the market will not do. This need for qualities of reciprocity, solidarity, even decent manners, domestically, mirrors the need for collective goods, internationally, and thus represents not only a challenge but an opportunity for leadership.
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My own view, of course, is that law and war will persist because they are mutually supportive. And this is not the worst dynamic equilibrium: a state without a strategy for war would be unable to maintain its domestic legitimacy and thus could not even guarantee its citizens' civil rights and liberties; a lawless state at war could never make peace and thus would be trapped in the cycle of violence and revenge.
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It is a cliché that generals prepare to fight the last war rather than the next one. But if it is such a cliché, why haven't the generals heard it---- that is, why do we persist in modeling the future on the past?
The past, it turns out, is all we know about the future. Things are usually pretty much the way they have been. About modern warfare we can say three things based on the past: that it pits one country against another; that it is waged by governments, not private parties; that the victorious party defeats its adversary.
Now it happens that we are living in one of those relatively rare periods in which the future is unlikely to be very much like the past. Indeed the three certainties I just mentioned about national security---- that it is national (not international), that it is public (not private), and that it seeks victory (and not stalemate)---- these three lessons of the past are all about to be turned upside down by the new age of indeterminacy into which we are plunging.
Prof. Brands ends his essay thus: "Patriotism--from patria, the fatherland--dies hard. It's a youngster in human history, yet older than any individuals. It's bound to outlast a few more generations of us. But it might not last forever." It may not. But then, again, it may; or it may last at least as long as I, or as long as those who may read this, or as long as our descendants for at least several generations may witness and even experience the process of state actors resolving issues that create conflict and war.
Historically, the solution to that conflict was generally a new form of state claiming a new legitimacy. On a more optimistic note, Prof. Brands's point may be that type of solution may become obsolete. Prof. Bobbitt, however, reminds us by taking the title of his book from the last lines of Book 18 of Homer's Iliad (as translated by Robert Fagles) wherein is described a shield fabricated for Achilles by Hephaestus, across the "vast expanse" of which "with all his craft and cunning/the god creates a world of gorgeous immortal work".
The last time I checked, "immortal" was a long time.
So as not to leave the reader with the notion that Prof. Bobbitt is less optimistic than Prof. Brands, I quote him again from page 826 of his book: "But I do not believe that I have discovered an historical law of general application. Far from it. Rather I believe that at each juncture, things might have gone differently. It is the decisions of those persons who guide the that determine whether stability or innovation will ensue. True, these decisions are confined by the 'genetic material' of the State: its culture and resources. But within these constraints many real choices are possible with respect to the two dominant, mutually affecting dimensions of the State law and strategy. The society of states we have today has been brought into being by countless acts of decision making that were not compelled by larger structures, but rather that constituted those structures. It is precisely because these choices could have been different that legitimacy is conferred--or withdrawn--by their outcome. History is the name we put to choices made."
This is really interesting, and I have never really thought about the idea that nations might cease to exist. But here goes...
My first thought is that people are not self-sufficient anymore (if they ever were). We must somehow engage in trade with others to live even a basic life, so there will always be a need for people to be connected, and most want to be connected to those with whom they share some basic traits of culture or belief. Countries have tried various types of "nation-building", and none seem to have worked well. I see no way to mesh cultures peacefully on a global scale. We can't even mesh cultures seamlessly across 50 states.
There is also the notion of power. Some people will always desire power, and some people are comfortable having someone in power over them. You'd have thought the Israelites of the Old Testament would have been satisfied with God directing their affairs through priests, but still, they clamored for a king. God gave them what they wanted, and it didn't work out too well. Along the same lines, the US presidency was not a powerful office by constitutional design, but over the years, Americans have also somewhat clamored for a king. That has not worked out particularly well, either, if you ask me. But people still yearn for a leader to make them feel protected.
Perhaps that is the pull - the difference between sheep and shepherds. The desire for protection from threats will always be with us, as will the desire for power. Maybe, if nations go away, we will return full circle to tribes.