The State, the Nation, Nationalism, and the Interstate Federalist Tradition

The argument of this chapter is that the state, nation, and its attendant nationalism were gradually evolved social constructs whose purpose was to maximize the survivability or power projection capabilities of a given group. Distinct political entities and recognizably different groups of competing peoples being as old as recorded history, the specific characteristics of the Modern state and nation are explored through an archeology of the interconnected developments in the societies, economies, and governments of Europe that occurred from approximately 1400 to the present. While necessarily incomplete, it shows how power competition between the hereditary heads of the major emerging geopolitical entities spurred efforts toward centralizing administrative, fiscal, and military reforms in the name of maximizing their power projection capabilities. Further, how this gradual elimination of local difference within states in favor of allegiance to a single uniform authority, coupled with technological and social innovations like moveable type and mass literacy, fostered the growth of the Modern nation. The various types of nationalism this produced are examined, as are those efforts to suppress, contain, or direct them. Everywhere, war features prominently; and building on the work of Raico, Higgs, Rothbard, and Mises, in the libertarian realist tradition, this chapter concludes that centralizing authorities of all types tend naturally to benefit from both nation and state building; concluding with observations on relations to the American case and how the Interstate Federalist Tradition, as a product of classically liberal thought, could offer an attractive alternative to a twenty-first century dominated by yet another round of so-called “Great Power Competition,” the results of which could wipe out all life on earth but the microscopic in an afternoon.