The decline of the nation-state

 The era of the modern nation-state began with the American and French Revolutions in the late 18th century.  They enshrined the idea of equal citizenship and governments dedicated to the welfare of their peoples. The French Revolution also inaugurated the age of the modern mass army.  Progress towards real democracy was slow in Europe during the first half of the 19th century, but it accelerated after the American civil war, which among other things marked a victory of democracy over aristocracy.  The unification of Germany led to a new era of European great-power conflict in which the major powers maintained large conscript armies and growing navies, generally protected their national economies with tariffs (except for the United Kingdom), and developed national arms industries.  After 1898 the United States became a player in the world conflict among nation-states as well and joined in the imperialism that went with it.  

The era of the two world wars vastly increased both the power of nation-state governments and their impact upon the world.  They raised armies of unprecedented size and unleashed new destructive power.  Twice they significantly redrew the map of Europe.  They required greater loyalty from their citizenry, which they enforced by various means, including wartime detention of aliens and persons thought to be suspicious.  In the Second World War the communist Soviet Union emerged as a stronger power than any nation state except the United States,  Even before that war, the USSR had starved millions of its citizens and imprisoned millions more, and the German state killed more than ten million people under the Nazis.  The United States developed atomic weapons, and the USSR, Britain and France followed suit in the postwar era.  

Equally importantly, the enormous sacrifices of the common people in the Second World War created new bonds between them and their government. The rights of organized labor peaked in the postwar period all over the western world, and governments took many steps to improve housing, health care, and education.  Meanwhile, only a mixture of inflation and very high marginal tax rates could finance that war and its aftermath, and those bore more heavily on the rich than the average person and created much greater equality of income and even wealth.  On the continent of Europe, however--where the growth of the power of the nation-state had had the most disastrous results--a countervailing political movement arose in the 1950s.  The European Common Market, which eventually became the European Union, sought to create a unified European political authority that would relegate national rivalries to the past.  West Germany, realizing how frightening any resurgence of German nationalism might be, took the lead in this process.  France under Charles de Gaulle refused to abandon its national sovereignty and still believed in a unique national mission, but the EU eventually moved to a common currency well after is death.

A more serious revolt against the nation-state--and indeed, against authority of all kinds--began in the late 1960s in the US and western Europe.  In the US it targeted the Vietnam War, and much of the Boom generation grew up distrusting the government on principle.  In Europe the revolt may have targeted the protesters' parents' collaboration with National Socialism.  The US revolt led to the end of the military draft in 1973--the abandonment of perhaps the most important single power of nation-states.  Britain had abandoned its draft much earlier, and eventually all the western European nations followed suit.  

The governments' loss of prestige helped, and was accelerated by, the rise of neoliberalism in Britain under Margaret Thatcher and in the US under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.  Both of them explicitly targeted the increased taxes and increased role of the government since the 1940s and argued that government was the problem, not the solution.  I have found in my new book that every subsequent president until Joe Biden has echoed Reagan's rhetoric to some extent while they continued the deregulation of the economy.  Meanwhile, international trade has increased enormously and all the richest countries depend on China and various third world nations to produce many necessary goods. The rights of labor have largely evaporated in the US and the UK, and although they remain stronger in Germany, France, and elsewhere in Europe, all these nations are trending towards greater economic inequality.  The governments of Britain and the US abandoned their industrial working classes, leading to Brexit and Trump's election during the last decade.  

During the Second World War, Roosevelt and Churchill bragged--deservedly--that their democratic nations could do at least as good a job of mobilizing their resources as totalitarian ones could.  The war in Ukraine has revived the conflict between authoritarian powers--Russia, and perhaps China--and democratic ones.  The American government has found that it barely has the industrial capacity to keep Ukraine supplied with necessary weapons and ammunition, much less to provide Taiwan with what it needs to prepare for a possible Chinese attack.  The US military establishment concluded after the fall of the USSR that it didn't have to prepare for another major war.  That assumption is now very questionable.

Meanwhile, the nation-state bequeathed by the Enlightenment has suffered even more--especially here in the US--by the collapse of intellectual authority.  We have no generally shared commitment to our institutions, little remaining respect for the achievements of our past, and no shared body of facts. Social media allows anyone not only to believe anything, but to find a ready audience for their beliefs.  The great repository of historical knowledge built up over the last few centuries is either ignored or replaced by distorted propaganda.  It turns out that Jack Teixiera, the Air National Guardsmen under arrest for the biggest unauthorized release of documents since Wikileaks, believed, among many other things, that the federal government staged mass shootings to promote gun control.  He is almost surely not unique among our volunteer military, the place where one would expect the most traditional patriotism.  And the pro-gun movement in the United States has deprived our government of one of its most fundamental rights: the monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

Because I do not see how the United States could reverse these trends--from the influence of our biggest corporations on our government, to our intellectual elite's frightening self-confidence and our population's disaffection--I continue to believe that we are at an historical turning point, one which I also identified at the end of American Tragedy in 2000 and the concluding chapter of No End Save Victory in 2014.   I find myself repeating the serenity prayer quite often.