For a generation or more, it has been an article of faith, at least in Europe, that the nation state is in profound decline. The rise of globalization, growing economic interdependence, the spread of new international organizations and the power of multinationals, not to mention the EU itself, suggested that the future lay in new forms of global and regional governance. This was a delusion. The opposite is happening. Nation states will be decisive players in global affairs over the next few decades.
So much is already clear with the US. During the Cold War, it behaved as a superpower constrained by its allies. Since Sept. 11 it has acted as Prometheus unbound, a nation state answerable to nobody but itself. Even if Senator John Kerry is elected president, the US will not revert to its pre-Sept. 11 behavior. Kerry may emphasize the importance of allies, but the unilateralist instincts of the sole superpower will not be put back in the bottle.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
The weakness of Europe as a global player is also a reminder of the efficacy of the nation state. Economically, the EU remains a formidable force, rivalling the US economy. As a political player, though, it pales into insignificance in comparison. Unable to act with any decisiveness, even in the Balkans, its impotence has been all too transparent over Iraq, where the EU has essentially been reduced to its component parts, most graphically illustrated by the divergent roles of Britain and France.
Whatever the lament about the dangers of a European superstate, it is inconceivable that this will change in the foreseeable future.
Europe cannot act in concert outside of itself because it is divided into nation states whose interests remain distinct and divergent. The recently expanded union will serve only to make this more true, with the consequence that Europe will continue to be a weak and marginal player in global affairs.
Even Iraq is a reminder of the importance of the nation state. Before the invasion, liberal imperialists liked to emphasize the limits of sovereignty, and to extol the virtues of imperial power acting to promote human rights and democracy, intervening in order to "civilize the uncivilized."
They have gone a little quiet recently, for two reasons. Firstly, the US has behaved in the way that imperial powers always behave; it is an illusion to believe that it has ever seriously or systematically promoted democracy or human rights outside its own territory. And secondly, Iraq's resistance movement has reminded the world of the power of self-determination, of the resentment felt against rule by an overweening power from an alien culture and race. This was the lesson of the anti-colonial struggle, which somehow had been conveniently forgotten. National sovereignty and independent nation states matter, not just for countries such as Britain that have enjoyed this condition for centuries, but no less for those for which this is a historically novel experience.
There is another sense, though, in which we are likely to see the resurgence of the nation state. The last century was dominated in its first half by medium-sized European nation states, and then subsequently by the rather larger US and Soviet Union. Of the world's five most populous countries -- China, India, the US, Indonesia and Brazil -- only the US has been a major global power during the course of the last half-century.
This picture is about to change, given the rise of China.
Over the next half-century, the world is likely to assume a rather different shape. For the first time in the modern era, the world's two most populous countries will become major global players in their own right. It will mark the biggest watershed in global affairs since the birth of the modern nation-state system.
China and India, with well over one-third of the world's population, will become major arbiters of all our futures. Compare that with the late 19th century, when Germany, France and Britain were the dominant powers with only 7 percent of the world's population (excluding colonies), or the US and the Soviet Union, which by the end of the Cold War contained slightly more than 10 percent of the world's population. The emergence of China and India as global powers will, in contrast to any previous period in modern history, introduce a rough and ready democracy to global affairs: the West, still the overwhelmingly dominant power in the world, represents only 17 percent of humanity.
The arrival of China and India on the world scene will reinforce the importance of the nation state. They will dominate east and south Asia respectively, which between them have well over half the world's population. Any trend in those regions towards the pooling of sovereignty along the lines of the EU, as in the case of ASEAN, will be secondary rather than predominant tendencies. The same can be said globally. India and China are, and will be, very different kinds of nation states from those that we are familiar with in the West. Not only are they far more populous -- a novelty in its own right -- they are also products of very different histories, cultures and races.
Perhaps China provides the starkest illustration of the emergence of a new kind of nation state. Populous countries are often prone to fissure, the most recent example being the Soviet Union, while Indonesia is undoubtedly the least stable of the top five.
After Tiananmen Square in 1989, it was widely assumed in the West that the communist regime would fall, as it had in the Soviet Union, and that the country might even split. Neither happened. A crucial difference was that while the USSR was very multiracial, the Han account for the vast majority of Chinese.
As Jared Diamond puts it in Guns, Germs and Steel: while five of the world's six most populous countries are creations of the past 200 years or so, China is more than 2,000 years old. This is a nation state possessed of an extraordinary centripetal unity, its cohesion born of history and ethnicity. The fact that its population is almost twice that of North America and the EU combined provides an insight into its novelty as a nation state.
None of this is to deny the importance of growing global integration, of which the EU is one example. Similarly, the accretion of a body of international law and the mushrooming of international institutions, such as the WTO and the international criminal court, are intimations of a nascent sense of global community. But these tendencies have lulled many commentators into underestimating the continuing strength and importance of the nation state.
The emergence of the US as a unilateral superpower was a rude reminder of where power is really located. Indeed, it has sought to withdraw from, boycott or ignore the Kyoto treaty, the international criminal court and other bodies. The arrival of China as a superpower, and probably India a little further down the road, will only reinforce the underlying importance of the nation state. Nation states, not multilateral institutions, will be the decisive players of the 21st century.
Martin Jacques is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Center.
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