The Nation State and the Citizen Soldier
Mark Steyn at NRO mentions that the Daily Star reports that some 4000 Britons (subjects of Her Majesty) have enlisted to fight for the Taliban in Afghanistan, and hence, are shooting and being shot at other subjects of the Queen presumably more loyal to the Queen than the first group. Steyn interprets (perhaps jokingly) this as being evidence of a civil war.
Yes, this was the same Mark Steyn that was hauled before a court in Canada to answer for being quoted in an Article in THE ATLANTIC magazine where he reported demography statistics; and yes, Canada is part of the same commonwealth, once known as the British Empire, that recently refused to allow a Dutch Member of Parliament, when invited to do so by the House of Lords, to enter England’s green and pleasant land, on the grounds that he made a film comparing paynim enormities to the Koran verses that inspired them, and Her Majesty’s Muslim subjects exercise a de facto veto over visits by members of the governing parliaments of foreign states.
On a perhaps unrelated topic, let me draw your attention to the opinions an observations of David Brin over at Sigma, who here relates that the move from a robust if amateur citizen-soldier army to a highly specialized and highly professional army implies an innate brittleness which speaks poorly to an ability to fight a no-front terror war.
My question for fans of science fiction (or anyone who likes, either seriously or as daydream, to think in the long term) is this: if the nation-state should pass into insignificance, what political and social structure is likely to replace it?
I ask this because this question has been posed a number of times in fiction form in SF books. In cyberpunk books, it is the international corporation, shadowy and answerable to none, which enjoys hegemony over world affairs. In Heinlein’s future history, either a sinister Federation of nation states, a league of nations, or a more libertarian Covenant, as drafted into the Constitution after the Second American Revolution, stating no one shall impose on the freedom of another for any reason, except to ward off harm to himself.
(A.E. van Vogt in AN ANARCHIST COLOSUS, the law run entirely by robots, and punishing only violent intent, as measured by measurement of the Kirlian aura — and he mentions that in the perfectly free society, your neighbor could walk up to your mailbox and open your letters, provided he did not steal them, and the lawbots allowed it.)
In real life, international organizations, such as that criminal organization called the United Nations, or that trade and bureaucracy organization called the European Union, see moving beyond the nation state as a goal within reach. Whether these supranational bodies are likely to achieve something like the sinister Federation of Heinlein, or the more ambiguous Co-Dominium of Jerry Pournelle, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
However, I have never seen–perhaps because it was not timely–any SF book proposing that the world order move back towards its posture as it was before the rise of the nation-state..
During the declining years of the Roman Empire, the power of kings in theory, at least, was hedged by the law, and hedged by the power of the Imperator (a word we translate as Emperor but which might as well be translated ‘Commander-in-Cheif”) and the whole society influenced and colored to its tiniest roots by the universal catholic Church, the Ecclesia. Nations — by which we mean a group speaking the same language — certainly existed, and so did princes, who were sovereign in their territories, but the nation-state as such was not the dominant model by which people interpreted world affairs.
After the 7th Century, Christendom also called the Ecumene (as that portion of the world once ruled by the Roman res-publica, the commonwealth, was then known) was engaged in mortal struggle with the dar-al-Islam. (We sometimes forget that the Middle East and Asia Minor and Mediterranean Africa were Christian, so much so that to discover, for example, that the seven church mentioned in the Book of Revelation are all in modern Turkey, or that St. Augustine of Hippo was African, comes as something disorienting). The House of Submission had sultans and princes within its terrain, but, again, the nation-state was not the principle vehicle for dealing with the world. The Dar al-Islam stood against the Ecumene of Christendom. (And neither were for the K’lal Yisrael, the community of Jews.)
The nation-state arose during the same period as the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, for reasons even historians cannot exhaust, but part of that evolution (or devolution, depending onyour opinion of the 13th Century) surely included, or perhaps was caused by, a rising tide of public opinion that placed more faith in national kings than in local barons or Church or Empire. The major shifts in the Reformation included Luther urging the German princes to take control of the local church, and King Henry VIII taking control of the local church. Moderns tend to regard the Reformation as a rebellion of private conscience against public intuition—God henceforth would speak to each individual separately, rather than through the intercession of priests—but this is something of what we fans call a ‘retcon’, a bit of retroactive continuity imposed by later writers (namely, the Enlightenment writers of the 18th century ascribing freedom of religion notions to enthusiasts of the 17th Century). The Reformers wanted to reform, not sunder, the Church, and they still intended it to be a public and universal and compulsory institution to control the spiritual aspects of human life. The Puritans seeking religious ‘liberty’ in the New World will seem paradoxical to any Enlightenment thinker, to whom liberty refers exclusively to freedom in private matters. Being ‘free’ to set up your own micro-theocracy in Massachusetts Bay with stricter social controls and less privacy than one enjoyed back in England is the freedom they sought.
Even then, the nation-state did not achieve (or fall to, depending on your opinion of the 16th Century) its modern form just yet. Multi-lingual kingdoms were the norm in Europe, and no one saw anything odd in having the Charles V ruling Spaniards, Burgundians, Frisnians, Netherlanders, not to mention outposts in the New World. No one thought it odd he was styled The Holy Roman Emperor. That title did not pass out of European history until Napoleon’s day.
One of the streams of political thought which led to the rise of the nation-state was the simple proposition that all those of one language, and one shared culture, should share one state. The complaints of the Germans after the Great War was that not all German-speakers, the Volk, were members of one Reich. The development of the United States was in some way the opposite: it was (until recently) a melting pot in which separate ‘volk’ identities, separate races, tribes and bloodlines, were merged into a compact or social contract: in theory, at least, anyone of any origin dedicated to a proposition that all men are created equal came become an American. These parallel developments have one unified theme: that the state should serve the people, whether a people based on a common romanticized idea of race and soil (as in Germany) or a people created by common compact out of many (as in America). During World War Two, I dare say that the Americans and the Germans both held a mystical notion of their nation-states: instead of merely being the province of a prince, the nation had a spiritual dimension. It stood for something. I have read a historian who credits Napoleon for introducing, or, rather, exploiting, this new notion of national identity, but I live it to minds wiser than mind to decide this subtle issue.
My point here is the volunteers who were born and raised in England and who go to Afghanistan to take up arms against Her Majesty’s soldiers clearly do not use the nation-state as their principle identity. They are members of the Dar al-Islam.
Back to Mark Styen anecdote, I offer this is additional evidence that the modern, one might say, transnational idea of the nation state is left without the common sense or gumption needed to defend the nation state from fluid international enemies: any court of law which would reach the absurd conclusions of the thought-police in Canada (and I mean both absurd in the logical sense, and in the comical sense) where a man is prosecuting for pointing out truths about an implacable, and, more to the point,numerically superior enemy, comes from a world-view that has lost the mystical respect for naitonality, lost patriotism, lost spirit, without which the attempt to fight a spiritual war is impossible.
Mark Steyn, perhaps unintentionally, points out the limitations of the classical liberal world order, or at least, the modern liberal world order, based on a pervasive nihilist philosophy of total personal license and no personal responsibility: "If a jihadist says he wants to kill Canadian troops, he’s just exercising his right to freedom of religion. If I quote what he said in Canada’s biggest-selling news weekly, we’ll be charged with "flagrant Islamophobia" and hauled up in court."
To tie this back into Brin’s theory, if the modern world is a world of asymmetrical warfare, where, at any time, without warning, any neighborhood of any town or city could be the scene of the next battle, or next emergency, and if the enemy is fluid, and passes through borders without noticing them, I ask whether the nation state and its small professional military corps is the proper tool to use to fight this type of combat? I return to one of my recurring themes to insist this is psychological warfare, or, to use a more precise term, spiritual warfare. It is not a police action. What institution is best suited for waging an international spiritual crusade requiring the cooperation of every free man of the West?
(Since I specifically asked my question of Science Fiction readers, of course I am expecting everyone to say that this war should be fought by the Lensmen of Arisia. They have the requisite international character, I admit. No doubt Kimball Kinnison is even now disguised as an drug-addicted dock walloper somewhere in the stinking ghettos of Afghanistan, meticulously discovering where the zwilnicks are growing their opium.)
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
