In March we opened a new series called Beyond the Nation(LSS 5 3 26), which suggested that there are a number of practical , and very pressing problems which could be more efficiently addressed if the response were global rather than by the current group of 193 or so mutually suspicious, jealously competing, nation states. In particular we looked at things like pollution, disaster relief, and the economic brakes imposed by creating national identities,
Thinking about it, that last is the very heart of what we’re on about, isn’t it? Because national identities are really, no viscerally, important to people. They have more power over our minds than any alternatives offered by religions, class, sports teams or profession. They not only define who we are: they define the behaviour others expect of us, and more importantly, the behaviour we expect of ourselves. And no one can deny the critical importance they have played at times when freedom was in critical jeopardy. Would Ukraine have sustained the fight against Russia for so long without a crucial sense of its own identity? Or for that matter would the USSR have sustained its own fight against the Nazis without incorporating a strong sense of Russian Nationalism? All this, and more can can be set in the balance for the Nation as the highest form of organising human societies, as we have argued elsewhere. (LSS passim: see our World Government series)
Yet nations are transient, fleeting things. Where are the Spartans or the Akkadians now? Men and women lived and died for their causes, and many like them, across thousands of years of history. Yet the real drivers of existence are huge impersonal things like climate, disease or massive technological leaps such as the Industrial Revolution. Britain spent immense quantities of treasure and lives trying to defend a position it had established in the Age of Sail, only to discover that the Age of Steam made all its efforts irrelevant[1] And so the question becomes “If your identity is so important, what price are you prepared to pay to maintain it?” Because if technologies can change, so can societies, and the identities which they generate.
We shall close the series with a personal anecdote, a thing we rarely do, Many many years ago still trapped in Undergraduate adolescence we were debating the question of Britain’s membership of what was then called the European Community with a fellow inmate, albeit far more intelligent than ourselves Being good Young Socialists we then followed the Orthodox Labour Party Line: that the UK should leave forthwith. Being entirely of independent mind (and far less neurotic) our interlocutor laughed and observed “You would have been against joining up Wessex with Mercia, wouldn’t you?” A quiet wisdom which time has made more memorable than almost any other things we have ever heard or read.
[1]Kennedy, Paul. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. New York: Random House, 1987. London: Unwin Hyman, 1988. ISBN: 0394546741 (US hardback); 0049230737 (UK hardback). see especially chapter 3
#nation state #society #politics #history #russia #ukraine #USSR #Britain #economics
Learning, Science and Society 