THE ORIGIN OF THE NATION STATE
The City State is a natural consequence of markets, and the enforced dominion of some set of rules in order to gain access to the benefits that market.
The Nation State is a declared, involuntary, genetic and cultural empire enforcing dominion over city states and surrounding territories. The empire is a cross genetic and cultural involuntary organization, enforcing dominion over all political orders in a territory ostensibly for the common good – and in many ways the claim is true.
Prior to the nation state, multi-ethnic, military, legislative, and commercial, empires, usually ruled by a monarch from the dominant ethnic group, were the common form of cultural, economic, political, and military organization.
As markets expanded, and wealth expanded, and ‘cognizance’ of the greater world expanded “as an inadvertent byproduct of 15th-century intellectual discoveries in political economy, capitalism, mercantilism, political geography, and geography combined together with cartography and advances in map-making technologies.” Or stated differently, accounting, record keeping, literacy, and map making made people aware of both their competitors and their economic opportunities for preserving competition against them – for preserving their sovereignty. The result was somewhat of a ‘big sort’ in europe that is currently occuring in the United States, as people in the USA re-nationalize after ‘filling up’ the new continent.
This is the positive, romantic, or ‘opportunistic’ side of the story. But the other side of the story is negative, pragmatic, and defensive.
The modern Nation State was invented by Napoleon for use in funding his invention of Total War. The Nation State evolved everywhere else in response to Napoleon’s invention of total war: either as a defense against it, or as a siezure of opportunity to replicate it.
Before Napoleon, only tropical empires could marshall the resources necessary for sustained expansionary conquest and control. Napoleon was the first European to successfully bring Oriental Despotism to Europe with the same level of mobilization of the populace as the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Chinese had been able to do, due given their relative ease of controlling irrigation by flooding of rivers and concentrated production, compared to small farms distributed over large territories with distributed production in what we call Christendom (Europa major).
The combination of Post-Templar Self-Defended Credit, in the form of Jewish-Credit Under State Protection, superior methods of record keeping (accounting), the increases in agrarian and mechanical production in Europe due to the second ‘agrarian revolution’, produced in no small part through rapid expansion of literacy and print, and the windfalls from the transfer of trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and the ability to manufacture muskets in vast numbers thereby eliminating the advantage of a professional warrior class made a Napoleon possible – but only because of the backwardness of the French Monarchy, which, like the church, had stagnated in comparison to her faster-evolving neighbors.
This combination of extremely backward governance, and extreme opportunity to mobilize is usually seen only when there is an extraordinary excesses of young males lacking opportunities for income and sex. But when combined with extraordinary credit and community license to restructure all of society by violence, the momentum of the movement created an opportunity for despotism equal to that which had been available in the ancient river empires.
As far as I know this is the origin of the second phase of the nation state: total war. The technological ability to organize distributed production under the same level of control as concentrated flood river production.
To take this further we must also address cosmopolitan universalism on the one hand(Profits for Some), and the clash of civilizations on the other (Norms for All).
Source date (UTC): 2016-09-29 03:35:00 UTC
