Though it dominates the world, the nation-state owns no long history of legitimacy. It developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its nationalism a doctrine invented in Europe, writes the political scientist Elie Kedourie, that pretends to supply a criterion for the determination of the unit of population proper to enjoy a government exclusively its own.... Briefly, the doctrine holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government.
Not the least triumph of this doctrine is that such propositions have become accepted and are thought to be self-evident, that the very word nation has been endowed by nationalism with a meaning and a resonance which until the end of the eighteenth century it was far from having. These ideas have become firmly naturalized in the political rhetoric of the West which has been taken over for the use of the whole world. But what now seems natural once was unfamiliar, needing argument, persuasion, evidences of many kinds; what seems simple and transparent is really obscure and contrived, the outcome of circumstances now forgotten and preoccupations now academic, the residue of metaphysical systems sometimes incompatible and even contradictory.
Nationalism differed radically from the hierarchical feudal organization that preceded it in the West. It offered every member of society who was included within its definition the security, invested with powerful emotion, of merger into a welcoming crowd. Not the king or the nobility but the people would be its essential polity: L'etat c'est moi et moi et moi.That was the increase in political freedom its invention installed. But com-plementarily, notes the economist Barbara Ward, its essential nature is [as well] to leave other people out.... It can even divorce from all community of brotherhood and goodwill fellowmen who simply happen to live on the other side of a river.
The power of the state, when nationalism succeeded in acquiring it enlarging such power in the process amplified that essential tension. Whole populations discovered political and emotional investment in their national causes. But outlanders became certainly more alien; the Other was confirmed in his Otherness; and between nation-states so radically divided divided, as they believed, by nature itself opened gulfs of threatening anarchy. Bridging them was difficult in the best of circumstances and no hierarchical authority survived to mediate as the Church had once done. In international affairs the worst case came to be counted the most reliable.
Then industrial technology and applied science enormously amplified the nation-state's power and when the smoke cleared the cities of the dead and gradually the nation of the dead revealed themselves to view. Once men lose all grip on reality, observes Barbara Ward, there seems to be no limit to the horrors of hatred and passion and rage they can dredge up from their psychological depths, horrors which normally we use all our social institutions to check. Unleashed nationalism on the contrary removes the checks.
Which suggests, reverting to Elliot's clue, that no living organic structure could be found sufficiently strong to resist the new death organization because the entire nation was implicated: the death organization was the nation-state itself. It followed that once mechanisms could be devised with which to attack civilian populations, civilian populations would be attacked. The enemy was the enemy nation, which was no more than the corporate body of all the enemy citizens, each of whom, in uniform or not, regardless of age or sex, was individually the enemy.