Jon Wilson Informed Coment
On October 27, Israelis go to the polls in an election fraught with debate about ancient history. The country’s right-wing finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has concrete plans to extend sovereignty over much of the West Bank and all of Gaza, sometimes speaking of expanding as far as Damascus. Netanyahu has invoked the idea of a ‘Greater Israel’ covering much of the Middle East. Each justifies their claims with biblical promises and interpretations of two-thousand-year-old Jewish history.
These arguments contrast with the rhetoric of the Jewish state’s founders, who remained vague about its borders. In the mid-twentieth century, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, the state’s first president and prime minister, weren’t persuaded to extend the new state as far as Jerusalem. They saw the city as embarrassingly “full of priests, rabbis, archdeacons and patriarchs” that “reeked of incense”, as Abba Eban, the country’s first ambassador to the United Nations, put it. More important were the kibbutzim and moshavim, agricultural communities built on modern principles, and the present-day fact of defensible territory occupied by Jews. In reality, Israel was created by twentieth-century migration, war and diplomacy, not an ancient legacy. As the Soviet delegate supporting Israel’s creation put it in the United Nations in 1947, ‘juridical and historical argument should play only a secondary part’ in deciding the country’s fate.
But today, anxious leaders across the world are turning to ancient history. Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine while lecturing Tucker Carlson for two hours about ninth-century Novgorod and a Viking prince named Rurik. Narendra Modi consecrated a grand new temple to Ram at Ayodhya in 2024, presenting today’s India as an unbroken Hindu civilization rather than a secular republic created in 1950. China’s rulers trace their state’s origins to centuries of apparently unbroken unity, rather than communist revolution. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and countless fellow-travellers evoke the ancient unity of England and the more recent history of empire to justify their opposition to European intervention and immigration.
None of these stories is exactly made up. But they are profoundly misleading, treating the nation-state as an ancient inheritance finally reclaimed. In fact it is one of history’s newest, and most improbable, political inventions.
In 1914 and again in1945, few imagined the world would be organised into nation states. Between these years, war and economic crisis caused near-total global collapse. Empires crumbled and hundreds of millions were killed or displaced. In this three-decade rolling global catastrophe, multiple different ways of organising political power were put into practice, with the nation state far down the list. Federation was one popular option, with the Soviet Union’s model of multiple nationalities in a single state an example even for many liberals. Now-improbable mergers were seriously mooted — Britain and France, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Some kind of world government seemed possible. Three months after Hiroshima, Britain’s foreign secretary Ernest Bevin — later famous for pugilistic nationalism — stood up in the House of Commons advocating a directly elected world parliament.
Yet none of that happened. In a world riven by tension but with no will for a return to world war, communists and capitalists, former colonizers and the former colonized, converged on the sovereign nation-state as the only form able to keep the peace. As I show in Out of Chaos: How the Nation State Emerged from the Ruins of World War II, the nation state was the only political structure flexible enough to hold incompatible visions at once, allowing differences in ideology and aspiration amongst one-time allies to be accommodated across the globe.
A world of formally sovereign, juridically equal nation states allowed enough flexibility to hold incompatible visions of the future at once. It did so by committing everyone to remarkably little in substance — not to a particular definition of democracy, nor to a specific economic system, only to the bare principle that a recognised people should govern a recognised territory without outside interference.
That emptiness was the point. Communists could fill it with central planning, Americans with free markets, anti-imperial nationalists with a long-deferred promise of self-determination finally redeemed, former imperial powers with a face-saving way to withdraw without admitting defeat. The nation state won because it was the one form every rival could tolerate in someone else’s hands.
This is what today’s nationalists misunderstand. They, together with their anti-national globalist opponents, are trapped in bad history, claiming there is some authentic, original way of organising the world waiting to be recovered.
But it was the nation-state’s emptiness that allowed an exhausted generation to build a working settlement out of nothing after 1945. Suspend the doom, and you can see the emergence of new forms of nationhood filling that hollowness now: a Ukrainian nationalism including Russian-speaking citizens as full members; new UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s Britain, reimagined as a partnership of self-governing cities and regions rather than one undivided sovereignty; an Indian electorate that deprived Modi of a majority in 2024, forcing his civilizational project into coalition with parties that see India as a multiplicity of societies.
The nation state’s flexibility means it is not going away. But its emptiness is there to be filled again, by people who don’t need the book of Genesis, or a Viking prince, or a sixteenth-century temple dispute to know who they are.
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