Against "nationalism"

For those who hold up nationalism as a political sentiment that the world as a whole ought to celebrate more roundly, the nation is the optimum-sized unit of social organization for pursuing and preserving the common good for the greatest number. The nation should be large, but it can’t be too large. It grows to the point that it achieves a maximum economy of scale; if it grows any bigger, it begins to collapse of its own weight. At the same time, the nation is as compact as it can be without excluding any who belong to it naturally by virtue of birth, geography, or some other given criterion. Multinational organization is okay, a moderate nationalist might concede, if it serves a security or economic function that’s narrowly defined. He would, however, be quick to contend that the total population of the European Union, for example, is too large and diverse for that political entity to assume the broader role of a legitimate democratic nation-state.

That theory of nationalism is coherent. In light of it, the lines on the map of the world as they appear today need to be redrawn. In 2019, the difference between the most populous nation (China, with 1.4 billion people, nearly three times as many as are encompassed by the EU) and that of the least populous (Tuvalu, unless you want to count Vatican City) is a factor of 127,000; in area, the difference between Russia and Monaco is a factor of 3 million. The languages of 30 percent of China’s population are mostly unintelligible to the Mandarin-speaking majority. The differences are at least as great as those among the Romance languages, which are natural markers of separate Spanish, French, and Italian national identities. By linguistic criteria, the People’s Republic of China, though a state, is not a unified nation. Or, if it is a unified nation, so are Spain, France, and Italy taken together, along with much of the rest of Europe.

A state struggles to maintain its identity as a nation when a segment of its population — e.g., Scots in the United Kingdom, Catalans in Spain — seeks to secede and form itself into a separate, smaller, more homogeneous nation-state. Separatist movements are micro-nationalism carried to its logical conclusion. They’re an inevitable feature of the system of states and always will be, because societies are dynamic. Maps are always changing. Boundaries have to be drawn somewhere.