The Nation-State: A Liberal Aberration

Liberal capitalism’s divide-and-conquer strategy

Brecht Jonkers argues that the liberal nation-state is a capitalist tool of divide-and-conquer, opposed to the diverse yet unified civilisation-states that have shaped human history.

The concept of the nation-state and the “one state for each ethnic group” is a modern liberal concept, without value for the vast majority of the world population, and with little to no connection to most of the human past.

You can’t claim to be “trad” and yet hold to the “a state for each race” LARP, much as rightoids in the West particularly like to try. Large space integration based on common civilisational characteristics is the general norm of human society, and has been so for millennia. Likewise, it doesn’t make sense to claim legitimacy as an anti-imperialist or anti-globalist while upholding this vestige of liberal political thought that seeks to undermine solidarity between ethnic groups.

Ancient civilisations such as China, Iran/Persia and (north) India have never been united by blood and race, but were bound by common value systems, political institutions and ancient traditions. Russia was built along the same lines. The Heartland of Eurasia, blossoming alongside the Silk Road, numbered dozens of magnificent empires and realms, none of which were ethnically exclusive in character.

The idea of a “nation-state” as a political concept is a capitalist, and particularly a liberal, idea. It was meant to divide and conquer ancient institutions and political societies, and to forcibly “harmonise” states into having a single guiding ethnic group that would be identified with the state.

It’s for this reason that modern France violently repressed Breton and Occitan ethnic identity, that Turkey suddenly decided that Anatolia had no more space for ethnic Greeks and Armenians, and that Britain sought to practically extinguish the Irish ethnos living under its rule.

The liberal nation-state is a recent aberration in world history, meant especially to ease the way for capitalism and liberal civil society. And it’s not even particularly useful at that. Even the United States gave up on the idea by the late 19th century in favour of “melting-pot” migration because it simply didn’t have enough people otherwise to carry out its Manifest Destiny agenda. And it’s this infusion of liberal-capitalist thought into segments of Jewish intelligentsia which has brought about Zionism and the establishment of the would-be ethnostate of “Israel”.

In the contemporary world, the demand for nation-states is a weapon in the hands of the global financial elite to demand the breakup of civilisation-states around the world, particularly aimed at geopolitical rivals like China (Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong) and Russia. It is a regressive, reactionary and ultimately imperialist concept aimed at an age-old strategy of divide and conquer.

This article was first published here.