The long crisis of the nation-state and the rise of religions to the public stage

I The crisis of the nation-state

The main characteristic of the modern state (the nation-state) is the principle of sovereignty, established with the Peace of Westphalia (1648). Sovereignty essentially means the right of a prince (or a government) to exercise exclusive political, judicial and military authority within a given geographic zone. This right implies necessarily the principle of non-interference in the affairs of another state.

Since the first purpose of the Peace of Westphalia was to end the wars of religion, the phrase ‘cuius regio eius religio’ [‘whose realm, his religion’] became the first and still today the most famous identifying mark of the principle of sovereignty. It means that each prince had the right to impose his own religion (and any other decision) upon his subjects, and other states should not interfere. The implementation of this principle had a curious, apparently paradoxical, but long-lasting consequence: in the process of formation of the modern state, the importance of religio progressively faded, whereas the importance of the regio steadily increased. The stronger the sovereign state became, the weaker religion became.

There are two main reasons for this. The first is that the same religion existed in several different states, i.e. it lacked the character of uniqueness that each state needs to distinguish itself from others (such as language, flag, national anthem, founding fathers, national mythology, etc.). The second is that the authority of a prince was absolute only to the extent that he did not share his power, even with ecclesiastical authorities: thus, the clergy – whatever the religion – was either pushed out of power or in a subordinate position of power (as with the creation of ‘civil’ religions).

From a geographic point of view, the first consequence of the principle of sovereignty is the greater importance of borders separating the territory of one prince from that of another. Until then (with a few exceptions), the physical limits of a state had been defined by a natural obstacle (forest, river, mountain, glacier, desert, swamp), or else they had been vague and changeable. With the principle of sovereignty, borders became stable and not to be crossed without authorization of the ruling prince. In the 19^th century, when the nation-state reached its final form, they became sacred, and their sacredness was carved in the marble of national constitutions (‘the borders of the motherland are sacred and inviolable’).

The second element that makes up the nation-state is the homogenization of a territory: all subjects of a prince must be able to recognize and to understand each other, to obey the same distinctive rules and the same laws. In short, people living within the borders of a state must become a ‘nation’.

As Ernest Gellner stated, the full maturity of the nation-state corresponds with industrial development (Nations and Nationalism, 1983). Industrialization transformed peasants into city dwellers, working class, soldiers and finally citizens. This new political, economic and military importance of masses, along with fierce competition between industrialized states, required a perfect identification of citizens with their state: this is a sine qua non for the ability to mobilize all national forces, either for economic or military purposes, or both.

To become a nation is not merely a ‘physical’ question of living within the same borders, or speaking a common language, or respecting a common set of laws. All this may be enough to create a ‘national market’, but it is not enough to create a ‘national identity’. A national identity is an indispensable political tool.

For the identification between citizens and their state to take place, the state has to be able to fulfill three indispensable conditions: (1) to prove to its citizens that the fact of being a member of the nation carries benefits and privileges, and will always bring more; (2) to promote an intense ‘national pedagogy’; (3) to subdue local and minority cultures. But there is an important hierarchy to be respected here: the second and third conditions are ineffective and even counterproductive if the first condition is not met.

According again to Ernest Gellner: ‘Industrial society is the only society ever to live by and rely on sustained and perpetual growth, on an expected and continuous improvement’ (1983: 23). Any crisis, Gellner goes on, can jeopardize its credibility: ‘Its greatest weakness is its inability to survive any temporary reduction of the social bribery fund, and to weather the loss of legitimacy which befalls it if the cornucopia becomes temporarily jammed and the flow falters’ (ibid.: 23).

As a political form, the nation-state attains its definitive structure between the end of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20^th centuries. Then its decline begins.

Paradoxically enough, the first cause of this decline manifested itself in the very same years in which the nation-state was triumphantly reaching its final form. This cause is the ‘first wave of globalization’ (roughly 1870–1913), whose characteristics are the ‘second Industrial Revolution’, the generalization of the colonial system, the reduction of border taxes, the multiplication of foreign investments and international financial activities, the shortening of distances (thanks to the development of means of communication – railways, steamships, electric and wireless telegraph – and to the opening of the Suez Canal and then the Panama Canal), and international migrations (which were, proportionately, far more massive than current migrations).

All these phenomena, in particular the expansion of international finance and trade, multiplied the cases of reciprocal interference and trespassed on the theoretical impermeability of the sovereign states.

The second step in this process of decline of the nation-state occurred with the creation of some supranational institutions and regulations to which the individual states were supposed to submit. It started with the birth of the League of Nations in 1919, but it was in particular with the Second World War and its aftermath that this trend became obvious. First, the countries that won the war organized themselves as ‘United Nations’, and adopted constraining rules for all existing and future members; then the Bretton Woods conference established three global economic organizations (the IMF, the WB and the GATT), each one a binding jurisdiction for their member states. All those institutions weakened the principle of the inviolability of national sovereignty, wounding the sacred character of the state.

In particular, the decision to create an international court in order to try the entire German ruling class (Nuremberg trials) made clear that not only the states’ borders could be put under scrutiny by an external authority, but also its rulers and its policies. Formally speaking, the ‘Westphalian state’ was already dead with the end of the Second World War, even though the United States and the Soviet Union reserved to themselves and to their reciprocal spheres of influence the principle cuius regio eius religio, which did not apply to the other countries, ‘open’ to either American or Russian influences. This unique condition gave the illusion that the Westphalian framework was still dominating the system of international relations.

The fall of the Berlin Wall put this illusion to an end. The second wave of globalization (which started in fact in the mid-1970s) and the end of the bipolar (USA and USSR) world order constitute the third (and ongoing) step of the weakening of the nation-state.

This new phase is characterized by the weakening of the economic and social role of the state (as entrepreneur, banker, trader and provider of social services) and by the intensification of the cross-border movements of goods, capital and migrants. The dominant free-trade international atmosphere (called also, improperly, neo-liberalism) gave a new vitality to global economic institutions like the IMF and the WB, transformed others (such as the GATT, which became the World Trade Organization) and imposed others (the European Central Bank, the BRICS’ New Development Bank and the China-inspired Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank). Moreover, it opened a new season of international free-trade agreements.

The multipolar economic and political global system that came to life after the fall of the USSR created also the conditions for the establishment of new regional groupings, such as the European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA: the United States, Canada and Mexico), the Mercosur (whose full members are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela and whose associate members are Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru), and others. The ASEAN changed its nature, from an essentially far-eastern political grouping supporting the USA during the Vietnam War, to a regional free-trade organization, with many new members – and among them Vietnam itself – not particularly sympathetic to the interests of the United States. The Group of Twenty (better known as the G20), a forum for the governments and central banks from 20 major economies (with some exceptions for political reasons, like Saudi Arabia, Argentina and South Africa) was founded in 1999, but became effective only after the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008.

At the same time, the precedent of the Nuremberg trials went from an exception to the rule. Ad hoc international criminal courts were set up to prosecute those who were considered accountable for the atrocities in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Lebanon; however, in 1998, a permanent International Criminal Court was voted into existence by the United Nations and began functioning in 2002, sitting in The Hague.

Once the principle of interference into the affairs of a (less and less) sovereign state became commonly accepted, the number of international military missions – often labeled as ‘peacekeeping’ or ‘humanitarian’ – exploded: from a total of 17 international missions promoted by the UN between 1956 and 1989, their numbers increased to 51 between 1989 and 2010.

For all these reasons, we can say that, today, the political form of the nation-state is in crisis. Among these reasons, the most important and decisive is that Gellner’s ‘cornucopia’ is not ‘temporarily jammed’ but definitively jammed. The countries where the political form of the nation-state was actually implemented were the very small number of states that dominated the world at the beginning of the 20^th century (the USA, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia). Today, it is precisely those same countries that witness a definitive faltering of the cornucopia flow, for the simple reason that the number of their competitors has grown enormously in these last 25 years. Global wealth, once shared by only 6 or 7 major powers, is today shared also by a substantial group of emerging countries, some of them particularly big and populated, like China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, Mexico, South Africa, and so on.

At the same time, the weakening of state sovereignty is indisputable: governments are progressively losing their exclusive political, economic and social control over their territory. As the legitimacy and the credibility of the state diminish, other legitimacies take their places.

II The comeback of religions

When industrial development – and its political form, the nation-state – succeeds, religion retreats. There are three main reasons for this. The first, very classic (Max Weber’s ‘disenchantment of the world’), is that the supernatural interpretation of a phenomenon is abandoned when it can be explained scientifically. The second is that, in a very similar approach, the attempt to resolve a problem by resort to celestial assistance is abandoned when the problem can be resolved through earthly means. The third reason is that the state tends to replace the central role of the traditional religion with a ‘civil religion’.

In order to be effective, civil religions have to imitate traditional religions: they have their temples (parliaments, presidential houses, pantheons, heroes’ memorials), their rites (oaths, hymns, anthems, elections, national days), their mass functions (parades, rallies), their prophets (the Founding Fathers), their saints (those who died for their country), and their gods (Reason, Fatherland, Civilization, Race, Progress, Liberty, Democracy, etc.). However, as we said, the establishment of a ‘civil religion’ by the nation-state is only one of the causes of secularization, and certainly not the most important. The most important is the state’s capability to satisfy in a practical way some of the primary material needs of its citizens and, consequently, to offer them a meaning to life.

The less effective states become at offering their citizens both meaning and social services (and the latter are often the best guarantor of the former), the more do religions tend to reoccupy the public stage. When industrial development (and its political form) fails, religion comes back; in other terms, when the attempt to resolve a problem through earthly means (the Welfare State, unions, political parties, etc.) fails, people turn back to religions (or at least towards religious charities and social services).

To put it in a very simple and simplistic way, resort to the state and resort to religions are inversely proportional. Even simpler: the stronger the state is, the weaker religion is; the weaker the state is, the stronger religion is.

The decline of the state is the decline of its institutions: compulsory military service, fiscal centralization, national currency, social security, trade monopoly, parliamentary democracy and secularization. It is therefore normal that always more people perceive religions as Bernard de Fontenelle’s roses perceived the gardener: ‘If roses, which last but a day, were to tell stories … they would say, “We have always seen the same gardener, in our roseate memories we have seen but him, he has always looked like himself, surely he does not die like us, he simply does not change”’ (Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, 1818[1686]: 69).

Religions are perceived as ‘eternal’ not because they promise eternal life, but because they pre-existed the nation-state. The nation-state established itself also through the fight against religions, and now, when the nation-state is declining, these very same religions are still there, and in perfect good health. It is true that, for instance, Roman Catholicism is no longer what it was before, say, the French Revolution (1789), and Islam is no longer what it was before the abolition of the caliphate (1924), but for the average person who is frantically looking for some solid practical and moral landmarks, it does not make much difference: the Catholic Church still stands there, Islam still stands there, whereas the credibility of the state is crumbling.

This phenomenon is called ‘the comeback of God’ or ‘desecularization’. The author of the latter phrase, Professor Peter Berger, explains it in a short but very clear way: ‘Modernity, for fully understandable reasons, undermines all the old certainties; uncertainty, in turn, is a condition that many people find very hard to bear; therefore, any movement (not only a religious one) that promises to provide or to renew certainty has a ready market’ (1999: 7).

Of course, this ‘comeback of God’ made religions much more available for any political purpose. Religions are exploited for very earthly reasons. As Graham Fuller says, ‘Religion will always be invoked wherever it can to galvanize the public and to justify major campaigns, battles and wars.’ But, he goes on, ‘the causes, campaigns, battles and wars are not about religions’ (2010: 286).

To make an immediately comprehensible example, it is impossible to understand (and even more to defeat) ISIS by religious means. A better politically and militarily equipped, and in particular, a better motivated Iraqi army would be much more effective than an army of theologians who would try to explain that ISIS’ way to heaven is not the right one. The war in Greater Syria is not a religious problem; it is a geopolitical problem: a proxy war among Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Iran, with many other actors involved – Syria, Kurds, local Sunnis, local Shiites, Russia, France, the United States, etc. Since they lack any kind of national and political legitimacy, the main actors use the religious tool against one another.

However, it is important to bear in mind that no trends are univocal and unidirectional. ‘Desecularization’ is stronger in some areas than in others and sometimes is accompanied by processes of secularization, in particular in some emerging countries where people are experiencing, in practical ways, the ‘disenchantment’ of their world. Nevertheless, in broader terms, we cannot totally dismiss this very geopolitical assessment by Philip Jenkins: ‘Worldwide, religious trends have the potential to reshape political assumptions in a way that has not been seen since the rise of modern nationalism’ (2007: 18).