Is it the end of the nation-state?

SAM SOKOL

Writing on his weblog Jerusalem Letters, Yoram Hazony recently contended that the rise in anti-Israel sentiment in Europe may not be the continuation of the old antisemitism, but may instead be attributed to the emergence of a post-nationalist worldview based on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the 18th-century German philosopher.

Hazony is an Israeli-born philosopher and political theorist best known as the founder and dean of Jerusalem’s Shalem Centre, a research institute focusing on the study of Jewish history, political theory and Zionism, among other topics. Israel, Hazony writes, will “again feel the bite of the rising antisemitic tide, returned after its post-World War II hiatus.”

Citing American physicist and philosopher Thomas Samuel Kuhn’s famous 1962 treatise on paradigm shifts, a now overused phrase to be sure, Hazony posits that the world is now experiencing such a shift, specifically in how European and, to a certain extent, American, elites view nationalism. According to Hazony, the concept of the sovereign nation-state as the panacea for a people’s ills, as championed by such thinkers as John Stuart Mill and Woodrow Wilson, which led to the creation of the state of Israel through a vote in the United Nations in 1948, is in decline.

“The idea of the nation-state has not flourished in the period since the establishment of Israel,” he explains on his blog. “On the contrary, it has pretty much collapsed. With the drive toward European Union, the nations of Europe have established a new paradigm in which the sovereign nation-state is no longer seen as holding the key to the well being of humanity. On the contrary, the independent nation-state is now seen by many intellectuals and political figures in Europe as a source of incalculable evil, while the multinational empire – the form of government which John Stuart Mill had singled out as the very epitome of despotism – is now being mentioned time and again with fondness as a model for a post-national humanity.”

Following the Second World War and the horrors of the Holocaust, Hazony argues, “Nazism was seen as the rotten fruit of the German nation-state, and Kant looked to have been right all along: for the nations to arm themselves and to determine for themselves when to use these arms was now seen as barbarism and a brutish debasement of humanity.” Thus, some argue, the establishment of an independent Jewish state, seen by Israelis and world Jewry as a reasonable response to the Holocaust, becomes a symbol of the kind of nationalism that ultimately led to the depravity of the Nazi regime.

This is an argument that Hazony vehemently opposes. “The Nazi state was precisely the opposite of this: Hitler opposed the idea of the nation-state as an expression of Western effeteness,” he writes. “The Nazis’ aim was thus diametrically opposed to that of the Western nation-states. Hitler’s dream was precisely to build his empire on their ruin.”

Speaking from his office in the upscale Jerusalem neighborhood of Katamon, Hazony explained his thesis.

JI: Taking into account your thesis of a paradigm shift and the era of post-nationalism, how do you account for the support of Arab or Palestinian nationalism among European and American intellectual circles?

YH: I’ve gotten dozens of letters asking me that question, so I decided to write a follow-up piece mostly devoted to dealing with that. The basic theory goes like this (I quote Kant explicitly). The theory goes that there are three levels that peoples go through in order to reach the stage of history where everything has become rational and moral.

At the first level, everybody is in what Kant calls “the savage state.” In the savage state, people roughly just do whatever they feel like and use force in order to take whatever they want and whatever they need. It’s basically like Kant’s war of all against all.

Then there’s the second stage, where people say, “You know this is miserable, we can’t live like this, let’s organize together in nation-states under the rule of law, and that way maybe we will still have to fight wars, but, at least amongst ourselves, we’ll be able to solve problems without any use of force. We’ll just build the legal systems.”

At the third stage, which Kant calls the level of – I love this – “moral maturity,” all the nation-states say, “Well, this is crazy; we’re tired of killing each other and all these wars. Let’s eliminate the use of force among nations, and we’ll join together in one big world government.”

My argument is that the only place in the world that new paradigmers think has reached the level of moral maturity is Europe, and so what happens is that they look at the rest of the world and say, “Well, the rest of the world is one of two categories. It’s either people who are still in the savage state and haven’t reached the nation-state under the rule of law – they’re still on their way there – or they’re people who’ve reached the level of civilization and nation-state when we did and they should be going up to the next level, the level of moral maturity, where they are doing what we are doing, which is dismantling their nation.”

JI: So they don’t expect everybody to reach that level at the same time?

YH: It’s a process and when they look at North Korea or Iran or Syria or Turkey, what they say is, “Well, these people are primitives; we can’t expect anything of them morally. They haven’t even reached the level of the nation-state under the rule of law. They are not even civilized yet, so there isn’t anything that you can expect of them.” And, in fact, I argue, they expect almost nothing from them.

JI: Would you call this a contemporary manifestation of the old European colonialist attitudes, including its racism?

YH: I think that it is an easy transition from the old-style racism to the new paradigm. By the old-style racism, you said that everybody was racially inferior and, in the new-style racism, you say that everybody is culturally inferior but they are still people who you do not have to make any moral demands of … because they are seen from the new paradigm as being barbarians.

When you turn to the Jews or the Americans, for that matter, then you say, “Well, Israelis and Americans, what’s wrong with them? They are acting [in a mode of] unilateral national self-help in order to try to pursue [their] own interests and defend [their] own people [as if it were] a legitimate thing.”

But instead of saying those are like unschooled barbarians who haven’t yet reached the stage where they should know better, they say the Jews and the Americans should definitely know better because they are at the same stage that “we” are. So where is their moral maturity? They are not being moral and mature like us. They’re choosing to turn back the clock and continue living in barbarism. I think that that’s the source for the double standard [from which Israel suffers].

JI: How widespread would you say that this philosophy is outside of academia?

YH: I think that it has a significant toehold among academics, diplomats, bureaucrats in the EU and elsewhere, among jurists, people who deal with international law in different ways, amongst students and, in short, people whose profession is, one way or another, dealing with ideas, I think that it affects them more deeply than the rest of the population.

The catch is that normally when you look at these groups you think, “So what if the professors and the judges and the lawyers and the bureaucrats have a certain worldview? That’s nowhere near the majority of the population, and they are not even the political leaders.” So what happens very often in history, over and over again, is they think that because this is a small group, they can’t possibly have any influence. I think that, generally, what ends up happening is that these groups of people end up educating everybody else’s children.

You should add the media to the list of groups that is deeply affected by this ideology.

I got a few letters like this from friends of mine in Germany who say that the nation-state is alive and well – “You’re taking all this stuff way too seriously. It’s mostly the intellectuals, and some of the people in the media, and some of the judges, but most of us still believe in the nation-state.” I wrote back to them and I said, “But who’s educating your children?”

Some time after our interview, Hazony asserted that recent events had proved his thesis of post-nationalism correct. He cited European Union Council President Herman Van Rompuy’s remarks at an assembly of European leaders celebrating the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Van Rompuy told his colleagues that “fear leads to egoism, egoism leads to nationalism and nationalism leads to war.”

“If you thought my description of the worldview militating toward European Union was too philosophical to correspond to what actual European political leaders are saying and thinking, it’s worth taking a look at his remarks, which reflect the trends I described quite well,” Hazony argued.

Taking issue with Van Rompuy’s statement that “the European idea has been the most successful and most generous project in the world since 1945; it has united the whole continent and brought us peace and prosperity,” Hazony asserted that the council president’s ideas “open up whole new vistas of ingratitude for us to contemplate.”

He asked, “Isn’t it basically English and Scottish ideas, developed to govern and defend the British nation-state, that are today being borrowed to build the ‘continent of values’ that Van Rompuy heads?

Isn’t it ‘the idea of Europe’ that motivated Philip II, Napoleon, Hitler? For quite a few centuries, it seems as though it’s been the British nation-state (together with its admirers in France, America, Austria) that has been teaching the world what it means for peoples to live in freedom and decency, while ‘the idea of Europe’ has spawned a succession of tyrannies. But Van Rompuy doesn’t remember any of this either.

“The new paradigmers’ worldview, in a nutshell,” Hazony explained, is expressed in Van Rompuy’s speech: “Military power in the service of national interests just isn’t going to do it anymore. And, if you think otherwise, we’ll find ways to ‘isolate’ you and help you come to your senses.

“As I say, Van Rompuy doesn’t trouble himself to mention the United States. And he doesn’t mention Israel either. But he doesn’t have to. It’s obvious where all this is headed. For Van Rompuy, there’s trouble on the horizon and the threat comes from the continued existence of nation-states, which insist on using force to defend the lives and interests of their peoples. Disgust for America and downright hatred for Israel are the inevitable outcome of this line of thought.”

Sam Sokol is the Jerusalem-based Middle East correspondent for Zman magazine and the Five Towns Jewish Times, and news director at Koleinu, a national newspaper serving English-speaking communities in Israel. He has reported from all over Israel and from areas under Palestinian Authority control.

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