The history of humanity’s rise from savannah ape to masters of the planet is one of Faustian bargains. The agricultural revolution brought huge increases in population, but lowered living standards for many. What is true of productive systems is also true of ideologies. Of none is this more true than nationalism — an engine of both development and destruction. We need to recognise and manage both aspects of its personality — the beneficent and the diabolical.
Nationalism is, above all, an extraordinarily powerful social force. As we were reminded by the commemoration of the 1918 armistice, tens of millions of people have fought and died in national armies, often willingly, since the beginning of the previous century. They died en masse for what Benedict Anderson called an “imagined community”: “imagined”, because the vast majority of its members are unknown to those whose national identity they share, and “community”, because it recognises a primary bond of loyalty and support. Such bonds cannot easily be inserted into the economists’s framework of utility maximising rational individuals. They plug into something far deeper: nationalism is a secular religion that sanctifies the idea of the nation.
Human beings are intensely social. It is entirely natural for them to identify with something larger than their individual selves. Initially, however, these communities were both small and familial. Most of our subsequent political entities did not expect their subjects to feel a close identity with the state: they mainly demanded obedience. The mobilised nation state and the intense identity it promotes are roughly a product of the past 200 years, although, in the west, they echo the values of the ancient city states. Our modern starting point might be the levée en masse (mass conscription), brought in after the French Revolution.