The Merits of Nationalism, and Why It Blocks World Government

After tracing nationalism’s history, its role in restraining and provoking war, and its considerable damage to the international order, it would be a mistake to close the subject without the other half of the ledger. Nationalism has earned near-religious status in the modern world precisely because, used well, it has produced real and lasting good – and understanding both sides of that ledger is the only honest way to close out the subject.

What Nationalism Gets Right

Its clearest achievement is the sheer willingness to sacrifice it has generated in the name of freedom and unity: nationalist movements have repeatedly carried peoples to independence, and the same energy that won that independence has just as often carried through into real advances in language, literature, art, ethics, and civilization more broadly – growth and freedom have tended to arrive together rather than separately. History also credits nationalism with a genuine democratizing effect, since the same popular energy that powered independence movements against empire went on, in many countries, to demand accountable, representative government at home rather than settling for a change of ruler alone. Nationalism has proven to be a considerable economic motivator as well, pushing people to develop their own homeland’s resources and pursue rising living standards with an urgency that a purely administrative sense of citizenship rarely inspires.

Beyond the practical gains, nationalism does real psychological work too. It gives individuals a sense of purpose and direction that connects their own character and ambitions to something larger than narrow personal or group self-interest, building the kind of collective loyalty that lets a nation function as a coherent society with a shared sense of direction. And it channels the ordinary human instinct toward competition into something constructive, provided that competition stays within reasonable bounds: nations spurred on by a healthy rivalry with their neighbors have often developed faster, and more richly, in art and civilization than they would have left entirely to their own devices.

The One Thing It Blocks

Set against all of that is one significant cost: nationalism stands as a genuine obstacle to any real prospect of a unified world government, an institution that could, in principle, deliver a more durable global peace and free humanity from the endless burden of national rivalry. The very traits that make nationalism work internally – distinct language, literature, custom, and tradition – pull in the opposite direction from that kind of global unification, since the interests of the world as a whole and the interests of any one nation rarely align perfectly, and each nation’s particular circumstances tend to shape its own priorities more than any shared global ones.

Even so, there is one principle running through virtually every reasonable version of nationalism that offers a way to hold both halves of this picture together: live and let live. A nation genuinely committed to that principle isn’t simply claiming freedom for itself – it is, in the same breath, extending the same respect for freedom to every other nation around it. That single idea is arguably the closest thing nationalism has to a built-in corrective for its own worst tendencies, and it is where a fair assessment of nationalism’s place in international relations has to end: not as an unqualified good or an unqualified danger, but as a genuinely powerful force whose value depends entirely on whether the nations wielding it remember that other nations are entitled to exactly the same thing they are claiming for themselves.