By Crispin Sartwell
If everyone didn't tend to conceive the political nation-state as inevitable, and perhaps uncritically as desirable, it would be obvious that it is the most conspicuously disastrous experiment in human history.
Let's think of it as originating in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, though the story is obviously more complicated, and to actually tell the story we'd probably start by talking ancient empires.
Now perhaps the most obvious drawback to the nation-state has been a little thing we call "genocide." What the European nations did to the native peoples of Africa, Australia, and the Americas is obviously one of the most horrific chapters of our horrific species' history.
In part, these actions were driven by the ideology of the nation-state, its association of itself with civilization, and hence its assurance of the savagery of unsubjugated peoples. This of course also related to a "scientific" discourse (and "science" and "civilization" are closely related) of race, reaching its height in the 19th century and corresponding to the slave trade.
European nations annihilated cultures by forced conversion, by endless, ruthless economic exploitation (which proceeds apace) and by sheer butchery. They were enabled to do this by state-related centralizations of power: standing armies, hierarchical command structures, and the technological "advances" that were interlarded with these. The nation-state brought with it an unprecedented hunger for power of all varieties; one might simply say that the nation state is the relic of a desire for power so sheer and so absolute that it penetrates the whole world and the most detailed aspects of individual lives.
Then there are the straight-up systematic genocides, all of them made possible by state power and its most characteristic expression: the Armenian holocaust, the Jewish/gypsy/gay holocaust in Germany; the killing fields; the forced collectivization of agriculture under Stalin; Nagasaki; the Cultural Revolution. Even Rwanda, while tribal, also required state structures.
Only within the political state has the idea occurred to people and the technology been developed to actually annihilate all life on earth with a push of a button. This, if nothing else, is an utter moral refutation of the political state.
The state always tends toward totalitarianism because it arrogates to itself a monopoly of violence, so that it creates for itself a situation in which resistance is futile or impossible. The state always grows; it never shrinks. It eats into every aspect of every life like an acid. Everyone that participates in it has a motivation to prolong and expand its power, and the state always has the means to do that because it is extremely well-armed.
Eventually, there will be no human beings left, only bureaucracies enforcing their bland oppression by the spectre of mass violence.
There have been many forms of organization other than the state, and there will be many after the state if anything manages to survive the state. Anything, anything is preferable to the political state.
I assert not only that that is true, but that it is obvious.
