The modern nation state is an extremely efficient killing machine. We know this from our Tilly; the nation-state replaced its competitors, such as empires and city-states, because it could develop and support institutions of internal and external domination. The nation-state successfully extracted a large surplus from its population, which it transformed into the coercive means for acquiring even more internal surplus and for waging external wars.
He then elaborates:
The long century (1789-1914) can be regarded as the period of consolidation of the institutions of the modern nation-state. The last competitors were either eliminated or co-opted, small statelets were amalgamated, and the lower and middle classes were fully integrated into the domestic processes of the state. The perfection of these institutions, as much as anything else, allowed European states to conquer the rest of the world, and to apply the institutions of the modern-state to heretofore unfamiliar populations. This was, it is fair to say, a bloody process. It saw untold colonial depredation, from the conquests of Africa, South Asia, and North America to the "opening" of China and Japan. The Wars of the French Revolution exceeded any previous conflicts in size and destruction, largely because of the increased extractive and warmaking capacity of the state. Still, the old ways were not wholly replaced; in Europe, at least, much of the traditional elite continued to hold the reins of the state.
This process of perfection would culminate in 1914, when the truly destructive nature of the state would be unleashed. Internally and externally, the major states of the world set about the task of murdering as many people as possible. Eighteen million or so were killed in World War I. In 1917, the Russians had a Revolution designed to hand their state to right thinking people, and those right thinking people murdered dozens of millions more. Between 1939 and 1945, the German state murdered six million Jews, along with roughly twice as many Poles and Russians. The Japanese state murdered about 20 million Chinese. The good guys in that war (and I use the term with no ironic intent) saw fit to incinerate millions of German and Japanese citizens by dropping bombs on them as they slept. Following World War II, the Chinese state killed some fifty million of its own citizens, concentrated in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The various combatants in the Vietnam War killed about 4 million altogether, and the Khmer Rouge killed probably 2 million. All of this was made possible by the institutions of the modern nation-state; its extractive capacity, its efficient bureaucracy, and its ability to maximize military power.
Reading through this, I was reminded of Vidal who (I think correctly) noted that a Jeffersonian (or more accurately Hamiltonian) meritocracy will, sooner or later, yearn to develop into a full-blown aristocracy. Likewise, a nation state will want colonies and a colonial power will want an Empire. If the bureaucracy of a nation state became ever more refined and ruthless (as was Orwell's fear and Huxley's fear) then it's chilling to think of how much personal freedom could be restricted. In the developed world, it's possible that the notion of "personal freedom" really only exists in the tension between the calculations of bureaucrats and the machinations of powerful people who always secretly yearn for imperial splendor, for a full-blown empire. The urge to Empire may be the only check on the ability of the nation state to grow increasingly efficient at developing mechanisms of control and destruction.
It should be noted, in fairness, that if Farley's long and extremely worthwhile post was the work of an A student summarizing a century of political thought, this post has been the work of like, at best, a B student with a pretty good record collection and encyclopedic knowledge of baseball lore.
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