the origin of the nation-state

The nation-state is more of an "imagined community"--an artificial construct largely created by political and economic elites to foster more expansive national trading markets and to secure overseas colonies.

The difficult challenge for the budding nation-state was how to eliminate all the internal pockets of resistance to free trade in a national market while at the same time enlisting the emotional support of its subjects--subjects its citizens the collective tasks of society, including the collection of taxes and the conscription of armies to protect its national interests. This was no easy matter since, in many ways, the Enlightenment idea of the detached, self-interested, autonomous agent only with his own material self in mind and determined to optimize his own property holdings strangely at odds with an effort to forge a collective sense of common purpose and identity. How does the nation-state convince millions of newly emancipated individuals to give up some of their autonomy and freedom to the state?

The answer was to create a compelling story about a common past, one appealing enough to capture the imagination of the people and convince them of their shared identity and common destiny. The architects of the modern nation-State understood the magnitude of the task ahead of them. After Italian state unification in 1861, Massimo D’Zeglio, the former prime minister of Piedmont, was said to have remarked, “We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians.”

Every nation in the modern era has created a myth of origins complete with its own heroes and heroines and past moments of trials and tribulations, often memorialized in elaborate rituals. In an increasingly disenchanted secular world, the nation had to establish a powerful new image of a people who shared a noble past and were destined for future greatness. At the same time, the nation had to create a convincing enough utopian vision of what lay ahead to win over the loyalty of its subjects and, later, citizens. If the road to immortality no longer lay with accepting Christ as savior, then at least it could be found in the relentless pursuit of unlimited material wealth in the form of the accumulation and exchange of property. In return for giving one’s allegiance to the state—the litmus test being whether the citizen would be willing to give his or her life for their country—the state would uphold its side of the covenant by protecting each person’s right to own and exchange private property in a free marketplace.
Creating a shared identity was also essential to making viable an unobstructed national market. Before there was an England, France, Germany, and Italy, what existed was a thousand different stories and traditions being lived out in little hamlets, nestled in valleys and on mountainsides across the continent. Each story was passed on in a separate language or at least in a distinct dialect.

A myriad of local languages, customs, and regulations for conducting commerce kept the transaction costs high for producing and trading goods and services over a wide geographic terrain. Suppressing or even eliminating pockets of cultural diversity was an essential step in creating an efficient and seamless national market. Creating a single homogenized national myth required the often ruthless destruction or subordination of all the local stories and traditions that existed for centuries of European history.

The success of the nation-state model owes much to the adoption of rational processes for marshaling far activities. To begin with, it was necessary to establish a single dominant language in each country so that people could communicate with one another and understand shared meanings. It’s often thought that sharing a common language was indispensable to bringing people together under the aegis of the nation. However, that’s not generally the case. Take France, for example. In 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, less than 50 percent of the people spoke French, and only 12 to 13 percent spoke it correctly. In northern and southern France, it would have been virtually impossible to find anyone who spoke French. At the time Italy was unified in 1861, only 2.5 percent of the population used the Italian language for everyday communication. In eighteenth-century Germany, fewer than 500,000 people read and spoke in the vernacular that later came to be the official German language, and many of them were actors who performed new works onstage or scholars writing for a small intellectual elite.

Much of the impetus for creating national languages had less to do with nation formation and more to do with the demographics facing the early print industry. Printers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were anxious to expand the markets for the mass production of hooks. The problem was that while Latin was the official language of the Church and was used among European scholars and government officials in the palace courts, it represented too small a reading market for the new communications revolution. On the other hand, there were so many languages and dialects spoken across Europe that each one by itself would be too small a market to be commercially viable. The answer, in most countries, was to choose a single vernacular language, usually the most dominant in a region, and establish it as the language for reproduction in bibles and later for works of literature and science.

Even here, the languages that eventually became standard French, German, Spanish, Italian, and English were, in part, invented. They were usually the result of combining elements of all the various idioms spoken in a region and then standardizing the grammar. However, once a common language became accepted, it created its own mystique of permanence. People came to think of it as their ancestral tongue and the cultural tie that bound them together.

- Jeremy Rifkin