The Death of the Nation State Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

Two recent statements by very different public figures from our Left liberal elite throw an interesting light on the world picture through which this elite shapes how the rest of us think and feel. 

The first was a comment by Amol Rajan, University Challenge and former Radio 4 host as well as former editor of the Independent, in which newspaper in 2012 he called the nonagenarian Duke of Edinburgh “a racist buffoon” and condemned the late Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations as “the industrialisation of mediocrity”, for which, much later, he apologised.

In a recent interview with Gyles Brandreth, Rajan expressed doubts about Britain’s future and wondered whether it was the best country in which his four children should grow up. He was keen for them to visit India, where he himself was born, he said, so that they might “fall in love with the civilisation that’s in their blood” (the last three words are the key ones).

The second statement was by Zack Polanski, Leader of the Green Party, in an interview with Robert Peston on ITV, in which, asked if he thought Israel had a right to exist, he replied: “I don’t believe any country has a right to exist. People have a right to exist, the Israelis have a right to exist, the Palestinians have a right to exist. By “country” I’m assuming Polanski meant ‘nation state’ or just ‘state’ (since its meaningless to talk of ‘nations’ – the other possible meaning of ‘country’ – having ‘rights’ because a nation is what Ernest Renan called “a spiritual community” daily renewed in the minds of its members and as such cannot have ‘rights’). When Peston responded that the implication of his statement was that Britain also had no right to exist, Polanski did not disagree.

Without in any way suggesting that Rajan and Polanski are political bedfellows, what these two statements highlight are the tensions within the world picture of our ‘Anywhere’ ruling class (to use David Goodhart’s terminology) to which both these figures undoubtedly belong. 

The blood line still speaks

Rajan speaks about an Indian civilisation that is in his ‘blood’ and which he wishes to pass on to his children. The implication, as the Daily Sceptic pointed out in reporting this exchange, is that links of ‘blood’ must also therefore be a wholly acceptable element in the identity of the majority population of England. I can only assume that Rajan, who calls England “my country”, would agree with this,  though with the caveat (which I would share) that English identity is also open to those who do not have the “blood” line but who culturally assimilate, as many over the years have successfully done.

Many on the Left, however, have most definitely not seen Englishness in this benign way. This has been particularly evident over the last year in derogatory comments from Labour politicians about English nationalism, denouncing it as “dysfunctional”, “populist” and (pejoratively speaking) “ethno-nationalist”, with former Labour minister Geoff Hoon in the vanguard, and at a local level through the removal by Labour councils of St George’s and Union flags during the ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ campaign. This of course is just one instance of a wider and pervasive ‘two-tierism’ by which one set of heritages is celebrated while indigenous ones are seen as potential sources of Right-wing extremism, as in the case last summer of a white English girl draped in a Union Jack being excluded from her school on a Culture Day while her ‘diverse’ schoolmates inside celebrated their own cultures.

So next time Labour politicians tell you that expressions of English patriotism are undesirable while simultaneously pandering to minority cultures, remind them that a fellow pillar of the Establishment – you can’t be more ‘in-crowd’ than Radio 4 and ‘The Indy’ – is okay with a blood line being a central part of one’s identity, as long as national identity is fully open to those without it who willingly assimilate.

Do nation states have a right to exist?

Zack Polanski’s statement about nation states undermines current woke orthodoxy in a different way while also accentuating it. What distinguishes us, he is implying, is that our rights come to us primarily or exclusively as individuals – presumably from universal declarations of human rights and international law – not as members of communities and particularly not as citizens of a nation state. Polanski was asked whether Israel had a right to exist as a state. The answer to the question was known in advance, but to make his well-known rejection of Israel’s right to exist sound more acceptable he generalised it to all countries.

In doing so he laid bare a key part of radical progressivism – that we are citizens of the world unconstrained by the limitations traditionally imposed by the social, national, religious and gender categories into which we are born. From this perspective the world is a tabula rasa where the past need not constrain us and which we can remake as we see fit.

It’s no accident therefore that Polanski’s Green Party champions the rights of those who want to live as if they were members of a sex into which they were not born.  It’s also unsurprising that – along with the Liberal Democrats and many in the Labour Party – it’s keen to merge us again into the EU, strengthen the powers over us of the UN and bind us through international ‘green’ treaties that regulate every aspect of our lives, reducing the nation state to a hollow shell.

The problem is that the Palestinians, whom Polanski champions, appear to have a distinct (if recently acquired in historical terms) sense of identity, a desire for their own state and, presumably in many cases, a strong sense of their membership of the Ummah. They, along with Israelis and many Jews in relation to Israel and many indigenous English in relation to England, would doubtless dispute Polanski’s assertion that no country has a right to exist. Quite what such a right involves is open for discussion but – for each of the Israelis and English (and almost certainly for Palestinians too) – it’s highly unlikely to be one that is compatible with the globalist vision of the future Polanski has in store for them.  

Reports of the death of the nation state are greatly exaggerated

What is most striking about the hostility of Western elites towards patriotism and nationalism is its shortsightedness. Those who feel the nation state has had its day ignore the fact that historically, in much of the world it is still in its early stages. At the beginning of the 20th century vast numbers of people lived either in large multi-national monarchical empires (Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire) or in the vast colonial empires of European powers. The first group broke up at the end of the First World War and the second group fell apart, at varying rates of disintegration, over the following 50 or so years, in all cases ending up with the creation of new nation states. Others re-emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. There were 51 founding member states of the UN in 1945. There are 193 today.

The nation state therefore is currently of greater importance to a much higher proportion of the world’s massively increased population than ever in the past. Some states may be heavily dependent on more powerful ones or on big business, and all will be much more interconnected with other parts of the world than ever in the past, but outside Europe federal associations of nation states like the European Union have not caught on. Far from being the inevitable future model, Europe is an outlier in having embraced the EU.  

Despite common misapprehensions, most people in the world also still live within a few miles from where they were born. In 2024 only 3.7% of the world’s population lived outside their country of birth. In this respect European and other Western countries are similarly outliers in having large and growing immigrant populations, the UK with 16% of its population foreign-born at the 2021 census, rising to an estimated 19-20% today. By contrast many non-European nation states, while they may have rapidly rising populations and well-established multiple ethnicities, lack the destabilising influence on national identity of large populations constantly arriving from elsewhere.

It’s mostly Western elites therefore that have turned their backs on patriotism and the nation state, through cultural and ethical relativism, misplaced guilt about past empires, a false identification of nationalism with fascism, a decaying civilisation’s boredom with the nation’s past achievements, and out of a sense – the unholy product of Christianity and Marxism – of the world being divided between oppressors and victims.

But even in Western countries the idea of a nation is still alive and well among majority populations, as Amol Rajan has shown through reminding us unwittingly how interest in the blood line remains an endemic feature of our lives and as Polanski too will find, having tied himself in knots by opposing the very idea of a nation state while yoking his political future to the supporters of a people who desperately want a new one for themselves.

Dr Nicholas Tate was chief executive of England’s school curriculum and assessment authorities in the 1990s, director-general of the International School of Geneva 2003-2011 and adviser 2025-2026 to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Hungary. He has written extensively on education and the nation state. His most recent book is Seven Books that Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does.

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