I promised to reason my “Syrian Compromise” …

Here goes.

In the course of my lifetime, the world has become dominated the by the political institution of the “nation state”.   This has any conceptual disadvantages, because it denotes a self-contained, free-standing particle, immune to intervention from outside, and entitled to full sovereignty over its own affairs.   As a “political particle”, the nation state therefore comes with many disadvantages and dangers.  I take the view, however, that at his stage of our systemic evolution, we must accept this domination, and conduct international affairs in the language and grammar of the “nation state”.   We are where we are, and there is, in terms of international political structures, only one show in town…

It was not always thus.   When I entered my teens, in 1948, the political syntax still included “Empire”, “Colony”, “mandated Territory” (overseen by the collapsed League of Nations), and “state” (i.e. the components of federal associations such as USA, Australia, Germany) – the “nation state” was merely one institution among many.  When I was a member of the Youth Section of the UK United Nations Association in the 197/1951 period, its name was the “Council for Education in World Citizenship”.   Internationalism was the elixir of the day.  “National sovereignty” did not dominate the scene.

Paradoxically, the United Nations itself changed all that.   Its adoption of the nation-state as its principal component unit of membership, lent political standing to the self-governing “nation state”.  And when it came to dismantling the British, French, Belgian and Portuguese “empires”, they disintegrated into new “nation states”, converted from “colonies” by the choices of their residents.  This process lasted roughly thirty years (1960/1990), and “United Nations” membership ballooned correspondingly.   In that process, during my lifetime, the self-governing nation-state has emerged as the world’s “political format of choice” – whether democratic or autocratic.

That process has not yet run its course.  It has however, become axiomatic (in the new political grammar) that every nation-state must command its “own” distinctive physical “territory”, must control its distinctive part of the surface of the globe.   There is no such thing as a “virtual” nation-state – every state must have its territory (e.g. The Vatican).   It is precisely a dispute over territory that bedevils settlement of the Palestinian claims to nation-statehood; other disputes involve the carving out of new nation-states from the territory of other, established nation-states – Scotland, Catalonia, Kurdestan – and many new nation-states were carved out of the territory of the USSR, in some cases controversially (Ukraine). The Palestinians aspire to the status of self-governing “nation state”, as do the dispersed Kurdish peoples; the Scots, the Tamils of Sri Lanka, the “Spanish” Catalonians, and the Polisario of Western Sahara – they are all engaged in drives to establish new, sovereign nation-states, in a range of different circumstances.

It is not surprising that the tacticians of an assertive religion like Islam should wish to join this popular world movement   They have formed an Islamic splinter-group (as yet, without a settled name) that is seeking to acquire the other attributes of statehood – territory, population, Constitution, legislative institutions, control of civil order), and then to lay claim to the privileges accorded to a nation-state, including membership of the United Nations.   Iran is an outstanding example of a nation-state that has been successfully converted, by internal action, into an Islamic state.  Drawing on Islamic history, the new group seeks now the acceptance of a “caliphate” as a self-governing nation-state, and its followers are setting about their campaign with furious and brutal gusto.

This alignment of political and religious institutions is dangerous, and should be contested.  The very “genes” of the nation-state need to be re-engineered, to allow greater flexibility of international political action.   In certain respects, the absolute powers of “governments” over nation-states require modification, so as to facilitate collective action to counter the abuse of human rights.  Greater diversity of association for nation-states should be possible.  Procedural solutions should also be found to ensure that no natural person is ever denied a convenient link of “nationality” with a relevant nation-state: personal “statelessness” is a destructive consequence of the domination of the nation-state, as a political institution.  It is important that this re-engineering should be conducted at a generic level, capable of universal application to all global political systems; otherwise, the modified genes could become even more toxic and destructive than the present haphazard “system”.

24 November 2015