The history of political thought discloses two extreme and opposed responses to this question. Both are old and enduring; both appear in ancient and in modern times.
Greeks in the age of Socrates and Plato believed that a political order as large as the modern nation-state was incompatible with a fully human life. Artistotle's assertion that "man is a political being" expressed a widely shared conviction; it was commonly assumed that people can live according to their political nature only in states that are small. To live in a large state or in an empire is to be governed from a distant center and thus to be a subject rather than a citizen. In Aristotle's vision, people are united by a universal essence, yet only a pardochial state, the polis, enable them to realize that essence and the unity it implies.
This is plainly a vision in which the idea of a global society is threatening and antihuman. It is a vision which has recurred with increasing frequency in modern times, as people have sought ways of escaping the impersonality and inhuman scale of industrial civilization. Rousseau reaffirmed the basic standard of ancient democracy: that the state should be small enough for the citizens to meet regularly in a single assembly. Since his time, some of the most idealistic thinkers have felt that only through breaking up the vast states and organizations of the modern world can community be saved. And in contemporary America most radicals seem to believe that the only way to a new humanity is through drastic decentralization. Indeed, the ideas of community and of face-to-face association have practically become equivalent in many minds. From this point of view, for all humankind to constitute a single society and live under a single government would be catastrophic.
Another kind of idealism, however, is inspired by a very different vision: one of all human beings, with no peoples or races excluded, living in common humanity in a global polity. This conception, like its opposite, that of face-to-face democracy, rose in ancient times. It was developed by the Stoics after the city-states had been incorporated into empires. The polis is replaced in the thought of the Stoics, by the cosmopolis, the cosmic polis. As we know, Stoics saw the universe as a divine order; this order is present in laws that can be apprehended by reason; we are all therefore citizens of a universal city. Here the principle that there is a universal human essence takes a very logical political form: the ideal of a universal human community. Not surprisingly, Stoicism was the principal philosophy embraced by the most effective statesmen of universal order that the world has known, those who administered the Roman Empire and shaped the Roman law.
The Roman ideal of universal and eternal peace and the Christian ideal of one global faith linger as a bitter longing in today's world. These ideals glimmer faintly in international law and in the United Nations. They deepen the horror that we feel before the maelstrom of nationalism, fanaticism, and war that has filled the history of our times.
One of the most powerful restatement of the universalist outlook is found in the philosophy of Karl Marx. Nations are held by Marxists to be organizations of a doomed class; the workers will establish the lasting and all-encompassing unity that eluded both the Roman Empire and the Roman Church. But how far we are from realizing this ancient dream is indicated by the contributions of Marxism itself to the passions pitting us against one another.
Which do we really want, associations so small and personal that they might, as Aristotle believe, be bound together by friendship, or a peace so inclusive and just that in its compass all humankind is one fraternity? Is our ideal Athen or Rome? These two visions have been invested with such splendor by their idealistic defenders that we may feel let down when reminded that many prefer what we now have, the nation-state system that crystallized about five hundred years ago. This is another alternative to a global society.
Is the nation-state just the wrong size, too large for personal relations and too small for global concord? Most people prior to the Reformation would have said that it is, and many today would agree. The nation-state is vast and impersonal, individuals and their intimate, spontaneous relations seem to be nothing in the face of the nation and its demands for money, soldiers, technicians, and submissive workers. The hatred that many students have felt for "The Establishment," the draft, the Pentagon, and so forth, probably arises in some part from their sense of the vulnerability of personal relations before the overwhelming and omnipresent power of the nation. At the same time, however, no single nation can guarantee global peace, and thus its might is dedicated above all to war; it brings the impersonality of the global state but not its security and peace. Professors and students seem to have felt these defects keenly; in universities today the nation-state has few friends.
During the past two centuries, however, it has been one of the chief objects of human devotion, and not only on the part of the worst human beings. People of intelligence and high ideals have been nationalists, among them the great German philosopher Georg W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), whose ideas had an impact on Marxism, liberalism, and practically every other major strain of modern political thought.
Hegel believed that for a community to have any real life it must have some significance in history, it must play a part in the affairs of mankind. In the past, it is true, small associations had been able to do this; Athens is the outstanding example. Hegel believed, however, that life now had to be conducted on a larger scale. The nation-state could attain a degree of power and of inner diversification beond the reach of smaller associations. At the same time, however, a community should not be coextensive with that vast and miscellaneous collection of people that we call "mankind." It would then have no identity as a particular community. To have this identity, it must be distinct from other communities, in a position to define itself through its differences from them and to test itself against them in war. On these grounds, Hegel looked on Athens and Rome (the small and the universal) as stages that have been left behind in the progressive development of humanity. The climax of history, he thought, would occur in the era of nation-states.
These political bodies took on a religious grandeur in Hegel's thought. A nation is of greater reality and value, he held, than any indivual human being. And in one of the most notorous propositions in the literature of political thought he referred to the nation-state as "the Divine Idea as it exists on earth." Hegel has been condemned and derided for such statements, but he was only saying explicitly and philosophically what many modern nationalists have felt.
Hegel was more extreme, however, than it is necessary to be in order to defend the nation-state. It is possible to feel that polities no larger than the ancient city-states are in most circumstances too small to be economically viable, militarily defensible, or culturally profound and diversified, and yet feel that it would be presumptuous and oppressive to place the entire globe under one set of institutions. These polar attitudes may lead one to favor something on the order of the present nation-state: a polity that is large but less than global.
From this point of view the nation, with all its flaws, may seem an indispensable medium for uniting the individual with others. Only as a member of a nation can a person enter into the full range of human relationships, those involved in family, vocation, military responsibilities, and so forth. You can hold this view while admitting that your nation is very imperfect and that your fellow citizens (and presumably you yourself with them) have much to be forgiven. There is, in short, a sober and repentant nationalism that rejects not only the ideal of a single, global society but also the national self-glorification expressed by Hegel.
Who is more nearly right, the Athenian citizen, the Roman-Christian universalist, or the modern nationalist? Each feels that he speaks for an indispensable condition of unity and life and each makes a reasonable argument.
