Professor Breuilly starts the program by describing the situation in Europe in the mid-18th century, and the wars that were fought between the main European powers at the time, which were really global wars. Nationalism, Professor Breuilly says, served a very useful cause at the time because it enabled governments to mobilize resources to fight these wars, on a much more extensive scale than had previously been possible. Professor Breuilly mentions the French army after the revolution, which was formed using identity and ideology rather than simple conscription. Together with a national administration, Napoleon gathered an army whose size was vast in comparison to any previous army in world history. Napoleon’s enemies had to do the same kind of thing otherwise they would not be able to match an army of 600,000 men.
Host John Harrison brings up the point that the treaty of Westphalia, signed in 1644 is always hailed as being the treaty which created respect for sovereignty. Professor Breuilly calls the Westphalia Treaty a bit of a myth as in fact it did not recognize sovereignty at all. At least three of the powers signing the treaty were guarantors of the peace as a whole; thus France had the right to decide that a smaller sovereign state might in some sense contravened the treaty. That right, Professor Breuilly points out, actually denies the sovereignty of that other state. Furthermore, the Treaty did not promote the idea of independence of politics from religion.
The word ‘sovereign’ was itself a very dodgy word in mid-17th century Europe, Professor Breuilly commented. Sometimes it meant ‘Prince,’ sometime it meant ‘the Dukes,’ sometimes it might have included ‘urban magistrates.’ People didn’t really have a clear idea of what a sovereign power over and above everything else was.
In the 19th century, Professor Breuilly says, the concept of the Nation State is still not very widely used. There was no procedure of recognition. Such a procedure becomes systematic after the end of the First World War. At the Treaty of Versailles, the two global powers, the US and Russia agreed that former multi-nation empires have to be broken up and formed as nation states. This template was then applied after the Second World War to the world as a whole. Professor Breuilly says that this system whereby empires are broken up and become Nation States suited the imperial powers. So we have to distinguish between those nation states which are ex-imperial states, and those nation states which are ex-colonial. When we talk about an order of nation states — and the decolonization process only came to an end in the 1970s — we are talking about a deeply unequal system.
There are, Professor Breuilly says, two completely different conceptions of what nation states actually are. There is what is called the ‘democratic’ or ‘will-power’ concept, where you ask people what state they want to be in, and they decide where the boundaries should be drawn by democratic vote, and then there is the so-called ‘objective’ approach when you think nationalism is a matter of a language, race or religion, and try and draw lines on that basis.
Professor Breuilly expresses pessimism as regards the future of nation states. For a while, he says, he thought that the future may lie in the voluntary coming together of sovereign states in a structure such as the EU, but now, after the economic crash in 2008 and the Brexit vote, that project is in danger, he says. He sees no future at all in the project of the Nation State. The future may be, he says, unions between smaller regions or even cities.
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