>>I'd like to do a short brief take on nationalism
because it lies at the heart
of our modern international system.
The nation's state is the building block
of the modern international system.
Today, there are 193 nation states in the world.
And if you're lucky, you belong to one of them
and you have a government and an army that protects you.
If you do not belong to a nation state,
you really have no rights.
Think of refugees.
But nations are a modern element in the national system.
There were no nation states a little over 200 years ago.
They begin with the Twin Revolutions
so the French Revolution
in the end of the 1700s
and the American Revolution that happened at the same time.
These two revolutions, the American and French,
really began a whole new framework for international order.
Over 200 years ago, there were no nation states.
Think empires, kingdoms, bishoprics, free cities,
tribal concatenation, caliphates,
all kinds of political institutions and states,
but no nation states.
In just 200 years,
the entire map of the globe has been resorted out
along national lines.
Now a lot of people like to say the nation state
we're in a post-national era today,
but that really is I think misguided.
Over 100 nation states gained independence
from the World War II 1945 to 1970.
That's more than half the nation states.
They are trying to sort out their borders,
figure out who is in and who is out,
who belongs to the nation and who is a fifth column.
And many of the wars in the world are really
defined by that attempt to build nation states.
I would argue that certainly in international relations
the single most important defining factor for modernity
is the rise of the nation state.
It's changed how we identify ourselves
and how we identify with authority.
At the heart of this political revolution
is a revolution of identity.
People identify with others from their nation
and sovereignty political power is invested in the people,
not in the rulers.
In the Middle Ages,
it was common for people to believe
in what was called a chain of being,
which Shakespeare call the chain of being.
That's a long, in a sense, chain of authority
that starts with God, works it's way down through angels,
the seven spheres of heaven,
to kings, the aristocrats,
bourgeoisie, commoners and of course there's
various kinds of indentured servants and serfs, slaves,
animals, various demons, all the way down to the devil.
And of course, in some Medieval scripts,
there's supposed to be nine spheres.
Dante had nine spheres of hell.
So this long chain of being
gets completely destroyed and rethought.
The world, in a sense, is leveled.
Today, in the American Constitution,
it says all people are created equal.
There is no chain of being.
That national identity
where all people are supposed to be equal
and in fact, authority is no longer invested in the king,
but in the subjects.
If you think about our political discourse, the rulers,
our rulers today are our servants,
all political in a sense.
Candidates talk about themselves as servants,
public servants.
And power is invested in the people
who are sovereign.
The nation state, it's the nation.
The people who are sovereign.
And the rulers are the servants.
This turns authority on its head 180 degrees
from the time of kings before the French Revolution
and the American Revolution to today.
There are still many kings and sovereigns
who are authoritarian in the world,
perhaps half the globe is still ruled in the old way.
But every year, we're seeing kingdoms fall
and more and more sovereign nations
where people actually have a degree of say
over their own authority.
One can liken this revolution
in the realm of international relations
to a giant earthquake in which
the aftershocks continue to ripple across the globe.
And in the Middle East,
we're still seeing those aftershocks.
We're seeing for example Kurdistan
ripping itself out of Iraq, Syria, perhaps Turkey even.
We're seeing Palestinians making a drive for a state.
Southern Sudan just a few years ago hived off
and was recognized as a separate state from Northern Sudan.
So the national borders that are created
in the First World War are not always permanent.
They're being contested.
The Islamic State
which has been so much in the news recently
destroyed the border between Iraq and Syria
only a few years ago.
It erased it, it raised this flag and said,
"We have destroyed nation states.
"We're going to rebuild an Islamic Caliphate."
In a sense challenging
this development of the nation state in the Middle East.
Now of course, America is destroying
and is hell bent and much of the West is
in a coalition to destroy that Islamic State
and in a sense, to bring back the borders
that were hammered out in World War I.
But the power of national identity
has been extraordinary.
It has swept everything before it.
Empires as in the First World War,
the four that we talked about
that were destroyed in the First World War,
could not compete with nation states
where people are willing to sacrifice themselves
in millions in modern wars
in allegiance to that nation
and they have overwhelmed in their capacity
to put forward armies, in their administrative knowhow,
the individual being the heart of this new political
structure has unleashed tremendous creativity.
So constitutionalism and nation states have been an
extremely dynamic force that in a Darwinian sense
have just swept all the other political concatenations
into the dust bin of history.
And that is largely the story,
our story, of the creation of the modern Middle East
and the modern Middle Eastern state system
is the rise of nation states.