Pick a side: Bureaucratic Imperialism or Democratic Nationalism

One oddity about the conference on national conservatism held by the Edmund Burke Institute in Washington in July, at which I was a panellist, was that the media treated its central theme of nationalism and nation-states with wary suspicion, as if it were some risky innovation, when it is in reality the status quo of international relations. There are 190 states in today’s world whose sovereignty is undisputed, and only a handful of others. Opinion polls in the great majority of democratic sovereign states show very low levels of support for secessionist movements. And where they are serious political forces—as in Catalonia and Scotland—that usually reflects recent histories of national difference institutionally or linguistically.

Most people still have a mental framework of a world divided into nation-states held together by loyalties called, variously, love of country, nationalism and patriotism. Since the end of the Cold War, however, this framework has been challenged…