Nation State Quotes

“In other words, they appeal to the state for protection, but the state is precisely that from which they require protection. To be protected from violence by the nation-state is to be exposed to the violence wielded by the nation-state, so to rely on the nation-state for protection from violence is precisely to exchange one potential violence for another. There may, indeed, be few other choices.”
― Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?

“Nationalism always preserved this initial intimate loyalty to the government and never quite lost its function of preserving a precarious balance between nation and state on one hand, between the nationals of an atomized society on the other. Native citizens of a nation-state frequently looked down upon naturalized citizens, those who had received their rights by law and not by birth, from the state and not from the nation....”
― Hannah Arendt

“Questioning the morals, motives, and actions of a nation-state is not an expression of hatred for it or its predominant religion.”
― Stewart Stafford

“That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state.”
― Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics

“Far from addressing the Soviet nationalities question, the Afghan adventure had, as was by now all too clear, exacerbated it. If the USSR faced an intractable set of national minorities, this was in part a problem of its own making: it was Lenin and his successors, after all, who invented the various subject ‘nations’ to whom they duly assigned regions and republics. In an echo of imperial practices elsewhere, Moscow had encouraged the emergence—in places where nationality and nationhood were unheard of fifty years earlier—of institutions and intelligentsias grouped around a national urban center or ‘capital.”
― Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

“The absolute monarch was supposed to serve the interests of the nation as a whole, to be the visible exponent and proof of the existence of such a common interest. The enlightened despotism was based on [Duc de] Rohan's "kings command the peoples and interest commands the king"; with the abolition of the king and sovereignty of the people, this common interest was in constant danger of being replaced by a permanent conflict among class interests and struggle for control of state machinery, that is, by a permanent civil war.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“There is no reason to believe that political agency must solely be located in the modern state, and Nietzsche does not hold such a view. He instead locates his political project in the transition away from the nation-state. Indeed, the decay of the state signals the superseding of the modern question of political philosophy as framed by Leiter: the theory of the state and its legitimacy. The new question for Nietzsche will revolve around determining which institutions can fullfill the Platonic mission of producing the new Platos that the culture-state failed to achieve.”
― Hugo Drochon, Nietzsche's Great Politics

“The nation-state furnished an ideology of national identity that made it easier to rally people for military adventures that their rulers considered profitable. The “common language and culture” of each of these new entities was in no way a natural human community like early tribes and bands. Rather, they were created by brutal conquest such as that of the British over the Irish, Scots, and the Welsh, or the Castilian Spaniards’ conquest of the Basques and the Catalans.”
― Roy San Filippo, A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation

“Technology and global trade have diluted the ties between nationals and strengthened the bonds between geographical strangers. To be from and connected to just one place is becoming rarer, and people feel increasingly disconnected from the nation-states issuing their birth certificates and passports.”
― Lauren Razavi, Global Natives: The New Frontiers of Work, Travel, and Innovation

“Countries are stories, concepts, invented by people just like you and me. And we can invent new stories, concepts, and culture based on shared, global experiences. People will continue to travel, as they always have, to places with better opportunities, fewer threats, and more fun to be had. Yet as the world becomes more global and technologically advanced, not everyone gets to participate beyond one locality, and protecting free movement is often overlooked. That’s why our systems need to adapt. Governments and companies need to deliver new infrastructure to keep up with the pace of technology, its impact, and its potential.”
― Lauren Razavi, Global Natives: The New Frontiers of Work, Travel, and Innovation

“Jewish Ideas Daily

In Defense of the Nation-State
By Diana Muir Appelbaum
Friday, October 5, 2012

In [Daniel Gordis’] new book, The Promise of Israel: Why Its Seemingly Greatest Weakness Is Actually Its Greatest Strength, Gordis weaves the work of political theorists and historians into a compelling case for the nation-state in general and Israel in particular. … the governments that have produced human rights such as personal liberty and the rule of law have most often been ethnically based nation-states … Gordis quotes intellectual historian Mark Lilla, who notes that while Western Europeans have forgotten “all the long-standing problems that the nation-state, as a modern form of political life, managed to solve,” … [Zionism] remembers the wisdom of borders and the need for collective autonomy to establish self-respect and to demand respect from others. …

European and American opposition to Israel … reflects the fact that Israel is the archetypal nation-state, and nation-states have fallen from favor in intellectual circles.

Until recently, republics have arisen only in small city-states and, usually, only briefly. Apart from these cases, in all of human history only a few ways have been found to organize political life. There is the intense and appalling tribalism of Afghanistan. There are empires in which conquering Herrenvolk oppress conquered peoples. There are dictatorships and monarchies in which individuals may have comforts or privileges but not rights. There has been the universalizing ideology of Marxism, which has produced brutality and death on an unimaginable scale. Then there is the nation-state.

The nation-state gives no assurances of the universal peace and justice promised by Marxism, Islam, or the human rights movement. It claims merely that it will attempt to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for its citizens. The nation-state does not claim it will bring peace or justice to the whole world, only that it will work to bring these benefits to a particular people living on a particular piece of land.”
― Diana Muir Appelbaum

“In the modern state, identity is not a question of self-discovery. It is an answer provided in advance. You are not asked who you are. You are told: this is your flag, your language, your memory, your grief. To belong is to perform this answer correctly. To dissent is not only to disagree—it is to disrupt the entire choreography of coherence.

Thus, identity becomes obedience wrapped in sentiment. The good citizen is not the one who thinks, but the one who aligns—who reacts with the correct emotion, at the correct time, to the correct cues.”
― Adeel Ahmed Khan

“It began as an agreement. In the wreckage of empires and the dust of revolutions, societies sought order. The nation-state promised administration, protection, identity. It was meant to govern the practical aspects of shared life: law, taxation, territory. But soon, it began to define the very meaning of life itself.

What had been a framework for managing difference became an instrument for enforcing sameness. What had been a structure to facilitate coexistence turned into a filter through which all belonging, morality, and memory were interpreted.

The genius of the nation-state is not its power to rule, but its power to redefine reality. It does not impose itself through domination alone. It enters the psyche through repetition, ritual, and narrative. It writes itself into textbooks, encodes itself into laws, and paints itself into the sky in the form of flags. It becomes the background condition of consciousness. Like oxygen. Like gravity. Unquestioned not because it is self-evident, but because it has replaced the conditions under which evidence is seen.

In this transformation, something subtle but monumental occurs: the nation-state ceases to be one possibility among many. It becomes the only frame through which community, identity, and truth are imagined.

You do not choose your nation. You inherit it. And what you inherit is not just a passport—it is a complete moral cosmology. It tells you who you are, what stories to remember, what threats to fear, what victories to celebrate. It becomes the narrator of your existence.”
― Adeel Ahmed Khan

“The hyphen in ‘nation-state’ does not marry story to machine; it teaches the machine to speak in the voice of story.”
― Adeel Ahmed Khan

“The hyphen in “nation-state” hides an inversion. It claims the people created the state, while in practice the state manufactures the people it needs.”
― Adeel Ahmed Khan