2016 and the return of the nation-state

Much of the political rhetoric that has been deployed during this period of political turbulence can make 2016 appear as the year the nation-state returned.  Yet for all the shock value associated with the year’s political events this apparent resurgence of the nation-state should not surprise us since underneath the surface nation-states never went away.  Even as politicians on the left and right frequently talked as if time had rendered the nation-state redundant, the nation-state always remained the decisive site of political agency in the West because it is the one place that joins together legal authority, coercive power, and a political method for determining who commands that political apparatus.  What has happened in western politics this year is not a function of the failure of alternatives to the nation-state, but of the inability of individual nation-states to uphold their positions in the international and European orders in the manner to which they had become accustomed.

In the US President-elect Trump is a product of the calamitous failures over the past decade of US policy in the Middle East and the economic difficulties for the US created by China’s rise.  Trump could successfully assert that the American nation-state should refocus on advancing the interests of American citizens because for the last decade the American government has proved unable to shape significant parts of the rest of the world to its will, and the failures of its attempt to exercise power in the Middle East has directly led to the strengthening of groups who are enemies of the US.  Moreover, the failed wars in the Middle East have cost the US state billions of dollars whilst the US’s domestic infrastructure meanwhile crumbled from neglect.  The US is now a declining power.  Leaving Trump’s personality aside, it is not historically surprising that when the whole foreign policy-making establishment that had presided over this imperial overshoot lined up behind a candidate who wished the US to continue abroad as if nothing had changed, enough voters chose a political neophyte who repeatedly pointed out that the US could no longer afford to play unsuccessfully at being the world’s policeman.

In the case of Britain, the terms of the state’s EU membership deteriorated from 2010.  Starting with the Maastricht treaty, British governments had over several decades procured a succession of opt-outs from EU policy structures.  However, from the onset of the euro zone crisis they were unable to secure any further singular arrangements.  As a non-member of the euro, Britain simply became irrelevant to the most fundamentally pressing questions at stake within the EU.  Consequently, when David Cameron sought to protect the City of London’s position in December 2011 by wielding a veto on what became the Fiscal Stability Pact he ultimately achieved nothing.  Even more significantly, when he tried to persuade Angela Merkel to give ground on freedom of movement as part of his renegotiation of Britain’s EU membership he came away with scraps.  Having assumed the German government would not risk Britain’s exit from the EU, Cameron succeeded only in demonstrating in emphatic fashion just how weak Britain’s position was in a union in which Britain lacked common policy interests with other states at just the moment he was asking for democratic support for staying in that union.  Again, it is not really surprising that, whatever the immediate economic risks, a majority of British voters chose instead to reclaim authority for the British nation-state.