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“It is a known fact in human nature, that … [as] aman is more attached to his family than to hisneighbourhood, to his neighbourhood than to thecommunity at large, [so] the people of each Statewould be apt to feel a stronger bias towards theirlocal governments than towards the governmentof the Union”.

Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist, XVII

1. Nationalism and cosmopolitism: rival or compatible ideas?

Globalization is changing the daily life of billions of people and com-pels social scientists to revise their theories. A key topic of this culturalrenewal concerns the relationships between nationalism and cosmopoli-tanism, a very old problem, today at the core of the debate concerning thefuture of the international order. For instance political scientists support-ing the project of a cosmopolitan democracy1 come up against the obsta-cle of nationalism, which sometimes is considered a rival ideology to cos-mopolitanism and sometimes the necessary intermediary step.

Before proposing a new approach to this old problem, it can be use-ful to reconstruct its history briefly. The shortest and most effectiveway to illustrate the role played by nationalism in the cosmopolitan vi-sion of history of the 18th Century is to recall the intellectual evolution

IL POLITICO (Univ. Pavia, Italy)2012, anno LXXVII, n. 3, pp. 68-90

HUMAN NATURE, NATIONALISM AND COSMOPOLITISM

by Guido Montani

Professor of International Political Economy at the Faculty of Economics of the Uni-versity of Pavia (Italy).

1 See G. W. BROWN, D. HELD (eds), The Cosmopolitanism Reader, Cambridge, Poli-ty Press, 2010; and especially the essay by Kok-Chor Tan, “Nationalism and Cosmpoli-tanism”, pp. 176-90.

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2 F. MEINECKE, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat. Studien zur Genesis des deutschenNationalstaates, München und Berlin, Verlag von R. Oldenbourg, 1928, p. 308.

3 F. MEINECKE, Die Idee der Staatsräson, Munich, Oldenbourg Verlag, 1924; Englishtranslation Machiavellism. The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and its Place in Modern Histo-ry, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, p. 1.

4 F. MEINECKE, Machiavellism, cit., pp. 4-5.

of Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954), the great German historian who,during his lifetime, observed the rise and fall of the German Reich pas-sionately. In his first great work, Cosmopolitanism and the NationalState, published in 1907, Meinecke shows how the roots of the Ger-man state were well grounded in the cosmopolitan culture of the En-lightenment philosophical and political movement. But during the 19th

Century it was necessary to abandon these generous and romanticideals in order to seize the historical occasion for national unity. Theend result was that the humanistic nation, imagined by Schiller, pro-duced Bismarck’s nation state2. Nevertheless Meinecke did not thinkthat the original cosmopolitan project had been abandoned. In a Pref-ace to the new 1915 edition he says that the war was shaping a uni-versal people: Germany was going to embrace the double ideal of cos-mopolitanism and nation state.

The outcome of WWI persuaded Meinecke to look for the pro-found reasons behind power politics: what position and future did Ger-many have in the European concert of nation states? And how couldGerman cosmopolitan values be reconciled with power politics? In DieIdee der Staatsräson, published in 1924, he says: “For each state ateach particular moment there exists one ideal course of action, one ide-al raison d’état”3. Therefore the government of a nation state must fol-low a policy line, in internal and external affairs, which is not dictatedby some ideal of morality and justice, but by the inner necessities ofthe state. The politician wanting to acquire power and to maintain itshould not follow personal inclinations and values but only the courseof action dictated by the raison d’état. The relations between moral lawand power are obscure and problematic because: “Kratos and Ethos to-gether build the state and fashion history”. The virtue of the politicalleader is to follow the complex path between these two great historicalshores: “Between Kratos and Ethos, between behaviour prompted bythe power-impulse and behaviour prompted by moral responsibility,there exists at the summit of the state a bridge, namely raison d’état”4.If we apply this general observation to the world system of states we

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should also admit that, since a world government does not exist, peacecan endure only in a situation of equilibrium among the great powers,but when this equilibrium is shattered, as happens when a great poweraims at hegemony and the other powers object to that, war becomes in-evitable. After a scholarly excursus of the theory of the raison d’état,from Machiavelli to Treitschke, Meinecke concludes observing thatthe League of Nations, the only bulwark against power politics in in-ternational affairs, was doomed to fail. International anarchy can bebrought to an end not by the League of Nations, but by “the world-hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon powers, in whose hands the strongestphysical powers of the globe are already concentrated”5. This realisticobservation also explains the German refusal of Anglo-Saxon hege-mony.

During Hitler’s regime Meinecke fell into disgrace due to his lib-eral positions. After the German catastrophe, in one of his speeches,Meinecke admitted that the old European system of great powers need-ed to be completely reformed: it was now necessary to build the Unit-ed States of Europe. The old nation states had to accept to integratetheir own raison d’état into a collective European raison d’état. NowGermany had to follow this new course of action in foreign policy6.

This short summary of Meinecke’s anguished historical journeyfrom the cosmopolitan ideas of the Enlightenment to German powerpolitics and to European Unity shows that the present experience ofEuropean integration should be examined carefully by every scholar ofinternational relations: Europe is at a crossroads between nationalismand cosmopolitanism. In the following pages we try to show that Eu-rope, after WWII, thanks to supranational institutions, was able toovercome the main contradictions between nationalism and cos-mopolitanism paving the way for a supranational community of na-tional peoples. In order to base our argument on solid theoretical foun-dations we first take into consideration the notion of human nature, be-cause – as Alexander Hamilton remarked – it seems reasonable to as-sume that people feel more sympathy for their neighbours than forsome distant and unknown person, but this sympathy does not preventthem from belonging to a wider political community. This behaviouris the basis for a federal system of government of national peoples.

5 F. MEINECKE, Machiavellism, cit., p. 431.6 S. PISTONE, Federico Meinecke e la crisi dello stato nazionale tedesco, Torino, Giap-

pichelli, 1969, pp. 480-81.

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7 E. O. WILSON, Consilience. The Unity of Knowledge, London, Abacus, 2006, p. 203and p. 208.

8 C. DARWIN, The Descent of Man, London, J. Murray, 1871, pp. 100-101.

There is a crucial difference between internationalism and federalism.In a system of sovereign nation states nationalism and cosmopoli-tanism are necessarily rivals, though in a federal system “national iden-tity” is compatible with a “cosmopolitan identity”: a German citizencan also be a European citizen and a citizen of the world.

The notion of human nature is the basis for our research. Thanks tothe impressive advancement of the studies on the origin of the humanspecies carried out by paleo-archeologists, anthropologists, biologistsand evolutionary psychologists, Edward Wilson criticizes social scien-tists who “have paid little attention to the foundations of human nature,and they have had almost no interest in its deep origins”. He prods so-cial scientists to answer the question: “what unites humanity?” Realprogress in social sciences is possible only on the basis of a commonaccepted theoretical basis. Wilson says: “social sciences are intrinsical-ly compatible with the natural sciences. The two great branches oflearning will benefit to the extent that their modes of causal explanationare made consistent”7. Here we try to contribute to a more comprehen-sive social sciences methodology examining the relationships betweenhuman nature and the ideas of nationalism and cosmopolitanism.

2. Human nature, cooperation and conflict

Charles Darwin observed: “As man advances in civilisation, andsmall tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reasonwould tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instinctsand sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personallyunknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an arti-ficial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all na-tions and races”. And, later on, Darwin says: “Sympathy beyond theconfines of man, that is humanity to the lower animals, seems to be oneof the latest moral acquisitions”8. Here we try to show that advances incivilisation become possible when human beings overcome artificialbarriers – created by themselves – from tribe to national allegiance.

We start our inquiry recalling the notion of “human universals”elaborated by Donald Brown who says: “Human universals – of which

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hundreds have been identified – consist of those features of culture, so-ciety, language, behaviour, and mind that, so far as the record has beenexamined, are found among all peoples known to ethnography and his-tory”9. Human universals outline the main features of a world people.Among these human universals Brown lists “cooperation” and “con-flict”, two aspects of human behaviour, which are crucial for social sci-ences. Here we propose to study the evolution of cooperation and con-flict in human societies up to the creation of the state. There is some rea-son to think that the state is a human artefact not dissimilar from thefamily, the tribes, the village; it is a product of cultural human evolu-tion. Marvin Harris10 aptly observes that, even before the first millen-nium B.C., in the Mesopotamian region, in the Nile valley, and after-wards on the Mediterranean shores, in China and the Americas, someinstitutions were created, which we now consider states: territorial com-munities monopolizing legitimate force, according to Max Weber. Theweberian definition can be applied both to the modern and the archaicstate. The birth of the archaic state can be considered a spontaneous out-come of independent evolutionary processes11. The population whichmoved from the Behring Strait into theAmericas about twelve thousandyears ago created the Maya, Aztec and Incas empires autonomously. Itis a rare case of a social experiment, as happens in a laboratory when itis possible to repeat the chemical analysis of a certain substance.

Genetic evolution and cultural evolution follow different patterns.Cultural evolution is based on the functioning of the human brain,which – we can assume – is the same in the Cro-Magnon man of 40thousand years ago and in modern humans12. The real difficulty the so-cial scientist has to face is to understand how the archaic societies atthe end of the Palaeolithic era and the beginning of the Neolithic eraworked, since we have at our disposal only skeletons, tools, ornamentsand dwelling ruins. Notwithstanding this, some rough idea of the prim-itive societies can be traced thanks to the anthropological studies ofsurviving societies of foragers, nomads, hunters and gatherers, etc. Of

9 D. BROWN, Human Universals, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1991; the quotation istaken from D. BROWN, Human Universals, Human Nature and Human Culture, in“Daedalus”, vol. 133, n. 4, Fall 2004, p. 47.

10 M. HARRIS, Our Kind: Who we are, Where we came from, Where we are going, NewYork, Harper Collins, 1990, Chapters 96-99.

11 Brown considers “institutions” and not specifically the “state” as a human universal.12 I. TATTERSALL, Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness, New York,

Harcourt Brace, 1998; see especially the last chapter.

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13 A. W. JOHNSON, T. EARLE, The Evolution of Human Societies. From ForagingGroup to Agrarian State, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2006, p. 245.

14 K. POPPER, The Poverty of Historicism, London, Lowe and Brydone, 1957. Recentresearches on the origins of humans enlighten also the old debate on the Marxian theoryof economic determinism, or the evolution of different modes of production, from huntersand gatherers to capitalist societies. The transition from foraging groups to agrarian soci-eties was much more complex than the simple marxian deterministic model can explain.For instance N. WADE (Before the Dawn. Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors,New York, Penguin Press, 2006, chapter 7) explains that it is not true that agriculture ledto settlement or stationary societies; on the contrary, the settlement way of life led to agri-culture (for a similar point of view see I. TATTERSALL, The World from Beginnings to 4000BCE, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008; chapter 7). Relating to the same issue, J.Cauvin’s research (Naissance des divinités. Naissance de l’agriculture. La révolution dessymboles au néolitique, Paris, Flammarion, 1997) provides extensive documentation ofthe cultural revolution of religious symbols which precede agriculture in village commu-nities of the Middle East. According to Cauvin it was the symbolic revolution that broughtabout the transition from nomadic societies of hunters and gatherers to the domesticationof plants and animals.

course, our aim is not to provide details of the vast findings accumu-lated by anthropologists in over a century of research, but only to ex-ploit their main findings.

Johnson and Earl identified “the following levels of cultural evo-lution: the family, the local group, the Big Man collectivity, the chief-dom, the archaic state, and the nation state. These labels – they say –do not signify perfectly discrete levels or plateaus, to one or another ofwhich all known cultures must be assigned; rather, they designate sta-tions along a continuum at which it is convenient to stop and makecomparisons with previous stations”13. We have now a comprehensiveframework in which we can discuss the notion of cooperation and con-flict. But first we need to specify that these different stations do not rep-resent stages of an imaginary course of history: there is not a singlecause explaining the transition from one station to another, but a plu-rality of causes. Karl Popper14 rightly says that there is not a law (or atheory) of historical development of human societies which allows usto predict their future.

One of the features of these different kinds of societies is that theycan be listed according to their relative size. The family group is thesimplest organization model of cooperation and likely the oldestknown. It comprises around twenty-five members, that is, five fami-lies living mainly by foraging. There is a division of labour betweenmen and women, but the group does not have a chief. Families main-tain relationships with other groups of the region. The Kung people,

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who nowadays live in Botswana, Namibia and Angola, do not live “asisolated families but are organized into camps of several families andjoined by personal networks of exchange that interconnect families andtheir camps across broad regions. The importance of these suprafami-ly organizations in handling the daily risks of hunting and the long-range risks of an unpredictable resource base shows clearly the limitsto family independence”15.

We cannot examine in detail all the aforementioned societies. Weneed only to show that the division of labour in the family, its autonomyand the hierarchy among its members are related to a suprafamily or-ganisation, which becomes more complex as the society expands. Thelocal group could include roughly from one hundred to five hundredmembers at the time of the Neolithic revolution. The cohesion of this so-ciety, producing a small surplus, required a strong combination of cere-monial activities and leadership. The Big Man did not have coercivepowers but he organized the local group and represented it in intergroupceremonies. In the following stages, the chiefdom organized thousandsor several thousand people. The development of intensive agricultureproduced a substantial surplus, the stratification of society into classesand élite groups became inevitable: land property and precise social lawsregulated the distribution of the surplus. In chiefdoms coercive powerwas necessary to organise production and to reduce violence among in-dividuals and families. The autonomy of the family was reduced and itsorganisation was embedded in a wider social framework. Regional poli-ties, or chiefdoms, “constitute the world of law and legal force that guar-antees order among communities within the polity, as well as a coordi-nated response to the outside world of competing and cooperativestates”16. In short, chiefdom societies announce the creation of the ar-chaic state, when a permanent bureaucracy was set up. The archaic stateorganised populations of about hundreds of thousands or millions of dif-ferent ethnic groups; it created roads, canals and long distance trade. Itsmost important achievement was the pacification of a number of warlikechiefdoms. This result was possible when the chiefs understood that itwas more convenient to integrate the vanquished people instead ofkilling them. “Integration on a massive regional or interregional scale isa defining characteristic of states”17.

15 A. W. JOHNSON, T. EARLE, The Evolution of Human Societies, cit. p. 67.16 A. W. JOHNSON, T. EARLE, The Evolution of Human Societies, cit., p. 247.17 A. W. JOHNSON, T. EARLE, The Evolution of Human Societies, cit., pp. 327-8.

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18 S. PINKER, The Better Angels of Our Nature. Why Violence has Declined, New York,Penguin Book, p. 52.

19 M. TOMASELLO, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, Cambridge Mass., Har-vard University Press, 1999.

Cooperation and especially increased cooperation among humanbeings is the angelic face of human nature. Let’s now give a look at itssatanic face. Anthropological research on violence in ancient societieshas definitively proved the groundlessness of the Noble Savage myth.In his extensive study on violence in history, Steven Pinker shows thatprimitive non-state societies were much more violent than modernstates. In prehistoric times violence was fairly common among men forthe conquest of women, among tribes and chiefdoms and among fam-ilies of the same tribe. Revenge for theft, adultery, vandalism and rapesfrequently ended in massacres, because it was the most secure way toavoid further revenge. Taking into account a great number of anthro-pological researches Pinker states: “The average annual rate of deathin warfare for the non-state societies is 524 per100,000, about half of1 percent. Among states, the Aztec empire of central Mexico, whichwas often at war, had a rate about half of that”. If we examine con-temporary history, the 20th Century, which is sometimes considered thebloodiest era in the history of humankind, is by far less violent than thetimes of the ancient societies. The annual rate of death for Germany,Japan and Russia/USSR was “144, 27 and 135 per 100,000 respec-tively”. Pinker’s conclusion is: “states are far less violent than tradi-tional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their mostwar-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the av-erage death rate of non-state societies and less than a tenth of that forthe most violent one”18.

Here, we are not trying to give a comprehensive answer to the prob-lem of the origin of the state – for instance we do not take into accountpopulation growth, the environment, technological changes, religion,etc. – but our aim is simply to shed some light on the evolution of co-operative behaviour. So far we have only shown that there is a nega-tive correlation between more cooperation among individuals and lessviolence. But an empirical correlation is not an explanation. The fol-lowing three observations can provide some ground for an explanation.

A first basis for cooperative behaviour is given by MichaelTomasello19 who compares the skills of human beings and those of oth-er primates, such as chimpanzees. Many animals have a social life, but

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only human beings are able to create artefacts and develop skills thataccumulate improvements across generations. Tomasello studies thecognitive development in human infants finding out that even in thepre-linguistic stage of communication they acquire the capacity to “un-derstand others as intentional agents”. Human infants are able to col-laborate with adults in joint activities. We need to recognize that “evenyoung children already have some sense of shared intentionality … Inshared cooperative activities, my individual rationality … is trans-formed into a rationality of interdependence … The universality of so-cial norms, and their critical role in human evolution, is apparent”20.This human behaviour has a very old origin, it probably dates back towhen the practice of monogamous relationships between females andmales in foraging groups created a propitious environment. “There wassome initial step in human evolution away from great apes, saysTomasello, involving the emotional and motivational side of experi-ence, that propelled humans into a new adaptive space in which com-plex skills and motivations for collaborative activities and shared in-tentionality could be selected”21. Cooperation probably developed inlittle family groups.

The second condition for the creation of the state and a high degreeof cooperation is the domestication of plants and animals, in short theagricultural mode of production, the exploitation of the surplus and thestratification of society.

The third fact at the basis of the archaic state is that it was built byhumans who were not only able to speak but also to write. The devel-opment of writing was the necessary tool to organize a bureaucracy andsend instructions from the metropolitan centre to the periphery of em-pires. The invention of writing happened independently in different re-gions of the ancient world during the process of state building: inSumerian and Egyptian civilizations, in Greece, in China, in India andin theAmericas. “Human mind – says Godart – reacted in the same wayto the problems created by accountability needs of palaces where theriches of the region were gathered together”22. The writing techniquewas a cognitive skill crucial for the administration of the state.

20 M. TOMASELLO, Why we Cooperate, Cambridge Mass., MIT Press, 2009, pp. 39-42.21 M. TOMASELLO, Why we Cooperate, cit., p. 85.22 L. GODART, L’invenzione della scrittura. Dal Nilo alla Grecia, Torino, Einaudi,

1992, p. 118.

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23 S. MENNEL, The Globalization of Human Society as a Very Long-Term SocialProcess. Elias’s Theory in “Global Culture. Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity”(ed. M. Featherstone), London, Sage, 1990; “It was in reaction to a prevalent overempha-sis on economics that [Elias] tried to show the equal centrality of violence and its control,intermeshing with economic development and with the development of knowledge, in theoverall development of human society” (p. 369).

3. The nation state, nationalism and national integration

In the last paragraph we saw how the archaic state favoured a highdegree of cooperation, “integrating” different chiefdoms. Now we ex-plore the same problem for modern societies, where social cooperationis organised by the nation state. We will see that the nation state, a po-litical artefact, integrates individuals, removing feudal barriers and in-creasing the degree of cooperation, but it also causes divisions andwars among national peoples. National integration – we try to show –is nothing but a station of human cultural evolution. Here we explorehow cooperation evolved emphasizing three features of modern soci-eties: the civilizing process, the development of institutions, the nationstate and nationalism.

The civilizing process. Several studies on the transition from Euro-pean feudalism to the modern era drew attention to the cultural, polit-ical or economic aspects of this great transformation. A new culture ofindividual liberties was the hallmark of the “Renaissance” in literature,figurative arts, science, technology and philosophy, which reached itspeak in the Enlightenment. Other historians emphasize the revolution-ary changes in trade, especially in long distance trade, and in urban-ization, where a new bourgeois class challenged the aristocratic pow-er. Other historians emphasize the political revolution in state buildingand in political thought, with the foundations of the great modern ide-ologies of liberalism, democracy, socialism and nationalism.

Here we focus our attention on the birth of the modern state. Thiswork was masterly carried out by Norbert Elias in his study of the civi-lizing process, where the cultural, political, economic and social aspectsare examined in their close mutual relationship23. Elias shows how in thecourse of the transformation individual behaviour concerning the dailyhabits of sanitation and decency changed radically, becoming more civ-ilized among the upper classes and the lower classes. The integrationprocess demolished the barriers of the closed manor and increasingly

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larger political communities were built under the rule of some powerfulbaron, prince or king. The modern state is not the outcome of a preciseplan but the result of endless struggles among feudal “chiefdoms”. Eliassays that the main features of the transformation process can be de-scribed as follows: “the territorial property of one warrior family, its con-trol of certain lands and its claim to tithes or services of various kindsfrom the people living on this land, is transformed with the advancingdivision of functions and in the course of numerous struggles, into a cen-tralized control of military power and of regular duties or taxes over afar larger area. Within this area no one may now use weapons and forti-fication or physical violence of any kind without the central ruler’s per-mission”24. Under the pressure of competition social functions becomemore and more differentiated; moreover the centralization of politicalpower and the enlargement of the territorial community were the crucialfactor allowing for a more accurate and efficient organisation of socialfunctions: individuals learnt to control, from their earliest years, their be-haviour in a more autonomous and automatic way.

It was this social, cultural and political transformation that pavedthe way for the industrial revolution, which originated in England butsoon spread across continental Europe and the world. A new higher de-gree of cooperation was now possible, because civil society and themarket became two aspects of human behaviour relatively independ-ent of political power. Adam Smith was able to state: “the division oflabour is limited by the extent of the market”, one of the fundamentallaws of a new social science, political economy. Since then, social sci-entists and philosophers developed theories and models explaining thecomplex and many-sided mechanisms of human society.

The development of institutions. Institutions keep modern societytogether: the family, the firm, the market, the sports club, the church,the state, etc. are institutions. The philosopher John Searle producedthe most convincing explanation of this “clue” concerning human so-cieties. Language is the basis of all institutions. “You can have a so-ciety that has language – says Searle – but does not have governments,private property, or money. But you cannot have a society that hasgovernment, private property, and money, but does not have a lan-

24 N. ELIAS, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, vol. II, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 19802;Engl. transl. The Civilizing Process. State Formation and Civilization, Oxford, Blackwell,1982, p. 202.

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25 J. R. SEARLE, Making the Social World. The Structure of Human Civilization, Ox-ford, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 62.

26 J. R. SEARLE, Making the Social World, cit., p. 86.27 G. M. HODGSON, What are Institutions?, in “Journal of Economic Issues”, vol. XL,

n. 1, March 2006, p. 18.

guage”25. This distinctive quality of language to create institutions ispossible because individuals communicate intentional states, which arealways about, or refer to, something: intentional states are about realityand a certain statement can be true or false. Therefore we can say that in-dividuals communicate in order to describe the world as it is or to makecommitments. An essential feature of language, says Searle, is that “itnecessarily involves social commitments, and that the necessity of thesesocial commitments derives from the social character of the communi-cation situation”. To be more precise, language has a deontological pow-er: it can create obligations when these obligations are socially recog-nized. In such a case we have an institution. If during a public ceremo-ny somebody says: “you Mrs X and Mr Y are married” new mutual ob-ligations are created. A certain piece of paper counts as €50 in the Eu-ropean Union because the European Union has the power to issue papermoney and the European citizens believe that with this piece of moneythey can buy a certain amount of goods and services. “In human lan-guages – says Searle – we have the capacity not only to represent reali-ty, both how it is and how we want to make it be, but we also have thecapacity to create a new reality by representing that reality as existing.We create private property, money, government, marriage, and a thou-sand other phenomena by representing them as existing”26.

Concerning the topic of this paper, we need to distinguish twokinds of institutions. There are institutions such as money, the market,common law, the village, etc., which allow for better coordination ofhuman action without a specific authority with organisational power:the rules can derive from tradition or from an external power, such asthe government. But there are other institutions – for instance tradeunions, firms, political parties, the state – which can work properly on-ly with a specific organisation. “Organizations – says Hodgson – arespecial institutions that involve (a) criteria to establish their boundariesand to distinguish their members from non-members, (b) principles ofsovereignty concerning who is in charge, and (c) chains of commanddelineating responsibilities within the organization”27. Let us now seehow the nation state differs from other organisations.

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The nation state and nationalism. The nation state is an organisa-tion, but it is an organisation with peculiar features. A firm, a tennisclub, a political party have some power over their members, but thispower is limited by their statute and external laws. On the contrary, thenation state has some power over their subjects or citizens limited bythe constitution or by internal legislation, but towards other nationstates it has unlimited – sovereign – power to employ military force todecide international controversies.

A comparison with the archaic state can help to explain the featuresof the modern state. Francis Fukuyama, in his careful reconstruction ofthe origins of the archaic states, says: “The founding myths of the Greek,Roman, Hindu, and Chinese states all trace the regime’s ancestry backto a divinity; or at least to a semidivine hero. Political power in earlystates cannot be understood apart from the religious rituals that the rulercontrolled and used to legitimate his power”28. The same statement istrue for the Incas, Maya and Aztec empires. Religion legitimated a su-perhuman power of the ruler over the life and death of their subjects. Butthe archaic states in actual fact had no “international” problems: for in-stance no significant relations existed between the Roman and the Chi-nese empires. The archaic state was by and large a global state.

Very different is the cultural context in which the nation state wasbuilt. The transition to the modern state was characterized by the sec-ularization of political culture. Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Mon-tesquieu and all the philosophers of the Enlightenment worked outdoctrines and theories to explain that the state is a human institutionand that its power cannot be based on divine right, but on the will ofthe people. Over these centuries the great modern ideologies of libe-ralism, democracy and, later on, of socialism were shaped. At a certainpoint – and very likely the turning point was the French Revolution –the legitimating principle of the Monarchy by divine right was substi-tuted by the principle of the sovereignty of the people. Sieyès, inQu’est-ce que le Tiers Etat? says: “The Third State constitutes a com-plete nation”. The historian Nora states: “At the very beginning of theRevolution the Ancien Régime was refused and replaced by the nation,a new kind of state was born”29.

28 F. FUKUYAMA, The Origins of Political Order. From Prehuman Times to the FrenchRevolution, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011, p. 88.

29 P. NORA, Nation, in F. FURET, M. OZOUF, “Dictionnaire critique de la RévolutionFrançaise”, Paris, Flammarion, pp. 801-12, p. 803. In the same page Nora says: “Dès le

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moment où les Etats généraux rejettent l’appelation qui le désigne depuis des siècles etdébordent les raisons limitées qui avaient motivé leur convocation, la rupture est faite avecce qu’on allait appeler dans l’été l’Ancien Régime, et la Nation est née”.

30 T. H. ERIKSEN, Ethnicity and Nationalism. Anthropological Perspectives, London,Pluto Press, 1993, says: “A nationalist ideology is an ethnic ideology which demands astate on behalf of the ethnic group. However, in practice the distinction can be highly prob-lematic” (p. 118). And he concludes: “ethnicity does not necessarily arise from moderni-ty, and it is not necessarily an end product.” (p. 158).

31 Saying quoted in W. CONNOR, A Nation is a Nation, is a State, is an Ethnic Group,is a…”, in J. HUTCHINSON & A. D. SMITH (eds), “Nationalism”, pp. 36-46.

The amazing success of the nation state formula is not an excusefor not examining critically a political thinking according to which anational people and a state should coincide. If we consider the mem-bers of the UN it is difficult to find a “pure” example of nation state. Ifone of the tenets of a nation state is the sharing of the same languagewe see that some states, like Switzerland, Canada, India, are multilin-gual; on the other hand the same language, such as English or Germanis spoken in different nation states. A national people sharing the sameculture can be considered an ethnic group; but – as Elias showed – dur-ing the process of civilization a certain king subjugated several feudallords building a multiethnic kingdom, not a nation. The French case isa good example of a specific local culture and language, which wereimposed to conquered populations. Though someone may maintainthat ethnicity is always at the root of a nation30, the real problem is toexplain why a certain culture becomes the dominant culture. The oth-er criteria identifying the nation, such as a common history and a com-mon race are more groundless; in fact they are founded on myths. Anold European saying states: “A nation is a group of people united by acommon error about their ancestry and a common dislike of theirneighbours”31.

In effect, the task of the social scientist is to understand why agroup of people shares a common error. It is impossible to explain whatis a nation state without taking into account the concept of ideology,not only as a political thinking, but also as a political thinking includ-ing some false statements. Mario Albertini defines nationalism as theideology of the sovereign, bureaucratic and centralized state. The na-tion state has the power to demand “supreme loyalty” from its subjects.“Indeed the national value holds the first place along the scale of peo-ple’s values … the nation state is an organisation which demands itsmembers to kill and to die (and therefore it cannot survive without an

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ideology which places the interest of the group above the life of its in-dividual members)”32. There is a religious aspect of nationalism – asthe symbol of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier shows – which de-picts the nation as a sacred community.

As an organisation based on people’s sovereignty, the nation statehad to conflate with liberalism, democracy and socialism. Indeed thenation state was the institutional container which facilitated the devel-opment of human rights, universal suffrage and the welfare state.Forced to incorporate these values, political power was domesticatedwithin the nation state. But political power remained savage outside.The nation state is the champion of “state sovereignty” and of the in-ternational system founded on the Westphalia paradigm. According tonationalism, humans are by nature divided into nations and the contro-versies among them, in the last resort, are settled by war. Indeed it is inthe international arena that the raison d’état shows the feral nature ofhuman beings. As Meinecke observes: “Striving for power is an abo-riginal human impulse, perhaps even an animal impulse, which blindlysnatches at everything around until it comes up against some externalbarriers”33. When, during the 19th century, the national market becametoo small for the development of national economic and military pow-er, the nation state looked for extra-national spaces, in Europe and inother continents. Colonialism, imperialism and two world wars werethe methods utilized by the European nation states to integrate otherpeoples. Is nationalism a human universal? Being a modern ideology34

it was not a human universal. Today as each people wants to become anation and to have a state, it is a human universal35. For the future, itwill remain a human universal only if it agrees to settle internationalcontroversies through cosmopolitan laws and not by military force.

32 M. ALBERTINI, Lo stato nazionale, Milano, Giuffrè, 1960, p. 132; now in Tutti gliscritti, (ed. N. Mosconi), vol. III, Bologna, Il Mulino, p. 260. Unfortunately Albertini’sbook was never published in English and so the English speaking scholars are more fa-miliar with the analysis of nationalism worked out by E. Gellner, B. Anderson, A. Smithand E. Hobsbawn, though M. Albertini was the first scholar to provide a scientific analy-sis of nationalism as the ideology of the nation state.

33 F. MEINECKE, Machiavelism, cit., p. 4.34 A. H. BIRCH, Nationalism and National Integration (London, Unwin, 1989) says:

“Humanity is not naturally divided into nations … nations are relatively recent and rela-tively artificial creations” (p. 8).

35 E. WILSON, Consilience, cit., says: “Territorial expansion and defense by tribes andtheir modern equivalents the nation state is a cultural universal”, p. 188.

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36 J. MONNET, Les Etats-Unis d’Europe ont commencé, Paris, Robert Laffont, 1955,p. 53.

Now we should see how it is possible to build external barriers tonation state power and reconcile Ethos and Kratos.

4. European integration, the supranational state and cosmopolitism

European integration sheds some light on the previous question. Na-tional integration creates the so-called “national affinity”, i.e. a citizen-ship based on exclusive loyalty to national government and rules, thanksto the adoption of a national language, compulsory (up to a few decadesago) military service, a national system of education, etc. European inte-gration is the effort to integrate different national peoples, without sub-merging their national identity into a new national European identity. TheEuropean treaties state: “citizenship of the Union shall be additional toand not replace a national citizenship”. European citizenship is a multi-level and non-exclusive form of political loyalty. The European Union isan organisation of states and citizens endowed with the power necessaryto achieve some common goals, such as a peaceful coexistence, an inter-nal market, a monetary union, a common foreign and security policy, etc.

The European Union is a supranational organisation. A comparisonwith an international organisation, the United Nations, can be useful.The main goal of the UN is to increase international cooperation in or-der to preserve peace, to prevent aggression, to encourage the respectof human rights, of international justice, etc. The functioning of the UNorganisation “is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of allits members”. But this principle was infringed by the creation of a Se-curity Council, with five permanent members endowed with a vetoright. The five members of the Security Council are obviously moreimportant than the others. Strictly speaking the “sovereign” of the UNis a group of five countries: in the last resort, international cooperationwithin the UN is based on the hegemonic principle and military force.

On the contrary, the EU achieves its ends by means of limited, buteffective power, which the member states confer to the Union: the EUis not based on the hegemonic principle and military force. In 1955Jean Monnet so explained the functioning of the European Coal andSteel Community: “The sovereign powers are conferred to common in-stitutions … which set up the first federal organisation of Europe”36.

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The first competences conferred to the ECSC were limited to the or-ganisation of the coal and steel market, and the Haute Autorité had thepower to fix prices, to tax, to manage a budget: it was a supranationalexecutive accountable to a Parliamentary Assembly and a Council ofnational ministers. A Court of Justice assured the compliance of Euro-pean law by member states. Since then, the competences of the Euro-pean Union have greatly increased: now there is an internal market for27 states, a monetary union for 17 states, a small European budgetwhich finances the agricultural policy, the regional policy, the researchand development policy, etc. Briefly the supranational methods allowfor more efficient cooperation among the member states because, whenthe competences are conferred to the EU, the Commission can becomea “government” of the Union and the two chambers – the EuropeanParliament and the Council – co-legislate. According to European jar-gon this decision-making method is called “communitarian”. JeanMonnet would probably have called it “federal”.

The real – and confusing – problem is that there is a second Europeworking alongside the “core” federal Europe. Concerning the compe-tences not conferred to the Union, such as taxation and defence poli-cies, the decision-making method is (almost) intergovernmental: everynational government maintains a veto right. There is a supranationalEurope and an international Europe which sometimes conflict.

Now let’s see how, thanks to supranational institutions, it was pos-sible to provide some crucial European public goods to the citizens ofthe European Union. The first major public good provided was the in-ternal market, whose construction started with the Rome Treaties(1957), when a custom union was set up and the tariffs on inter-Euro-pean trade were abolished. The second stage was performed with theSingle European Act (1986) when all physical barriers to the free cir-culation of persons, commodities, services and capitals were removed.This process is is still going on, because some important sectors, suchas energy, are under the control of national governments, but one cansay that Europeans lived through some dangerous dysfunctional equi-libria37 that existed in pre-war Europe. The first dysfunctional equilib-

37 F. Fukuyama in The Origins of Political Order, cit., describes a dysfunctional equi-librium as an institution or a system of institutions which cannot evolve towards a moreefficient institutional set up. “The ability of societies to innovate institutionally – saysFukuyama – depends on whether they can neutralize existing political stakeholders’ ve-toes over reform” (p. 456).

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rium was the warlike mood of European nation states. The creation ofthe internal market – thanks to the regulating power of the Commis-sion and of the enforcing power of the Court of Justice – was substan-tial not only for the stimulation of growth and welfare, but also to per-suade citizens and politicians that a new war among Europeans wasnonsense. Peace in Europe is a by-product of economic integration.

The second dysfunctional equilibrium removed by the EuropeanUnion was the monetary division of Europe. The success of the Com-mon Market was based on the Bretton Woods agreements establishingfixed rates of exchange among the European currencies and the dollar.After the break down of the monetary system, in 1971, the project ofthe Common Market – the industrial and the agricultural markets – wasseriously endangered: floating currencies caused the fall of intra-Eu-ropean trade, unemployment, inflation and huge public debts. In 1979,the European governments attempted to stop the threat of floating cur-rencies by creating the European Monetary System, an island of sta-bility within an instable world currency system. This imperfect device,after the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unity, was replaced by astraightforward Monetary Union. In 2002 European citizens were ableto utilize a continental currency, without frontiers. But the MaastrichtTreaty (1991) was a clumsy compromise: the Monetary Union was setup without an Economic Union, a Fiscal Union and a federal govern-ment. It was very easy to foretell that the construction was too weak toface the new global economic and political challenges.

The financial crisis erupted in the USA and hit Europe in 2008. TheEU, owing to its small budget, was unable to launch a recovery plan, asthe US federal government did. National governments were obliged toincrease their debts to save the banking system and to provide nationalrecovery plans. This was only the first part of the European tragedy. Thesecond act started with the Greek crisis, caused by an accountabilityfraud and an exorbitant indebtedness. The German government reactedharshly threatening the expulsion of Greece from the Monetary Union.At that point, international finance understood that the unity of the eu-ro-zone was at risk and that every country was responsible for the re-imbursement of its own debt. Other states excessively indebted, such asIreland, Spain, Portugal and Italy were obliged to pay increasing andunsustainable rates of interest. In 2011, the survival of the MonetaryUnion was in doubt. At last, in December 2011, a “fiscal compact” wasagreed among 25 governments of the Union: a Fund to help memberstates in financial distress was provided on condition that severe rules

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for restraining national deficits and excessive debt are observed. Europeis perhaps getting over the third dysfunctional equilibrium.

EU is a work in progress. Even if a Fiscal Union is on the assem-bly line two other dysfunctional equlibria loom on the horizon of Eu-ropean politics: European democracy and European foreign and secu-rity policy. European democracy is a problem that cannot be side-stepped any longer. In 1979, the European Parliament was directlyelected by the citizens, but it was not able to become the engine of EUpolicies and institutional reforms: the European parties have little cloutand the Commission is more accountable to national governments thanto the European Parliament. However the creation of a Fiscal Union –which implies severe EU intrusions on national budgets – is not possi-ble without involving the citizens in the democratic control of the EU:a federal government accountable to the European Parliament and theCouncil should be set up. This step will be carried out with great diffi-culties, owing to the lack of bold pro-Europeans politicians.

It will be much more difficult to find a clear response to the prob-lem of where Europe will stand in the new multipolar world. What willbe the basic idea the EU will propose to other people in order to or-ganise a peaceful and cooperative world?

The answer to this question is included in the supranational featureof European institutions. As Jean Monnet said, the model of the fede-ral state inspired the creation of European institutions. Since then theEuropean nation states were obliged to support the European projectand more and more competences were removed from the nation statesand entrusted to the EU. Now, one can uphold that the European Unionis a kind of supranational state38. The concept of “state” adopted herehas a more general meaning than Weber’s definition of the state as “amonopoly of the legitimate use of force”. Security is a public good and,like every public good, it can be provided by a coercive power (a le-gitimate government). By state we mean a legitimate government co-operating peacefully with other governments and endowed with the co-ercive power necessary to provide certain public goods. Someonecould say that the internal market, the monetary union and the fiscalunion are European public goods, but that the most important publicgood, security, is still in the hands of national governments which con-trol police and military force. This observation is correct, but it should

38 I discussed this point of view in G. MONTANI, Lo stato sovranazionale. Ordine coo-perativo e ordine coercitivo nell’esperienza europea, in “Il Politico”, n. 2, 2010, pp. 27-52.

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be noticed that we are now trying out a further phase of the civilizingprocess studied by Elias. The modern state was based on a peacefulcivil society: the coercive military force at the disposal of a legitimategovernment was crucial for the provision of other public goods, suchas property rights, free speech, etc. Europe was able to achieve a peace-ful coexistence among its member states with other means. Historicalcircumstances compelled Europe to follow this path. Social scientistsshould accept that the way to build a supranational state may differfrom the way followed in the past to build the nation state.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the break down of the USSR, thedownsizing of the USA as a superpower caused by the emergence ofnew global players, such as China, India and Brazil, the history of Eu-ropean integration has taken on a new meaning. During the Cold War,European integration was considered nothing but a device for coordi-nating national policies within the US hegemonic area. Today a newmultipolar world is developing at a brisk pace. Citizens and govern-ments must face new challenges: global financial and economic insta-bility, international migrations, regional wars, nuclear proliferation,terrorism and, last but not least, a global environmental disaster thatmight end the life of the human species on Earth. The process of Eu-ropean integration, with its supranational features, is becoming a mod-el that can be followed for the solution of global problems as well. Thefuture of a multipolar system can be either the clash of civilizations andgreat powers or a world cooperative system, with institutions provid-ing global public goods, such as peace, international justice and eco-logically sustainable development. In a few words, European integra-tion can be considered a workshop for the reforming of the world’s in-stitutions of cooperation, created at the end of WWII. Humankind isbecoming a community of fate and the European Union can be lookedupon as a regional experiment for the democratic organization of thefuture cosmopolitan community of nation states.

5. Cosmopolitan federalism

Unfortunately the debate on the relationship between European in-tegration and cosmopolitanism is blurred by the uncertain status of theEU, which is not a League of Nations and not yet a federation. Philoso-phers and political scientists can therefore maintain that, as Will Kym-licka says: “Many of our most important moral principles should be

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cosmopolitan in scope – e.g., principles of human rights, democracy,and environmental protection – and we should seek to promote theseideals internationally. But our democratic citizenship is, and will re-main for the foreseeable future, national in scope”39. We have seen thatdemocratic citizenship – and other ideals – cannot be trapped withinthe nation state borders because all human beings can share the idealsof political equality, human rights and environmental protection. Theseideals cannot be promoted only by international institutions. The fed-eral state is the appropriate institutional model to realize them, withinthe nation state and among the nation states. In our century we can andmust develop a policy to build a cosmopolitan democracy inhabited bycitizens of the world (kosmopolitês).

Let’s consider the climax of the nationalist age, the decades beforethe outburst of WWI. The national governments of the Great EuropeanPowers were engaged in imperial wars, fighting over a piece of landoutside Europe. In Europe they incited their people to hate their neigh-bours. The good national citizen had to be first of all a good soldier.Now look at Europe today: the same national peoples have electedtheir representatives in the European parliament, where they can de-bate common problems, decide common policies and take part, withtheir national governments, in the improvement of European institu-tions. They discuss these problems in a common language, usuallyEnglish, and their stance and resolutions have a real impact on the dai-ly life of their countrymen. The EU does not yet have a federal gov-ernment, but the European democratic deficit can be overcome by theincoming institutional reforms.

The substitution, among European peoples, of wars, trenches anddeath camps with a common Parliament is not an exclusive Europeanvirtue. Every people can do the same. An interesting empirical researchcarried out by a team of evolutionary psychologists on the role of cul-ture in early social cognition, in Peru, India and Canada, reaches thefollowing conclusions: “Organisms inherit their environments as muchas they inherit their genes. … In the case of humans, the genomes ofindividuals cannot ‘expect’ any particular constructed environment.Human beings must be equipped with whatever skills are necessary forbecoming competent members of whatever culture they are born into.… basic social-cognitive skills as imitation, joint attention, and com-

39 W. KYMLICKA, Citizenship in an Era of Globalization, in G. W. BROWN, D. HELD(eds), “The Cosmopolitanism Reader”, cit., p. 443.

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40 T. CALLAGHAN, H. MOLL, H. RAKOCZY, F. WARNEKEN, U. LISZWOSKI, T. BEHNE, M.TOMASELLO, Early Social Cognition in Three Cultural Contexts, Monographs of the Soci-ety for Reasearch in Child Development, Serial n. 2999, vol. 76, n. 2, 2011, p. 114.

munication by pointing are things that humans do in unique ways andthat, generalizing from the current data, they begin to do at roughly thesame developmental period universally across cultural contexts. Theyare skills that humans have evolved for functioning in their self-builtcultural worlds”40. If these findings are correct, the difference betweenan ethnic culture and a national culture is only the degree of complex-ity due to the different history of the peoples, including of course thecreation of the nation state, which was able to impose a dominant cul-ture. However, in Europe, the integration process among nation statesshows not only that some competences were transferred from the na-tional government to the EU, but also that a few competences, espe-cially regional customs, finance, welfare services and – sometimes –languages, are claimed by local governments. Briefly, a multi levelkind of government, the federal model, is the proper answer for amultinational and multicultural society.

What is possible in Europe today can become a reality in the worldof tomorrow. Humanity is becoming a community of fate. Dramaticglobal challenges are shaping a global society: the instability of the fi-nancial and monetary global system, the gap between poor and wealthypeoples, the proliferation of mass destruction weapons, national ter-rorism and the risk of an irreversible ecological crisis. International re-alism tries to answer these problems with the so-called state-centric ap-proach: intergovernmental cooperation, when possible and war, if thelatter fails. Yet there is a more effective alternative: building suprana-tional institutions. This point of view is usually ignored by social sci-entists when they propose plans to policy-makers for the reform of theinternational political and economic order because it is necessary toabandon the fetish of national sovereignty. This is an error. Let’s con-sider the crucial idea of people’s sovereignty, before it was confusedwith national sovereignty. John Locke in The Second Treatise of Gov-ernment says that political power: “is that power which every man,having in the state of Nature, has given up into the hands of the socie-ty, and therein to the governours … to the preservation of himself andthe rest of mankind” (§ 171). The state so constituted “is nothing butthe consent of any number of freemen capable of a majority to uniteand incorporate into such a society”. (§ 99). Therefore any reasonable

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individual can freely decide to take part in the political community; no“national identity” is required. If one of the fathers of modern politicaltheory upheld that the scope of the government is the preservation ofthe “lives, liberties and possessions” of all humans, why is it so diffi-cult nowdays to imagine a plan to transfer some power from nationalto supranational institutions? The answer is certainly not plain and sim-ple, since in some countries nation building is the prevailing issue, notsupranational integration. But in many continents – Africa, LatinAmerica and Asia – regional supranational integration is a chance andin the world society the industrialized countries have the duty, not on-ly the possibility, to reform and democratize the institutions already inexistence, first of all the UN institutions41. Therefore the simplest an-swer to our problem is that the fetish of national sovereignty is todaythe ideological fig leaf for the conservation of privileges and rents ofnational rulers. Today the citizens of many nation states elect parlia-ments and governments, which do not have the power to face globalproblems, including the fundamental problem of preserving the livesof their citizens. The nation state is the Procustean bed of democracy.

To conclude, national democracy is in crisis because more andmore problems are global and require a global solution. Global supra-national institutions are the appropriate answer. But this new phase ofthe civilizing process can be covered only if cosmopolitan federalismand cosmopolitan democracy go along pari passu.

41 Some supranational proposals are worked out in R. FIORENTINI, G. MONTANI, TheNew Global Political Economy. From Crisis to Supranational Integration, Cheltenham,Edward Elgar, 2012.

Abstract - One key issue bound up withthe cultural changes prompted by globaliza-tion is the relationship between nationalismand cosmopolitism. This paper explores thenotion of human nature to look at why, thoughpeople feel more sympathy for their neigh-bours, this sympathy does not prevent themfrom belonging to a wider political communi-ty. Scholars of international relations shouldconsider the present experience of Europeanintegration carefully. After WWII, thanks tosupranational institutions, Europe managed toovercome the main contradictions betweennationalism and cosmopolitism. National sov-

ereignties can – and must – be pooled in com-mon supranational institutions. In a system ofsovereign nation states nationalism and cos-mopolitism are necessarily at odds; in a feder-al system national identity is compatible witha cosmopolitan identity. The essay concludesthat national democracy and the nation stateare in crisis because more and more problemsare now global, and require a global solution.Global supranational institutions are the an-swer. This new phase of civilization can onlybe achieved if cosmopolitan federalism andcosmopolitan democracy proceed pari passu.Human nature is not an obstacle.