John Dunn - The History of Political Theory and Other Essays: 12 - Is there a contemporary crisis of the nation state?

Is there a contemporary crisis of the nation state?

Formulating the question

Nations consist of those who belong together by birth (genetically, lineally, through familially inherited language and culture). States consist of those who are fully subject to their own sovereign legal authority. A true nation state, therefore, would consist only of those who belonged to it by birth and of those who were fully subject to its sovereign legal authority. By this (for practical purposes, no doubt absurdly stipulative) criterion it is unlikely that there is a single nation state in the world at present, and moderately unlikely that any such state has ever existed. But, as with most political ideas, the force of the idea of the nation state has never come principally from its descriptive precision. What it offers is a precarious fusion of two very different modes of thinking: one explicitly subjective, urgent and identificatory, and the other presumptively objective, detached and independent of the vagaries of popular consciousness. (It is hard to exaggerate the shaping impact of this second mode in forming the category of state (Skinner 1989).) Common birth is both a ground for, and a source of, allegiance. External authority is a device for furnishing protection. Taken together, they furnish a basis for rulers and subjects to live together with greater imaginative ease than either party would be likely to draw from the other taken separately: a contemporary version of xhepactum subjectionis (chapter 3 above). It is unsurprising that this unsteady mixture has proved unsuitable for clear analytical thought. But its analytical debility has been no bar to ideological or practical potency. The ideas that every nation should have its own state and that every state should be a single nation (Gellner 1983; Anderson 1983) may not have much solid merit either as normative or as practical proposals. But between them they have made a great deal of the political history of the twentieth century.1 Each of the three great geopolitical shifts of this century - the First World War and its aftermath, the Second World War and the unravelling of European empire which succeeded it, and the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and decomposition of the Soviet Union - has drastically extended the nation state as a political format and strongly reinforced it as an ideological option. Why, then, has it come to be a commonplace of contemporary political journalism that the nation state is today somehow in crisis: palpably unable to master problems which it once handled with aplomb, incapable of ensuring an order of its own (ecological, economic, civil, even spiritual) on its subjects' behalf, baffled by the novel challenges of a turbulent global economy and a decaying global habitat? The first question to press in this context is whether the journalistic commonplace is in fact valid. Has there been, for some specifiable set of reasons, a clear deterioration in the capacity of the nation state format to master the hazards to the security and prosperity of its subjects, in comparison with some distinct and earlier phase in modern history? Has there been some definite change in the sources or intensity of such hazards, sufficient to render a long-serviceable formula, normative or practical, palpably inadequate to control dangers which it once met with relative serenity? The first view locates the crisis in a diminution of the power of the nation state as such - a clear lessening in either its normative appeal or its practical capacity (or, of course, in both). The second locates the crisis in a sharp rise in the acuity or scale of the hazards which now confront its subjects. The least plausible of these hypotheses is the claim that the practical capabilities of states today in any general fashion fall short of those of their predecessors. Such a claim is not simply absurd. There have been forceful arguments that modern political and economic organization has a strong internal impetus towards immobilism, an impetus which can be reversed only by massive disruption (war, conquest, perhaps large-scale natural disaster) (Olson 1982). At a more ideological level, also, the rightwing economistic critique of rent-seeking and of the allegedly inherent economic inefficiency of state as opposed to market distribution2 has achieved considerable impact in many settings over the last two decades. But it is hard to see firm grounds in any of these lines of thought for judging that the intrinsic practical efficacy of modern state forms has deteriorated over the last half century. Far more plausible is the judgement that the present sense of crisis in the efficacy of the nation state comes from a resonance between two very different types of shift: a fading in all but the most extreme settings (typically those of armed conflict) in the normative appeals of the idea of the nation state, and a brusque rise in awareness of a series of new and formidable challenges (economic, ecological, military, political, even cultural) the scope of which plainly extends far beyond national boundaries and effectively ensures that they cannot be successfully met within such boundaries. Seen this way, the sense of crisis, whether well judged or otherwise, is at least easy to understand. It is a sense, above all, of political crisis: crisis in the efficacy of political action (cf. Dunn 1990a, chapter 8). It is in the nature of politics that new political challenges should arise all the time. But some such challenges are manifestly far more formidable than others. It is most unlikely that the causal capabilities of the nation state as an organizational format should have declined significantly and persistently in conditions of peace and appreciable long-term economic growth. But even in these conditions the combination of drastic new challenges and inherently limited inherited powers of action might easily have lessened the normative appeal of the repository of those powers and should rationally have impaired the practical self-confidence of national governing elites. Even if this emergent sense of political inadequacy did not in itself impair the normative appeal of the state form in question, it might readily expose the intrinsic limitations of that appeal in the face of the far harsher demands which are now placed upon it. Whatever else might be needed to meet them effectively, the drastic new challenges of global interdependence plainly require vigorous political action: a preparedness on the part of immense numbers of human beings to alter substantially and rapidly major aspects of how they choose to behave. Such changes place formidable strains on the political capacities of any human population. There may be a reason (perhaps inherent in global economic rationalization or in the dawning awareness of environmental peril) why the normative appeal of the idea of the nation state as such is already weakening. But even if it were not (indeed, even if it is not), it might still be true that the novel challenges of rapid global transformation would pose strains on the nation state, as an arena in which to concert political action, far greater (and perhaps unmanageably more severe) than those which have previously faced it. The immediate appeal of the idea of nation has nothing in particular to do with efficacy. We may not like, or choose to espouse, the social relations into which we are born. But we are born into them, whether we like it or not; and their claims are there, to embrace or to reject, quite independently of any practical impact on our own life chances. But the immediate appeal of the idea of the state is virtually confined to the latter's presumed efficacy (Skinner 1989). States which are in fact effective in promoting the security of their subjects undoubtedly win (and deserve)3 - a higher degree of loyalty than those that fail lamentably to furnish anything of the kind. But even states that notably fail to furnish security (even Iraq (Makiya 1993)3 o r Myanmar or the Republic of Somalia) are compelled today to pretend not merely to wish to do so, but to be within realistic reach of at least becoming able to do so. Because this is so, the normative appeal of the idea of the state is inherently vulnerable to a sense of political crisis, and the practical dissipation of such a sense through effective political action is greatly impeded by any prolonged weakening in the normative appeal of the state as a system of agency. It may be difficult to judge whether or not particular states (or even all states considered together) are or are not for the present gaining or losing in the practical ability to handle the collective predicaments of their own subjects (see chapter 10 above). But it is extremely easy to judge that there is widespread and disagreeable suspicion across the even minimally politically concerned populations of most countries in the world at present, from career politicians and high-ranking state officials to the most reluctant and despondent of voters, that their own states (and perhaps most other states also) are at present palpably weakening in their capacity to cope with these predicaments. At the limit, a sense of political crisis converges with the objective dynamics of state collapse - with revolution (cf. Dunn 1989; Dunn 1990a, chapter 6) or descent into the state of nature (Liberia, Somalia, much of Afghanistan). It is clear for the present that all the OECD states (for example) are very far indeed from collapse, and even further from revolution. But it is perhaps equally clear not merely that their practical adequacy for many purposes is genuinely subjectively in doubt in the eyes of their own subjects, but also that this adequacy may in addition be quite objectively in doubt. A prevailing sense of political crisis is volatile and potentially misleading, an unreliable tracer of real changes in economic, social and even political circumstances. But it is also a political factor in itself, and capable under some conditions of exerting its own causal force in reshaping or dismantling political arenas: consider the recent decomposition of Italy's postwar political system and the emergent challenge to Japan's for long remarkably successful postwar conservative hegemony.4 At this level, accordingly, the journalistic commonplace that there exists a contemporary crisis of the nation state might well prove virtually self-validating. By being reiterated, and through coming to be believed, it could make itself rue: consider, for example, the backwash from the Maastricht agreement. Because a sense of political crisis is itself an important political phenomenon, it is certainly pertinent to study its sources and its potential consequences. But, if we wish to understand what is going on in contemporary politics, it is likely in the long run to prove more rewarding to concentrate principally on the more external and objective features of the contemporary situation of nation states.

Locating crisis

Every actual nation state is both a somewhat hazy amalgam of at least two constitutive ideas and a disorderly, complex and profoundly opaque fact (Dunn 1990a, Introduction; Dunn 1985, Introduction). If we are to determine how far, and in what sense, the nation state is today in crisis, we first need to consider whether the prevailing sense of its being in crisis (if and where this does prevail) comes principally from the ideas or principally from the facts. Whether at the level of ideas or at the level of facts, it is inherently unlikely that all nation states should ever be equally in crisis at the same time. (A world in which they were so would already have become one in which the hazards to the human species were palpably beyond the reach of human powers to meet: a condition of uncontrollable biological or physical catastrophe, a planet which now precluded life, the heat death of the universe.) In the world of today, incontrovertibly, some states (Liberia, Somalia, Angola, Afghanistan) are far more in crisis than others (Switzerland, Singapore). As far as we know, this has always been true in the past; and we still have dismayingly little reason to expect that it will ever cease to be true in the future. The judgement that the nation state is today in crisis is not founded on the experience of the feeblest of contemporary states (cf. Cruise O'Brien et al 1989, Introduction and Conclusion). There is nothing either in the idea of a nation or in that of a state to ensure that Liberia or Chad will ever be firmly viable again (even though Liberia, for example, had in some respects a longer continuous political history than any other single subSaharan state in Africa before it first slipped into anomic military tyranny and then dissolved into competitive banditry).5 We should not be surprised that ideas alone prove insufficient to ensure peace and prosperity for any human population, even though the idea of the state, both at the level of ideological pretension and at the level of international law (Vincent 1990)3 inhibits the acknowledgement of such insufficiency with some obduracy. But in a world in which human populations are technically compelled to live on terms of ever greater intimacy with one another, the inability to guarantee minimal security to particular populations may prove over time an important threat to the appeals of ideas through which their interests are supposedly protected. In this respect there is an important asymmetry between the ideas of nation and state. In conditions of adversity, nation might become a purely passive category, a pure community of suffering. But even in conditions of adversity, the category of state retains in itself both a claim to be an agent and a corresponding burden of responsibility. Settings in which the idea of the state carries no factual structure of effective agency along with it (Cruise O'Brien et al. 1989, Conclusion; Hawthorn 1994) threaten the chances of their inhabitants to act together strategically and effectively in the face of their predicament. But they also threaten the prospects for the normalizing political instruments of the world economy (the IMF, the World Bank) to prevent concomitant disruption in the latter's trade and credit flows.The ending of the ColdWar has left a world of less imminent eschatological horror (cf. Bracken 1982), but also one of even more discomfiting tension between social intimacy, gross disparities in human misery, and limited political and military capability and will to alleviate the misery or even suspend the intimacy (see chapter 8 above). In itself the fact that some parts of the world are at present in no condition to instantiate convincingly the category of the state is conspicuously worse news for those parts of the world than it is for the category of the state. But if we consider the role of that category in articulating relations between states - horizontally and globally, rather than vertically and locally - local inefficacy may in the end prove a major impediment to the capacity of states in happier settings to furnish the services which they too purport to supply. (It is an important question about the realist strand in the understanding of international relations whether (or how far) its trenchantly zero-sum conception of the nature of these relations makes it obtuse to this possibility.) Where it plainly is unviable in practice, therefore, there is more than one way in which the failure of the nation state may react back on its appeal as an idea in less beleaguered settings. But even if these negative reactions do more on balance to impair its appeal than they do to reinforce it (which is far from evident), we can be confident that a sense of political crisis in the core countries of the OECD has not arisen from the travails of Liberia or Somalia (or indeed even from the uncomfortable experience of post-communism from Saxony to Bosnia and Vladivostok).

Nationhood

In this ampler, and for the moment altogether more comfortable, setting is it reasonable to see a sense of political crisis as emanating in any degree from the properties of the idea of the nation state? To answer this question, we need to consider its two core constitutive ideas in turn. The idea of a nation is that of a community of birth (in more liberal interpretation, perhaps, a community of birth and mutual choice). But actually existing nation states (as with actually existing socialism (Dunn 1984)) are altogether scruffier than this: medleys of birth, mutual choice, provisional instrumental exploitation approximately within the law, and vigorous manipulative penetration from well outside it. In idea, membership of a nation should be wholly uncontentious; a brute matter of fact, and prior to (a premiss of) any conceptualization of interest. In fact, however, few things are more contentious (already) in the more prosperous of modern nation states than who exactly at any particular time is entitled to full membership of the nation; and conflicts of interest over this question (while hard to demarcate either stably or accurately) are acute and intensely inflammatory (see chapter 9 above). (Consider the prospective impact of the NAFTA free trade agreement, especially upon relations between Mexico and the USA.) These conflicts have increased; they are increasing; and there is no reason whatever to expect them to diminish for the foreseeable future. As a fact, the nation state is a rough and ready mechanism for furnishing a set of real services (Gellner 1983). But the relation between fact and idea is increasingly slack; and there are no imaginative or analytical resources within the idea to alleviate the increasingly prominent strains within the fact. It may in the end prove important that the idea of nation should be so conspicuously exposed from two very different angles. From a realist viewpoint it is too vague and too sentimental to serve convincingly as a device for assessing interests (but cf. Weber 1980). From a liberal viewpoint it is too particularist in taste and too recklessly submissive to contingency to serve as a device for interpreting value for human beings.6 But these threats, if threats they are, are as yet scarcely imminent. While it is reasonable to suppose that the idea of nationhood should be under somewhat greater practical strain as a framework for organizing collective action in conditions of massive and (at the receiving end) largely involuntary external penetration of citizenship as well as with unpleasantly slack national labour markets, the strictly civic aspect of such conditions is still in most OECD countries more a fear about the future than a fact about the present.

Statehood 

Insofar as a sense of crisis emanates from the properties of these two key ideas, therefore, it is reasonable to assume that it must be coming less from a weakening in the appeals of the idea of the nation than from a lessening in the cogency (normative or practical) of the idea of the state.

Crisis at the periphery 

There are two main doubts about the state, both certainly as old as the concept itself, and each clearly foreshadowed in the historical experience of the miscellany of large-scale political units which preceded its full formulation and to which the concept has since been regularly applied (cf. chapter 4 above). The first is a doubt about the intentions of those who at any given time direct state power: a scepticism that these intentions are in the case in question (or usually, or often, or ever), as benign as they are fulsomely proclaimed to be. We can be confident in the face of this doubt, that there remain ample grounds for entertaining it; but we can be at least equally confident that the chances of the doubt's being in general better founded now than it has been for the last three and a half centuries are slight.7The second (and perhaps even weightier) doubt concerns the state's efficacy in relation to its expressed intentions: above all as a device for furnishing security to its subjects. Here too, while there continues to be massive reason for entertaining the doubt, it is inordinately unlikely that the grounds for doing so have strengthened greatly since the seventeenth century. Certainly the concept of state is applied more widely (and perhaps more promiscuously) to political units in the world today than it was in the days of Hobbes: not least for its convenience in imposing a minimal framework of order on social interactions and economic transactions which bind human populations ever closer together. In the settings of modern international law and international relations the sufficient conditions for applying the concept manifestly do not at present entail a level of practical efficacy in state performance adequate to guarantee the security of anyone. ome portion of the sense of crisis in the nation state today, accordingly, may well derive in this way from two types of threat to state legitimacy. The first, stemming principally from the diffusion of a variety of secular rationalist theories of political value and political possibility (cf. chapter 14 below; Dunn 1984; Dunn 1993, Conclusion), foments excessively high political expectations, and vents its disappointment at the failure of history to live up to them on the state powers which are (in fantasy at any rate) the most concrete facilities for at least attempting to realize them. It is inherently difficult to pin down a relation of this character (cf. Habermas 1976). But it remains a plausible diagnosis of anomalies within the modern understanding of politics, albeit more convincingly seen as a permanent dimension of vulnerability than as an at present especially dynamic source of novel hazard. As we have already noted, the second variety of threat to legitimacy, arising from the overextension of the category of the state, its relentless application to what are often grimly inappropriate referents, occurs principally at the periphery of the world political and economic system. The dismal realities to which the term 'state' frequently refers in these settings (President Mobutu on his river boat), do nothing for the majesty of the idea of the state. (They are not what Hobbes or Hegel had in mind.) But it is hard to believe that they inflict much damage upon its standing or authority closer to the centre of world political economy. (What would you expect of the Heart of Darkness?)

Crisis at the centre 

If there really is a contemporary crisis of the nation state, it must in the end be a crisis not of the periphery but of the centre. At that centre, too, there is good reason to suppose that it must stem not from diminishing intrinsic powers on the part of particular nation states9 but from a growing gap between the causal capabilities of even the more advanced nation states and the effective demands placed upon those powers. This is as we should expect. All power is relational. It is apparent enough that in many concrete ways the powers of advanced states today to carry out particular actions vastly exceed those of their predecessors. They can move their armed forces far more rapidly from place to place. They can communicate with (and spy upon) each other with a speed, intensity and amplitude which are wholly unprecedented. They can shift earth, raise buildings or unleash explosive power on a scale which no past ruler could have seriously imagined. But these awesome powers are not focused on fixed and stable targets. Indeed, now that the Cold War is over, they are no longer even aimed crucially at the rapidly rising powers of other human agencies. Instead, they need to be assessed (and to an increasing degree they are already coming to be assessed), in relation to a range of formidable new threats to human security of which we are belatedly becoming aware (cf. Hurrell & Kingsbury 1992). If there really is a contemporary crisis of the nation state (and not merely a transitory, quasi-cyclical decline in political self-confidence, prompted by recession or by reaction to the brief euphoria of 1989), this is where it must emanate from. There is no reason to assume any clear relation between the degree to which human populations at any time are aware of the threats which they face and the scale of those threats themselves. Neither political theory nor political science offers much special aid in judging that scale (see chapter 10 above). But, between them, they may reasonably hope to capture some aspects of the structures from which the threats arise. Two of these structures are essentially external to state agency: a product of global economic dynamics and ecological degradation. But one is itself in part a consequence of state action: not an immediate product of state agency itself, but an interactive effect between states, generated by the extremity of the challenges now posed by global economic dynamics and ecological pressure. It is hard to judge the acuity of all three threats, but easy to appreciate how each could readily exacerbate the others. Because of these two features of the situation, we can be reasonably confident at present that no one is in a position to assess accurately quite how severe the contemporary crisis of the nation state really is (or even whether the term 'crisis' is genuinely appropriate). But none of us should have much difficulty in seeing that the sense of crisis, however frivolously generated or insecurely grounded, may well turn out to be all too apposite. The economic threat has been most extensively explored. We can catch the subjective flavour of it clearly enough in the petulant tones of M. Balladur at the obsequies of the franc fort: cWe can't allow a situation to continue where so much money can change hands in a very short time and threaten a nation's security' {Financial Times, 13 August 1993, p. 1). (Those who live by the market need not be surprised if they prove to die by the market.) It is still difficult to judge the full impact of the vast expansion in trade flows, the dramatic increase in the scale and speed of capital movements, or the dizzy volatility of currency markets, on the capacity of state elites to realize their own purposes; not least because the starkly unintended consequences of market liberalization will certainly continue to promote vigorous attempts to reverse many of the changes that have produced these outcomes. The accents of M. Balladur are those of a humiliated (and politically exposed) representative of a peculiarly proud state. But they serve to epitomize the discomforts of an entire political class. We can trace the resulting stigmata of impotence already in many prominent political processes: the effective blunting of the social democratic project (cf. Esping-Anderson 1985); the recoil from European monetary union;10 the faltering of the Uruguay Round of the GATT (contrast Winham 1986); the sharpening (though ultimately contained) challenge under the Clinton presidency to the NAFTA agreements between Canada, Mexico and the United States. The central challenge of global economic liberalization is to the Keynesian conception of the welfare state; the promise., reaching back at least to Lorenz von Stein, to take full responsibility for the economic welfare of a given population through the deft exercise of the power of its state. The existing and anticipated unemployment levels of the OECD countries, and of western Europe in particular, are a notable setback not merely to Keynes's own hopes and expectations in the aftermath of the GeneralTheory (Clarke 1988), but also to the variety of expedients eventually deployed by other western governments in face of the Great Depression (cf. Barber 1985; Hall 1989), and still more to the levels of employment achieved and welfare publicly provided across most of western Europe over most of the period since the Second World War ended. Since there is such a clear elective affinity between the Keynesian conception of macroeconomic management to deliver popular welfare and the idea of the nation state (with its claim to embody a relatively intimate relation between ruler and ruled), it is unsurprising that these experiences should have spread anxiety well beyond the ranks of career politicians or state officials. Insofar as the political formula of the welfare state proves to be economically unsustainable (or even insofar as it proves to be unsustainable in the competitive political conditions of modern representative democracy (cf. Dunn 1992, Conclusion)), doubts about the normative legitimacy of capitalism which have dogged it throughout its history (and which have never been fully resolved even at a purely intellectual level - see chapter 7 above) will press against it once more, and with increasing force (Dunn 1990b, esp. Introduction and Conclusion). While they are most unlikely to place the state as a political format objectively in jeopardy, there is far greater likelihood of their disturbing the comfort of political incumbency (and thus of sharpening a sense of political crisis, not least against incumbents). A less immediate, but potentially more profound, threat to state viability is already beginning to arise from the challenges of environmental degradation. In the spheres of economics, the threat to the political standing of the nation state comes essentially from the tension between a national framework of sovereign authority and government responsibility and an uncompromisingly international field of economic causality. In the sphere of ecology, the national framework of sovereign power and government responsibility is also in some tension with ecological causality. (Acid rain, the ozone layer, still more global warming, are no respecters of boundaries.) But the principal residual obstacle to effective action in face of ecological hazard (over and above the key elements of sheer expense and painfully limited scientific comprehension) is less an incapacity on the part of governments to meet locally generated ecological threats within their own borders than a difficulty in cooperating effectively together to guarantee one another against the involuntary importation of pollution from elsewhere. Their problem, in this context, is not a deficiency in domestic power but a disinclination or incapacity for effective collective action. Even domestically, the ecological threat to state viability may in the end prove quite formidable. The scale of cost already palpably involved in any attempt to reverse many major instances of environmental degradation,11 the bitter conflicts which will certainly arise over distributing the costs of any such reversal, even the widespread doubts whether states can readily be equipped to find out what should best be done over matters where powerful interest groups are so drastically at risk, all ensure severe pressures on the state's capacity for effective agency. But the main ecological challenge to state viability is likely to come not from domestic limits to the state's power, but from the difficulties of securing effective and trustworthy international cooperation (Hurrell & Kingsbury 1992). The problem of collective action (Hardin 1982) permeates all politics. It is at least as easy to pick up in the domestic politics of the United States12 as it is in the general assembly of the United Nations. But the problems of collective action are peculiarly intractable where there is little realistic prospect of creating an effective enforcement agency and where the rational appeal of seeking to ride free is often devastatingly apparent. It is a complicated and unobvious question about many ecological issues whether or not the structure of costs and rewards of cooperation yields a clear balance of advantage for state actors to cooperate or to defect (Heal 1993): to form binding collective agreements to restrict environmental damage to one another and abide strictly by their terms, or to participate, in the spirit of Callicles,13 like skulking brigands, in the complex processes of global negotiations, affix their signatures slyly to such treaty documents as emerge from them, and resolutely ignore their terms thereafter, whenever it is more convenient to do so. One element of this complexity lies in the prospective costs and rewards of punctilious observance of the agreements themselves. But a second, which may in practice be every bit as important, lies in the strategic dilemmas delineated in the theory of games. What might be starkly irrational in the case of a single pay-off Prisoner's Dilemma could well be strategically optimal in a frequently repeated game, with no definite terminal point, and with conspicuous relations to many other concurrent repeated games. If human beings are to re-establish control over the ecological dangers of which they are now becoming aware, they will certainly need to act together more deftly and patiently than they have usually contrived to do in the past. For the present, there is no serious possibility of their either discovering or fashioning a discrete new instrument of action which can supplant the nation state in this struggle against the recalcitrance of nature. If they do eventually learn how to behave in a consequentially less self-destructive manner, there is little reason to expect that the sites of their learning will have any especially intimate relation to states as such. But the agencies required to implement this learning in the last instance are likely to continue for the foreseeable future to be states. Faute de mieux: either states or nothing. If states fail, by and large, to make, enforce, or abide by effective international agreements restraining the environmental destructiveness of modern economic activity, it may be an analytical error to blame them for this failure (Dunn 1990a, chapter 12).The fault may lie principally elsewhere: in the cognitive limitations (or intemperate and inveterate greed) of their subjects - the ultimately ruling demos - or in the fundamental features of the pay-off matrix of environmental costs and damage. But their subjects are unlikely to be prepared to acknowledge the former; and most of them will usually be unequipped to recognize the latter. At the receiving end, therefore, the consequences of state inaction or breach of faith are likely, as they come out, to appear both avoidable and discreditable. While this need in itself have no instantaneous effect on the material or organizational components of state power, it would quite rapidly impair the residual normative appeal of states as such. Every state is many other things too; but the key feature of each state is that it is a potential structure for political action. Damage to the normative appeal of a state is not merely damage to an idea. It also impairs (and can at the limit simply eliminate) the capacity of a state to serve as a structure of political action. If there is a crisis of the nation state today, it cannot result merely from speculative guesses about future possibilities. But even if it is right to conclude that there is no clearly delineated crisis of the nation state today (no objective feature of its location which explains why it must now be in crisis)3 that is no guarantee that there will not be such a crisis tomorrow. We do not yet know that the political challenge of arresting environmental degradation is any threat at all to the nation state as a format for political life or political action. But just in case it does prove to pose such a threat, we would be well advised to consider that possibility in advance. That at least would give us an opportunity to see why exactly it might do so., while there was still time to do something about it.