No one saw it coming—that the next big thing of the 21st century would be the nation-state, an idea from the 17th. Yet it has suddenly become a global phenomenon—a driving force of politics in the U.S. and around the world and the subject of intense intellectual debate. The news has even come to Harvard, where a professor of history has written a book about American nationhood, and a professor of economics says that “there is something special about the nation-state—it creates reciprocal obligations that don’t exist across national borders.”
There is, to be sure, a resistance. One salvo against the organizers of this week’s National Conservatism Conference in Washington accuses us of injecting “a malignant form of nationalism . . . into the American body politic” and said we “need to be mercilessly defeated on the battlefield of ideas as if September 1, 1939”—the day Germany invaded Poland—“were approaching.”
But in general, the mood has moved through the stages of grief from denial to anger to acceptance—acceptance that the nation-state is alive and well, not about to die and make way for global progressivism...
Read the full article in the Wall Street Journal "here":