Nationalism: the greatest enemy to happiness today

International Law: Part 1 – Nationalism

     "Wherein", asks C.E.M. Joad in 1939, "is to be found the greatest enemy to the happiness of contemporary man?" In poverty? In pain? In the wickedness of the human heart? Possibly and perhaps. But these have oppressed men in all times; they were not distinctive of 1939. Twentieth century man (Joad suggested) suffered more from the unchecked power of the Nation State, than from pain, poverty, or personal brutality.

      "The Nation State regards itself as the sole arbiter of right and wrong, claiming to be both judge and jury in its own cause, acknowledges no law to govern is relations with other States and no morality in restraint of its designs upon its neighbours. Over the lives and liberties of its citizens it exercises an absolute control. It requires of them a willingness to kill other human beings whom they have never seen, whenever it deems the mass slaughter of the members of some other State to be desirable, and conceives that its welfare may be promoted by exacting from them the most horrible sacrifices, in order that they may harm the citizens of its alleged enemy.....

     "It tramples upon the liberties of individuals in order to establish its independence. While proclaiming its determination to be free, it deprives its citizens of their freedom......

     "The State is an anachronism. With its trade restrictions and tariffs, its customs and quotas, it sets up barriers between itself and its neighbours and seeks to the best of its ability to impede the manifest drive of our civilization towards unity. ...(driven by)...the abolition of distance.....It is only 150 years ago that it took a man as long to travel from York to London as it now takes him to fly from London to New York. The future holds in store advances no less remarkable than those of the past......... Today we can fly in the air; tomorrow we shall fly in the stratosphere." (Joad writing, we should remember, in 1939).

     I admire Joad's clarity, and vision. So much he got right! Yet the shrinking of distance that has seen a man walk on the moon, and that has sent this week a rocket to land on Mars (!!), has not yet welded Europe into a Federal State, nor abolished the concept of protective tariffs. At least this seems to be the case in the slower-moving parts of the Anglo Saxon world, like Derbyshire and Detroit. 

(This is the beginning of an investigation into the slow process by which we evolve International Law; a folk process; almost a religious process. )