Allow me a crude caricature of a type of anthropology: Individuals are conceived as isolated atoms of impenetrable human stuff. We bump into each other, but we can’t penetrate past the hard outer shell. Negatively, this anthropology rests on a denial of communion.
Allow me a second crude generalization, a political one: Politics is anthropology writ large. Thus, nations are also conceived as isolated atoms of impenetrable ethnic stuff, with hard boundaries of language, culture, blood, and territory. Nations bump into each other, often violently, and the best we can hope for is an equilibrium of violence and threatened violence that we call a balance of power. What’s impossible, even wicked, is the effort to cultivate a communion of nations.
Caricatures are rhetorically useful. They can be substantively useful, insofar as they distil distorted instincts of thought and action and capture the nub of a viewpoint. Caricatures at least provide a contrast-term against which to develop a positive alternative. So – and this is my third and final request for indulgence – allow me to offer a series of arguments against the atomistic conception of nationhood that underlies hard forms of “nationalism.” This will clear some ground to make a positive case for pursuing a communion of nations, a Christian one; in a word, Christendom.
First, a historical argument. In his contribution to this Theopolis Conversation, Rich Bledsoe summarizes Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s backward-Bible autobiography of Western man, in order to suggest that we’re at an epochal moment in Western history. Trump plays Samson, the last defender of the old order. Like Samson, he fails, but also prepares the way for a new order. Rich thinks Trump was the final defender of the Protestant world of nation-states, which is now giving way to two rival city-centered global networks, the Babel of secular globalization and the global church. Sexuality is at the center of the conflict, as each form of globalization is represented by a civic woman – Babylon, the mother or harlots v. the new Jerusalem, the bride descending from heaven.
I find Rich’s suggestions very suggestive. But rather than entering a new age of global homogenization, we may be entering an age of international fragmentation. In a recent interview, John Gray suggests the world is breaking up into large zones that he calls “civilization states.” These won’t be merely great powers, but great powers that operate by non-Western public norms and promote these norms within their enormous spheres of influence. Civilization states may disconnect from one another. China already restricts access to the internet, and Western states may someday do the same on a large scale. Since the pandemic, mass mobility has decreased and may remain depressed for some time. Gray predicts we will enter a multi-polar world, an anarchical geopolitical disorder similar to the world of the late nineteenth century. Meanwhile, Gray expects anti-liberal movements to grow stronger within liberal democracies: On the one hand, “woke” movements, which are almost entirely a Western assault on Western sins and traditions; on the other hand, various forms of alt-rightism who worship the strong gods of paganism, blood, soil, and masculine honor.[i]
Whether or not Gray is correct about the future, it seems that the era of nation-states is less than it appears. As Peter Turchin has argued, globalization is not a recent but a recurring historical phenomenon. Beginning in antiquity, the human race “has experienced other periods of heightened long-distance connectivity that resulted in massive long-distance movements of goods, people, ideas, genes, cultivars, and pathogens.”[ii] During the Age of Discovery, “all major population centers of the world, both in Afro-Eurasia and the Americas were connected by trade and conquest.”[iii] Expansions have been followed by contractions. Populations decline, connections across continents diminish, and the movement of goods, people, and ideas slows or ceases. In short, “long-distance trade/information networks have a tendency to ‘pulsate’ – expand and contract,”[iv] typically in cycles two or three centuries in length. The pulses are driven by interactions of “demographic, economic, and political components of social systems.”[v]
Though Turchin warns we cannot simply overlay previous cycles on the present, twentieth-century globalization does resemble earlier periods of expansion and stagflation. The last half of the century witnessed “a massive population growth that has slowed down in the past decade, suggesting that we may be approaching the peak of global population.” In addition, “infectious diseases have dramatically increased in incidence during the twentieth century, reaching a peak during the 1980s.” These trends raise “the possibility that studying previous globalizations may not be a purely academic exercise.”[vi]
Turchin’s analysis suggests we should see the age of the nation-state as an eddy within the dominant historical stream of globalization. By the time the European nation-state system emerged (say, for convenience, in 1648), English colonists had already settled in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, Spain had century-old colonies in Central and South America, and the Dutch had established trading posts in India. From the first, nation-states pursued various forms of imperialism. The age of the nation-state has always also, perhaps primarily, been the age of European imperialism.
Second, a historical-theoretical argument. As both Edmund Waldstein and Alastair Roberts point out in their contributions, it’s ghastly difficult to distinguish nations from empires. I agree with both Edmund Waldstein’s historical criticisms of Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism and Alastair Roberts’s biblical ones. As Alastair says, Hazony’s contrast of nations and empires is “tendentious” because “nations and empires have often been complicatedly intertwined and far from straightforwardly opposed.” As Pater Edmund notes, this is true in part because modern nation-states are often the product of imperial conquest of one sub-group over others. It’s not so long ago that Germany and Italy became unified nations; at certain points in the middle ages, the English king held more territory in France than the French king. Hazony says nations come into existence either from the free association of clans or a “despotic” subjugation of tribes and clans by a conqueror.[vii] But many states have come into existence due to a combination of coercion, incentives, and propaganda. Where does Britain fit into Hazony’s scheme: Empire, peaceful uniter of clans, despot? You’d get different answers, no doubt, depending on whether you asked a member of the Scottish National Party or a London banker.
Hazony’s sharp dichotomy also underplays the importance of cross-cultural effects, including the mutual effect of center and periphery. Tea, we hardly need reminding, isn’t an indigenous product of Great Britain, nor is curry. Nations are permeable in both directions, as exporters and importers of goods, people, fashions, tastes, and customs.
Third, a theoretical argument. John Milbank and Adrian Pabst go further than muddying the distinction between nations and empires, declaring that “all power tends to become imperial.” They enumerate three reasons for this drift toward empire:
to stabilise volatile “backyards” (e.g. the United States in Central and Latin America; China in the South China Sea; Turkey and Russia in the wider Caucasus and Eurasia), or to secure natural resources and market outlets (e.g. the United States worldwide; the European Union’s trade agreements; China’s expansion into Africa) or else . . . to pursue a “civilising mission” (e.g. the US export of democracy by “hard” and “soft” power, or the European Union’s promotion of human rights, or China’s neo-Confucian project of global harmony.[viii]
I will gloss this summary with a further example: The US hasn’t just stabilized our own backyard, but, given its early ambition to be a leader in global commerce, other people’s backyards. How else do the “shores of Tripoli” merit an appearance in the Marine Hymn?
Consequences, negative. Once we have broken down this dichotomy, Rusty Reno’s hard-headed practicality becomes less compelling. Rusty is right to warn that theoretical constructs of Christian politics can become “a theological self-therapy for coping with powerlessness.” But I suspect he’s being somewhat cagey in his claim that he has no general theory of Christian politics. Without some vision, however hazy, of a political telos, it’s hard to tell whether the nudging he wants to do constitutes progress or regress.
More fundamentally, Rusty assumes a dichotomy of nation and globalism that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Caught in this binary, he thinks “a practical integralist has two choices” – dialogue with the existing secular imperialists or encouraging opposition among dissenting polities, especially nations. That forecloses the option of cultivating an alternative structure of global association and global power. The dichotomy of empire and nation occludes political imagination.
Consequences, positive. Nations aren’t solid and discrete political entities. They have a double tendency to assert themselves beyond their borders and receive “alien” products from outside. A real-world international system should reckon with the permeability of nations, which means aiming for something that is neither nationalist nor globalist. Milbank and Pabst describe this intermediate system as a “commonwealth of nations” that gives priority to personal and cultural associations rather than to states, official channels of diplomacy, political treaties, or trade agreements. Drawing on Edmund Burke, they envision a “family of nations and peoples” that “can embed the society of states and markets,” where peoples are linked by “customs, manners, and habits of life.”[ix]
Within a commonwealth of nations, or a commonwealth of commonwealths, the global church can play a critical role. It offers a political place to stand. Christians and churches are both inside and outside individual nations. An American Christian labors in hope for the good of America, but the good he seeks cannot be limited to the American good. Churches should have the political distance to see and protest America’s injustices, to advocate for the good of other nations, to forge deep bonds of communion with brothers and sisters of every tribe and tongue.
Fostering the communion of nations offers plenty of opportunities for the practical integralist. Opportunities abound. In 1942, Christopher Dawson’s worried about the drift of international order toward bedlam, and pinpointed the spiritual source of disorder:
The modern world is being driven along at the same time in two opposite directions. On the one hand the nations are being brought into closer contact by the advance of scientific and technical achievement; the limits of space and time that held them asunder are being contracted or abolished, and the world has become physically one as never before. On the other hand, the nations are being separated from one another by a process of intensive organization which weakens the spiritual links that bound men together irrespective of political frontiers and concentrates the whole energy of society on the attainment of a collective purpose, so as inevitably to cause a collision with the collective will of their societies.[x]
Christians who forge spiritual links across national boundaries are strengthening the sinews of the body of Christ. They also, Dawson suggests, play a crucial geopolitical role, counteracting the centrifugal forces of contemporary politics and creating international networks outside official channels. In her recent To Bring the Good News to All Nations, Lauren Francis Turek recounts a more recent example: Concerted efforts by American Evangelicals on behalf of persecuted believers in the Soviet bloc and victims of the global sex trade.[xi] When the Cold War ended, the bonds remained, fostering East-West friendship and collaboration. Efforts on behalf of persecuted Chinese Christians today could have a similar impact, planting seeds of future Sino-African alliances founded on a Christian-Confucian synthesis. To dismiss churchly initiatives as minor-league “private” efforts is to adopt a politics of sight rather than a politics of faith.
Through the ages of Western Christendom, the Papacy was often a force for peace, but the church today needs to become something more like leaven. As it seeps across borders, the communion that is the catholic church witnesses to, and can be a means for realizing, a communion of nations, which might mature into a new Christendom.
Peter Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute.
[i] Freddie Sayers interview with John Gray, LockdownTV, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13hdpSvHCyI
[ii] Turchin, “Modeling Periodic Waves of Integration in the Afro-Eurasian world-system” in George Modelski, et. al., eds., Globalization as Evolutionary Process: Modeling Global Change (London: Routledge, 2008) 163. See also Turchin, Secular Cycles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). I am suspicious of the neo-Malthusian overtones of Turchin’s theory.
[iii] Turchin, “Modeling,” 163.
[iv] Turchin, “Modeling,” 163.
[v] Turchin, “Modeling.”
[vi] Turchin, “Modeling,” 188-9. In 2010, he put his point more boldly: “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe.” Earlier in 2020, he explained how he reached that bleak 2010 assessment: He and a colleague “analyzed the data on a variety of instability indicators and found that, indeed, the trends for almost all of them went up after 2010” (Turchin, “Political instability may be a contributor in the coming decade,” Nature, February 3, 2010, available at https://www.nature.com/articles/463608a).
[vii] Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism (New York: Basic Books, 2018) 80-81.
[viii] John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) 332.
[ix] Milbank and Pabst, The Politics of Virtue, 358.
[x] Dawson, The Judgment of Nations (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1942) 52.
[xi] Turek, To Bring the Good News To All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations (Ithaca: Cornell, 2020). See also my summary of Turek’s book at Firstthings.com (February 12, 2021).
Allow me a crude caricature of a type of anthropology: Individuals are conceived as isolated atoms of impenetrable human stuff. We bump into each other, but we can’t penetrate past the hard outer shell. Negatively, this anthropology rests on a denial of communion.
Allow me a second crude generalization, a political one: Politics is anthropology writ large. Thus, nations are also conceived as isolated atoms of impenetrable ethnic stuff, with hard boundaries of language, culture, blood, and territory. Nations bump into each other, often violently, and the best we can hope for is an equilibrium of violence and threatened violence that we call a balance of power. What’s impossible, even wicked, is the effort to cultivate a communion of nations.
Caricatures are rhetorically useful. They can be substantively useful, insofar as they distil distorted instincts of thought and action and capture the nub of a viewpoint. Caricatures at least provide a contrast-term against which to develop a positive alternative. So – and this is my third and final request for indulgence – allow me to offer a series of arguments against the atomistic conception of nationhood that underlies hard forms of “nationalism.” This will clear some ground to make a positive case for pursuing a communion of nations, a Christian one; in a word, Christendom.
First, a historical argument. In his contribution to this Theopolis Conversation, Rich Bledsoe summarizes Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s backward-Bible autobiography of Western man, in order to suggest that we’re at an epochal moment in Western history. Trump plays Samson, the last defender of the old order. Like Samson, he fails, but also prepares the way for a new order. Rich thinks Trump was the final defender of the Protestant world of nation-states, which is now giving way to two rival city-centered global networks, the Babel of secular globalization and the global church. Sexuality is at the center of the conflict, as each form of globalization is represented by a civic woman – Babylon, the mother or harlots v. the new Jerusalem, the bride descending from heaven.
I find Rich’s suggestions very suggestive. But rather than entering a new age of global homogenization, we may be entering an age of international fragmentation. In a recent interview, John Gray suggests the world is breaking up into large zones that he calls “civilization states.” These won’t be merely great powers, but great powers that operate by non-Western public norms and promote these norms within their enormous spheres of influence. Civilization states may disconnect from one another. China already restricts access to the internet, and Western states may someday do the same on a large scale. Since the pandemic, mass mobility has decreased and may remain depressed for some time. Gray predicts we will enter a multi-polar world, an anarchical geopolitical disorder similar to the world of the late nineteenth century. Meanwhile, Gray expects anti-liberal movements to grow stronger within liberal democracies: On the one hand, “woke” movements, which are almost entirely a Western assault on Western sins and traditions; on the other hand, various forms of alt-rightism who worship the strong gods of paganism, blood, soil, and masculine honor.[i]
Whether or not Gray is correct about the future, it seems that the era of nation-states is less than it appears. As Peter Turchin has argued, globalization is not a recent but a recurring historical phenomenon. Beginning in antiquity, the human race “has experienced other periods of heightened long-distance connectivity that resulted in massive long-distance movements of goods, people, ideas, genes, cultivars, and pathogens.”[ii] During the Age of Discovery, “all major population centers of the world, both in Afro-Eurasia and the Americas were connected by trade and conquest.”[iii] Expansions have been followed by contractions. Populations decline, connections across continents diminish, and the movement of goods, people, and ideas slows or ceases. In short, “long-distance trade/information networks have a tendency to ‘pulsate’ – expand and contract,”[iv] typically in cycles two or three centuries in length. The pulses are driven by interactions of “demographic, economic, and political components of social systems.”[v]
Though Turchin warns we cannot simply overlay previous cycles on the present, twentieth-century globalization does resemble earlier periods of expansion and stagflation. The last half of the century witnessed “a massive population growth that has slowed down in the past decade, suggesting that we may be approaching the peak of global population.” In addition, “infectious diseases have dramatically increased in incidence during the twentieth century, reaching a peak during the 1980s.” These trends raise “the possibility that studying previous globalizations may not be a purely academic exercise.”[vi]
Turchin’s analysis suggests we should see the age of the nation-state as an eddy within the dominant historical stream of globalization. By the time the European nation-state system emerged (say, for convenience, in 1648), English colonists had already settled in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, Spain had century-old colonies in Central and South America, and the Dutch had established trading posts in India. From the first, nation-states pursued various forms of imperialism. The age of the nation-state has always also, perhaps primarily, been the age of European imperialism.
Second, a historical-theoretical argument. As both Edmund Waldstein and Alastair Roberts point out in their contributions, it’s ghastly difficult to distinguish nations from empires. I agree with both Edmund Waldstein’s historical criticisms of Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism and Alastair Roberts’s biblical ones. As Alastair says, Hazony’s contrast of nations and empires is “tendentious” because “nations and empires have often been complicatedly intertwined and far from straightforwardly opposed.” As Pater Edmund notes, this is true in part because modern nation-states are often the product of imperial conquest of one sub-group over others. It’s not so long ago that Germany and Italy became unified nations; at certain points in the middle ages, the English king held more territory in France than the French king. Hazony says nations come into existence either from the free association of clans or a “despotic” subjugation of tribes and clans by a conqueror.[vii] But many states have come into existence due to a combination of coercion, incentives, and propaganda. Where does Britain fit into Hazony’s scheme: Empire, peaceful uniter of clans, despot? You’d get different answers, no doubt, depending on whether you asked a member of the Scottish National Party or a London banker.
Hazony’s sharp dichotomy also underplays the importance of cross-cultural effects, including the mutual effect of center and periphery. Tea, we hardly need reminding, isn’t an indigenous product of Great Britain, nor is curry. Nations are permeable in both directions, as exporters and importers of goods, people, fashions, tastes, and customs.
Third, a theoretical argument. John Milbank and Adrian Pabst go further than muddying the distinction between nations and empires, declaring that “all power tends to become imperial.” They enumerate three reasons for this drift toward empire:
to stabilise volatile “backyards” (e.g. the United States in Central and Latin America; China in the South China Sea; Turkey and Russia in the wider Caucasus and Eurasia), or to secure natural resources and market outlets (e.g. the United States worldwide; the European Union’s trade agreements; China’s expansion into Africa) or else . . . to pursue a “civilising mission” (e.g. the US export of democracy by “hard” and “soft” power, or the European Union’s promotion of human rights, or China’s neo-Confucian project of global harmony.[viii]
I will gloss this summary with a further example: The US hasn’t just stabilized our own backyard, but, given its early ambition to be a leader in global commerce, other people’s backyards. How else do the “shores of Tripoli” merit an appearance in the Marine Hymn?
Consequences, negative. Once we have broken down this dichotomy, Rusty Reno’s hard-headed practicality becomes less compelling. Rusty is right to warn that theoretical constructs of Christian politics can become “a theological self-therapy for coping with powerlessness.” But I suspect he’s being somewhat cagey in his claim that he has no general theory of Christian politics. Without some vision, however hazy, of a political telos, it’s hard to tell whether the nudging he wants to do constitutes progress or regress.
More fundamentally, Rusty assumes a dichotomy of nation and globalism that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Caught in this binary, he thinks “a practical integralist has two choices” – dialogue with the existing secular imperialists or encouraging opposition among dissenting polities, especially nations. That forecloses the option of cultivating an alternative structure of global association and global power. The dichotomy of empire and nation occludes political imagination.
Consequences, positive. Nations aren’t solid and discrete political entities. They have a double tendency to assert themselves beyond their borders and receive “alien” products from outside. A real-world international system should reckon with the permeability of nations, which means aiming for something that is neither nationalist nor globalist. Milbank and Pabst describe this intermediate system as a “commonwealth of nations” that gives priority to personal and cultural associations rather than to states, official channels of diplomacy, political treaties, or trade agreements. Drawing on Edmund Burke, they envision a “family of nations and peoples” that “can embed the society of states and markets,” where peoples are linked by “customs, manners, and habits of life.”[ix]
Within a commonwealth of nations, or a commonwealth of commonwealths, the global church can play a critical role. It offers a political place to stand. Christians and churches are both inside and outside individual nations. An American Christian labors in hope for the good of America, but the good he seeks cannot be limited to the American good. Churches should have the political distance to see and protest America’s injustices, to advocate for the good of other nations, to forge deep bonds of communion with brothers and sisters of every tribe and tongue.
Fostering the communion of nations offers plenty of opportunities for the practical integralist. Opportunities abound. In 1942, Christopher Dawson’s worried about the drift of international order toward bedlam, and pinpointed the spiritual source of disorder:
The modern world is being driven along at the same time in two opposite directions. On the one hand the nations are being brought into closer contact by the advance of scientific and technical achievement; the limits of space and time that held them asunder are being contracted or abolished, and the world has become physically one as never before. On the other hand, the nations are being separated from one another by a process of intensive organization which weakens the spiritual links that bound men together irrespective of political frontiers and concentrates the whole energy of society on the attainment of a collective purpose, so as inevitably to cause a collision with the collective will of their societies.[x]
Christians who forge spiritual links across national boundaries are strengthening the sinews of the body of Christ. They also, Dawson suggests, play a crucial geopolitical role, counteracting the centrifugal forces of contemporary politics and creating international networks outside official channels. In her recent To Bring the Good News to All Nations, Lauren Francis Turek recounts a more recent example: Concerted efforts by American Evangelicals on behalf of persecuted believers in the Soviet bloc and victims of the global sex trade.[xi] When the Cold War ended, the bonds remained, fostering East-West friendship and collaboration. Efforts on behalf of persecuted Chinese Christians today could have a similar impact, planting seeds of future Sino-African alliances founded on a Christian-Confucian synthesis. To dismiss churchly initiatives as minor-league “private” efforts is to adopt a politics of sight rather than a politics of faith.
Through the ages of Western Christendom, the Papacy was often a force for peace, but the church today needs to become something more like leaven. As it seeps across borders, the communion that is the catholic church witnesses to, and can be a means for realizing, a communion of nations, which might mature into a new Christendom.
Peter Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute.
[i] Freddie Sayers interview with John Gray, LockdownTV, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13hdpSvHCyI
[ii] Turchin, “Modeling Periodic Waves of Integration in the Afro-Eurasian world-system” in George Modelski, et. al., eds., Globalization as Evolutionary Process: Modeling Global Change (London: Routledge, 2008) 163. See also Turchin, Secular Cycles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). I am suspicious of the neo-Malthusian overtones of Turchin’s theory.
[iii] Turchin, “Modeling,” 163.
[iv] Turchin, “Modeling,” 163.
[v] Turchin, “Modeling.”
[vi] Turchin, “Modeling,” 188-9. In 2010, he put his point more boldly: “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe.” Earlier in 2020, he explained how he reached that bleak 2010 assessment: He and a colleague “analyzed the data on a variety of instability indicators and found that, indeed, the trends for almost all of them went up after 2010” (Turchin, “Political instability may be a contributor in the coming decade,” Nature, February 3, 2010, available at https://www.nature.com/articles/463608a).
[vii] Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism (New York: Basic Books, 2018) 80-81.
[viii] John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) 332.
[ix] Milbank and Pabst, The Politics of Virtue, 358.
[x] Dawson, The Judgment of Nations (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1942) 52.
[xi] Turek, To Bring the Good News To All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations (Ithaca: Cornell, 2020). See also my summary of Turek’s book at Firstthings.com (February 12, 2021).
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