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Quote by Nathan W. Morris

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Nathan W. Morris

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“That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state.”

“Far from addressing the Soviet nationalities question, the Afghan adventure had, as was by now all too clear, exacerbated it. If the USSR faced an intractable set of national minorities, this was in part a problem of its own making: it was Lenin and his successors, after all, who invented the various subject ‘nations’ to whom they duly assigned regions and republics. In an echo of imperial practices elsewhere, Moscow had encouraged the emergence—in places where nationality and nationhood were unheard of fifty years earlier—of institutions and intelligentsias grouped around a national urban center or ‘capital.”

“There is no reason to believe that political agency must solely be located in the modern state, and Nietzsche does not hold such a view. He instead locates his political project in the transition away from the nation-state. Indeed, the decay of the state signals the superseding of the modern question of political philosophy as framed by Leiter: the theory of the state and its legitimacy. The new question for Nietzsche will revolve around determining which institutions can fullfill the Platonic mission of producing the new Platos that the culture-state failed to achieve.”

“The nation-state furnished an ideology of national identity that made it easier to rally people for military adventures that their rulers considered profitable. The “common language and culture” of each of these new entities was in no way a natural human community like early tribes and bands. Rather, they were created by brutal conquest such as that of the British over the Irish, Scots, and the Welsh, or the Castilian Spaniards’ conquest of the Basques and the Catalans.”

“THE MIDDLE OF WHAT? EAST OF WHERE? THE REGION’S VERY name is based on a European view of the world, and it is a European view of the region that shaped it. The Europeans used ink to draw lines on maps: they were lines that did not exist in reality and created some of the most artificial borders the world has seen. An attempt is now being made to redraw them in blood.”

“Well, in my view what would ultimately be necessary would be a breakdown of the nation-state system―because I think that's not a viable system. It's not necessarily the natural form of human organization; in fact, it's a European invention pretty much. The modern nation-state system basically developed in Europe since the medieval period, and it was extremely difficult for it to develop: Europe has a very bloody history, an extremely savage and bloody history, with constant massive wars and so on, and that was all part of an effort to establish the nation-state system. It has virtually no relation to the way people live, or to their associations, or anything else particularly, so it had to be established by force. And it was established by centuries of bloody warfare. That warfare ended in 1945―and the only reason it ended is because the next war was going to destroy everything. So it ended in 1945―we hope; if it didn't, it will destroy everything.”