In the early years of the twenty-first century, some have called for an end to the nation-state, and an end to its role as the primary structuring element of the political world. Setting aside polemics - for or against this demand - the questions remain: How would the world appear without the nation-state? How would the world be organized? If the nation-state did not shape the geopolitical system, what would?
History gives us a clue. The nation-state is the union of ‘nation’ (i.e., an ethnic or cultural group) and ‘state’ (i.e., a geographically-defined territory with a government). The alternative to a nation-state, as A.J.P. Taylor writes, is a dynasty:
The Habsburg lands were not bound together either by geography or by nationality. They have sometimes been described as the lands of the valley of the Danube. How could this include the Netherlands, the Breisgau, and northern Italy? Or in the nineteenth century, Galicia, Bosnia, the Bukovina, and even Bohemia? The Habsburgs themselves were in origin a German dynasty. They added a first a Spanish and later an Italian element, without becoming anchored to a single region or people; they were the last possessors of the shadowy universal monarchy of the Middle Ages and inherited from it a cosmopolitan character. The inhabitants of Vienna, their capital city, were Germans; this was their nearest approach to a national appearance. In other countries dynasties are episodes in the history of the people; in the Habsburg Empire peoples are a complication in the history of the dynasty. The Habsburg lands acquired in time a common culture and, to some extent, a common economic character: theses were the creation, not the creators, of the dynasty. No other family has endured so long or left so deep a mark upon Europe: The Habsburgs were the greatest dynasty of modern history, and the history of central Europe revolves round them, not they round it.
The Habsburg Dynasty, although it survived well into the modern era, was in many ways the direct antithesis of the modern nation-state. The Habsburgs were supranational and supracultural. The citizens or residents of the Habsburg realm had only this one thing in common: they were the subjects of the dynasty.
Geographically, the dynasty could change its shape without changing its character, because its essence was not derived from the lands which it governed, nor from the cultures of the peoples of those lands.
The Habsburgs developed their own institutional culture, originating in and from the administrative needs of the monarchy, and imposed that pattern onto its varied holdings. To that extent, a Habsburg culture could be said to exist. But the regional influences - Bohemians and Magyars, Bavarians and Galicians and Slovakians - existed within monarchy.
Such local cultures were permitted, so long as they did not interfere with the management of the royal and imperial business. (In the matter of which languages would be used for official matters, cultural matters did threaten to interfere with dynastic administration. In those cases, heated debates and diplomatic maneuvering reached intense levels.)
For those who live in the early twenty-first century and who long for the end of the nation-state and its role in shaping the geopolitics of the planet, a look at nineteenth-century Austria-Hungary, i.e., a look at the workings of the Habsburg monarchy, offers a vision of how a world without nation-states might function.
