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Updated: August 9, 2024
But the nation-states of Northern Europe, who had borne the burden and heat of the Crusades, were less affected by them, politically or otherwise, than were the city-states of Italy. Scattered broadcast over the territory of every medieval state are towns endowed with special privileges, and ruled by special magistrates.
Former subject peoples were free to consider plans for their collective futures and to assume responsibility for their relationships with one another through the instrumentality of the new nation-states created by the Versailles settlement. The same ingenuity that had gone into producing weapons of destruction was being turned to the challenging, but rewarding, tasks of economic expansion.
The nationalist solution encouraged the denizens of the Balkan to adopt national identities, to develop national myths, to invent a national history, and to aspire to establish modern nation-states. The examples of Germany and, especially, Greece and Italy were often evoked. For a detailed treatment of this theme see "Herzl's Butlers". The competing solution was reform.
The immediate responsibility of establishing world government rests on the shoulders of the nation-states. What the Bahá’í community is called on to do, at this stage in humanity’s social and political evolution, is to contribute by every means in its power to the creation of conditions that will encourage and facilitate this enormously demanding undertaking.
In contrast with these giant empires, the nation-states of Europe felt themselves out of scale, just as the Italian cities in the sixteenth century must have felt themselves out of scale in comparison with the new nation-states of Spain and France.
Ironically, even the half-hearted efforts made to protect ethnic minorities living in the newly created nation-states proved eventually to be little more than weapons to be used in Europe’s continuing fratricidal conflicts.
In the nineteenth century Europe began to be unable to supply her own needs in regard to the products of the temperate zone, and therefore to desire control over other areas of this type; but until then it was mainly in regard to the tropical or sub-tropical areas that the commercial motive formed the predominant element in the imperial rivalries of the nation-states.
My distrust of the State in economic reform is based on the belief that governments in great nation-states, even representative governments, are not malleable by the general will. They are too easily dominated by the holders of economic power, are, in fact, always dominated by aristocracies with land or by the aristocracies of wealth. It is the hand at the helm guides the ship.
In the exultation which follows the achievement of national unity each of the nation-states in turn, if the circumstances were at all favourable, has been tempted to impose its power upon its neighbours, or even to seek the mastery of the world. From these attempts have sprung the greatest of the European wars. From them also have arisen all the colonial empires of the European states.
Initially, it seemed that the vision of the future conceived by Woodrow Wilson would now be realized. In part, this proved to be the case as subject peoples throughout Europe gained the freedom to work out their own destinies through the emergence from the ruin of the former empires of a series of new nation-states.
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