Quotes About Nation-states

Nation-states like war; city-states like commerce; families like stability; and individuals like entertainment

Until recent history, the central state represented about 5 percent of the economy. ...and further, governments were sufficiently distracted by war to leave economic affairs to businessmen. The contagious creation of nation-states in the late nineteenth century led to what we saw with the two world wars and their sequels.

there is a crucial difference between a one-state solution and a binational state. In general, nation-states have been imposed with substantial violence and repression for one reason—because they seek to force varied and complex populations into a single mold.

Modernity has been largely shaped for Jews by three momentous experiences: the acquisition of citizenship by individual Jews in secular nation-states, the destruction of one-third of Jewry in the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel.

At least Tsar Alexander III understood that the game now being played was for the highest stakes. When Giers asked him, '...what would we gain by helping the french destroy Germany?' he replied: 'what we would gain would be that Germany, as such, would disappear. It would break up into a number of small, weak states, the way it used to be'.

Organizations, whether they are nonprofits or enterprise, need to be aware that nation-states are coming after them for political espionage, economic espionage, or destructive attacks.

Starrett (1996) argued that, because we inhabit a global community, our civic responsibilities transcend the borders of nation-states.

When a theological world view dominated, deviance was sin; when the nation-states emerged from the decay of feudalism, most deviance became designated as crime; and in our own scientifically oriented world, various forms of deviance are designated increasingly as medical problems. Thus we view the medical paradigm as the ascending paradigm for deviance designations in our postindustrial society.

Yet in Germany no less than the United States, the political meaning of genocide has never been widely understood. Both populations have, for the most part, denounced genocide as a racist act, but neither has recognized that it was also a productive one, whose outcome is the nation-states in which they live.

Restoring trust, reinventing political parties, finding new ways in which average citizens can meaningfully participate in the political process, creating new mechanisms of effective governance, limiting the worst impacts of checks and balances while averting excessive concentrations of unaccountable power, and enhancing the capacity of nation-states to work together should be the central political goals of our time.