The world is re-arming. It’s tempting to see this as part of a broader revival of nationalism driven by populists like Modi and Putin. On the contrary, argues Faisal Devji, it is a crucial part of a slow-motion collapse of nation states. Armed forces lie at the heart of national sovereignty, yet from Israel to India they are hiring mercenaries and allowing their centralized command structures to crumble. Nations are thereby ceding the monopoly of violence on which they depend to increasingly autonomous, unwieldy militaries. 

It has become a banality to suggest that nationalism is enjoying a revival around the world. This return is often seen as a repudiation of globalization, which not so long ago was held to be the defining characteristic of the post-Cold War period. Premised upon the vast expansion of capital, commodities, and communications across national boundaries, globalization is said to have increased both the anxieties of ordinary citizens and the growing inequalities between them. From the outsourcing of entire industries abroad to the arrival of migrants from distant lands, globalization had ceased to represent any kind of utopian future by the end of the twentieth century. Instead, it came to be associated with negative developments, from transnational terrorism to borderless pandemics.

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Nationalism, we are often told, has re-emerged with the rise of populism which everywhere promises to recover the people’s sovereignty over their country. Brexit and the Trump presidency are proffered as the chief examples of this process on either side of the Atlantic, followed by widespread attempts to re-shore the production of critical materials after the COVID pandemic as well as to lessen the West’s dependence on China. But are we really living through an era of national renewal, or do the events and movements that announce it actually represent yet another example of the nation-state’s slow collapse? Perhaps we can arrive at some kind of answer by looking at the re-militarization that has recently taken states around the world by storm. For nothing is more crucial to national sovereignty than its armed forces.

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Yet national armies, to say nothing about the idea of a nation in arms, have never really existed in history.

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Re-militarization occurs when new threats come into view, whether Russia and China for the West or the US and Europe for others. It also signals the collapse of the international order, which since 9/11 has lost the ability to mediate conflicts. The war in Ukraine, for example, has exposed the failure of a global strategy long deployed by the West. It is one that relies on economic sanctions, technology transfer, and long-distance missile or air strikes. But none of this has prevented the conflict from descending into an old-fashioned one comparable to the trench warfare of the First World War. That war, of course, led to the breakup of four empires and the emergence of nation-states as the normative units of political life. The defeat of global warfare in Ukraine has thus led to national rearmament all over Europe.