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.

Yet national armies, to say nothing about the idea of a nation in arms, have never really existed in history. This is true even of the famous principle enunciated by the sociologist Max Weber, that only a state holding a monopoly over violence could be considered modern. In earlier times, by contrast, multiple jurisdictions and shared sovereignty made for armies with diverse loyalties. But the states Weber described routinely made use of colonial troops – subjects rather than citizens – who even fought in Europe during both world wars. They also drew upon fighting men from subordinate sovereigns and relied upon mercenaries. The French Foreign Legion and the Gurkhas represent the remnants of that world, while the ranks of mercenaries keep swelling even in the most modern of armies.

Although national sentiments may be at play on both sides of the conflict in Ukraine, it is a proxy war and so global rather than national in character. Apart from Western assistance of Ukraine – whether with men, money or munitions – we have on the Russian side the deployment of Chechen troops under their own leader, the use of mercenaries from the Wagner Group, and the conscription of Central Asian migrants as labourers or fighters. Indians have also been lured to work or fight on both sides for money, while ISIS militants launched a terrorist attack in a Moscow suburb and sought to escape to Ukraine afterwards. Interestingly, the perpetrators of this attack, unusually for ISIS, had been paid and were thus mercenaries. Their actions introduced a whole new dimension to the conflict that reduced its national character even further.

The war in Gaza is very similar, being a proxy conflict on a global scale, with Israel receiving money and materiel from its Western allies while the Palestinians are supported by Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iraq’s Shia militias. And this is to say nothing of world opinion or its resort against Israel to international law. More interesting is the fact that both Hamas and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) seem to have lost their command structures, with the former’s leaders in Doha cut out of decision-making on the ground in Gaza, and the latter’s generals unable to rein in their subordinates on the battlefield. The extraordinary clips flooding Tik-Tok of Israeli soldiers violating their own army’s codes of procedure provide good examples of this. And the lack of military culture here only speaks to the absence of a national culture more generally.

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But there is nothing very unusual about either Ukraine or Gaza in this respect, since the multiplicity of actors involved in the fighting has the War on Terror as its precedent. American and European forces in Afghanistan and Iraq also made use of external contractors, as they were known, whether to avoid liability or as part of a neoliberal economy of privatization and outsourcing. They also depended upon Indian and other foreign cooks, nurses, and labourers often brought to these countries under false pretences. And this is to say nothing of the non-citizens included among the American troops in particular, who were promised US nationality as their reward. Instead of fighting in defence of their nation, in other words, these men and women sought to purchase its membership by their work.

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Rather than recovering the nation’s past and so spirit, even the most patriotic of modern wars belong in the world they would abjure. Their armies are globalised, depend on migrants or mercenaries, and increasingly deprive the state of its monopoly over violence.

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The complicated relations which define contemporary armies and conflicts deprive them of national uniformity and sometimes even a centralised command-structure which depends upon strict hierarchies. We saw this during the last war in Iraq, when those who engaged in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, for instance, could do so at least in part because the chain of command had broken down in a situation where external contractors worked alongside US troops without clear lines of authority. Those engaging in torture also drew many of their views and practices from popular culture available on social media and flouted military regulations. In Russia, similarly but also more seriously, we have seen Prigozhin’s unsuccessful attempt to use his Wagner mercenaries against the national army.

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Rather than recovering the nation’s past and so spirit, even the most patriotic of modern wars belong in the world they would abjure. Their armies are globalised, depend on migrants or mercenaries, and increasingly deprive the state of its monopoly over violence. They look more like pre-modern forces in this way than the ideal of a people’s army that was created by Napoleon in France after its revolution led to the founding of the nation-state. And yet we are not just seeing some return to the past, whether a national or monarchical one. The fragmentation of a centralised and hierarchical command structure that we see in modern armies may only replicate the coming apart of state and political structures along with the international order more generally.

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All the evidence we have from the wars that scar our century points to the conclusion that the military is a vector of globalization and cannot represent some mythical nation in arms.

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In this sense militant groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS might represent the secret truth of the militaries maintained by nation-states. Indeed, the latter was even founded in Camp Bucca, the US military prison in Iraq. Both drew recruits from around the world, though crucially as volunteers not mercenaries. Both were plagued by fragmented command structures and infighting, while allowing room for the playing out of sadistic fantasies. And like regular armies fielded by nation-states, both were no longer able to produce a homogenous culture cut off from the civilian world. Instead, their fighters drew their practices from the popular culture of pornography, video games, and social media. Like their counterparts in national armies, these individuals were all participants in a globalised society which produces highly individualised forms of loyalty no longer amenable to traditional hierarchies.

All the evidence we have from the wars that scar our century points to the conclusion that the military is a vector of globalization and cannot represent some mythical nation in arms. Some countries, like India, even appear to want the breakdown of the conventional army by introducing new ways of joining it. The Agnipath Scheme, for instance, recruits soldiers for four-year terms without the benefits of extensive training, full careers, or pensions. Such temporary training, which is also envisaged for the national service proposed by the British government, may produce semi-professional external contractors for the national forces in future. Its economic logic is that of outsourcing, which creates a breach in military discipline, whose uniformity was meant to represent the equality of citizenship in the nation-state.