John Laughland: The State as the Primary Factor in Peacemaking

From 15th minute.

John Laughland:

"Good nations will engage in good international relations while societies in a state of decomposition just like families where the parents are divorced or where the father is absent they are more likely to produce unsociable children, so countries which are in a state of decomposition are likely to be disruptive on the international stage. I think this is particularly true of the United States of America and the countries of the European Union who, having embraced post-modernism and post-nationalism and who above all are faced with catastrophic decline, try to compensate for these internal problems by projecting evil on to imagined bogeyman out in the world outside and by destroying those bogeymen as it were to expel the evil and to maintain intact their illusion of their own moral and political superiority.

It is for all these reasons that I believe we must liberate ourselves intellectually from the grip of this supra-nationalist ideology. Nation states are not barbaric and belligerent structures of naked vertical power. They are natural entities which correspond to certain basic human needs, for example, to the need of a shared language. Very often of course they correspond to the dictates of geography, which we cannot change.

Like the medieval cathedrals which grew out of Europe's Christian faith and which remains some of the greatest monuments in the world, so nation states are the greatest constructions of the human spirit. International organisations by the same token are not necessarily virtuous."