The dominant narrative in academia has declared the nation-state a recent European invention, crystallized by the French Revolution, the Peace of Westphalia, print capitalism, and industrial modernity. Scholars such as Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, and Eric Hobsbawm argue that nationalism is not the organic political expression of a people but an ideological construct manufactured to create interchangeable citizens for the factory floor and the bureaucratic state. Particularists have allowed this framing to stand for far too long. It is not neutral scholarship. It is motivated reasoning deployed as a rhetorical cudgel against our rooted attachments. The narrative gained dominance after 1945 because it aligned with liberal universalism, the anti-fascist reaction against ethnic particularism, and the administrative requirements of emerging supranational projects. It functions as a category error rooted in Whig and progressivist historiography. Such historiography treats contingent modern features such as print technology, mass literacy, and ideological nationalism as essential to the very definition of the nation-state rather than the accidental developments of a deeper, older form. This circular approach writes pre-modern realities out of existence by definitional fiat. It is time to reject it outright and assert our own reasoned understanding proudly.
The nation is a people bound by a common culture, language, history, territory, and ancestry. Here ancestry denotes shared historical descent and the living myth of descent, not any modern notion of strict biological purity. The state meanwhile is a centralized political institution exercising sovereign authority through government, laws, military, police, and administration over a defined territory and population. The nation-state is their synthesis: the state serves as the organized instrument of the nation’s ethnic core, the bounded and intergenerational “we” whose continuity it exists to secure. This form requires neither mass literacy, popular sovereignty, nor uniform mass congruence. It requires only a recognizable people with shared traits and a centralized apparatus serving their continuity under the prevailing legitimacy forms of the era. The nation-state form follows from human social nature itself. Particularist attachment precedes both the abstract social contract and the dream of universal empire. As Aristotle observed in the Politics, the polis arises naturally from man’s communal instincts. Montesquieu later showed how the spirit of the laws is shaped by the specific character of a people. Nationalism is therefore the belief that the nation and the state should align: that the state exists for the nation, not the nation for the state or for abstract universals.
This form is ancient. Pre-modern nation-states expressed their legitimacy through dynastic or religious warrant rather than mass popular sovereignty, yet they were no less nation-states for that reason. They lacked print media and universal schooling simply because those technologies did not exist. Modernist scholars bundle these late innovations into the definition itself, then declare everything earlier “not quite” a nation-state. The checklist is circular by design.
Consider Mercia at its 7th- to 9th-century peak under kings such as Penda and Offa. The Mercians formed a recognisable nation. They spoke the distinct Mercian dialect of Old English, traced Anglian ethnic roots through royal genealogies, and shared a religious culture that moved from pagan roots through Christian syncretism. They identified explicitly as the “boundary people” (Mierce) and demarcated their territory with Offa’s Dyke, a monumental earthwork that still marks the Welsh border today. Their state apparatus was functional and centralized. Kings exercised power through the witan, issued law codes, operated a hide-based taxation system, minted coins that displayed royal iconography asserting distinct authority, and raised military levies from defined borders. Mercia was hegemonic, absorbing and subordinating neighboring peoples. This was no loose tribal confederation or mere dynastic plaything. It was the sovereign political vehicle of the Mercian people.
Similar patterns appear across history and continents, demonstrating that the form is neither recent nor exclusively European. In early medieval Japan the Yamato court unified a people sharing language, Shinto-Buddhist religious culture, and historical myths while exercising centralized provincial administration and tax collection. Kievan Rus’ under the Rurikids constituted a Slavic ethno-linguistic polity. It possessed a shared East Slavic tongue, Orthodox Christian identity after conversion, dynastic chronicles recording ancestral origins, and a prince-centered state apparatus that extracted tribute and defended territory against steppe nomads. These cases rest on the same synthesis of ethnic core and sovereign instrument. Labeling them “proto-” or mere “cultural zones” is narrative smoothing that protects the modernist thesis.
Empires, by contrast, were typically multi-ethnic overlays that often preserved or exploited underlying ethnic cores rather than dissolving them; they therefore do not refute the recurrent nation-state pattern but frequently rested upon it. Critics raise several standard objections. They claim that pre-modern identities were primarily religious or dynastic rather than national. They argue that fluid borders and repeated conquests undermine any claim of continuity. Both objections miss the mark. Human identities are always layered. The nation-state form readily accommodates religious or dynastic expression as vehicles for the underlying particularist logic. Fluidity of borders and episodes of conquest exist in every era, including our own; many post-colonial states display far weaker congruence yet are routinely granted the nation-state label. What matters is predominant congruence between people and sovereign apparatus over time, not perfect stasis or the absence of change. Absorption or conquest may reset boundaries, yet it does not erase the functional reality that existed while independence held.
Scholars deliberately load the definition with requirements only modernity could meet, such as mass literacy, standardized education, print-driven “imagined communities,” ideological nationalism as a mass phenomenon, and popular sovereignty, then exclude everything pre-modern. When challenged, the goalposts move again. The inconsistency is glaring. Somalia is routinely called a nation-state despite chronic failure and clan divisions. Many post-colonial states are multi-ethnic with poorly matching borders. Yet Mercia, with stronger congruence and effective governance for its technological era, is denied the label.
The modernist thesis persists because it serves larger ideological ends. It ties nationalism to capitalism and secularism, portraying particularist attachments as recent “constructions” rather than evolved continuities. While not entirely monolithic, this framing has been near-dominant in post-1945 academia precisely because of its alignment with liberal universalism and supranational projects. Fortunately a counter-tradition already exists. Ethnosymbolists such as Anthony D. Smith have recovered the concept of the ethnie, the pre-modern ethnic nucleus built on myths, symbols, memories, and shared ancestry that supplied the foundation for later states. Azar Gat has gone further, grounding the pattern in evolutionary roots of ethnic cohesion as a durable feature of human group behavior: “political ethnicity” expressed through kin-culture communities that formed national states since the beginning of statehood millennia ago (Ancient Egypt as an early exemplar, enduring Chinese people-state, medieval European cases, and parallels worldwide). Gat shows that modernity released, transformed, and enhanced this ancient impulse via scale and technology, but did not create it. Adrian Hastings demonstrated the early emergence of English nationhood through the vernacular Bible and historical chronicles. These scholars restore historical realism against constructivist overreach and particularists should draw on them more confidently.
We must therefore adopt a clean distinction. Pre-modern nation-states consisted of a people with shared traits governed by a centralized apparatus under dynastic or religious legitimacy. Modern nation-states add industrial scale, mass ideology, and popular sovereignty. This distinction acknowledges genuine differences in mobilization and technology without erasing the deeper historical continuity.
Nationalism is not a 19th-century invention. It is the natural political expression of what our ancestors already practiced: the belief in a people served by a state. Particularists should reject circular checklists, subjective fluidity objections, and self-insulating definitions. Own the term. Root it in functional reality and ancient precedent, from Mercia’s Dyke to the Yamato court and the chronicles of Kievan Rus’. Reclaiming the nation-state restores conceptual dignity to particularism as the default human political order, rather than a deviation to be explained away or pathologized. Nationalism is then seen for what it is: conscious affirmation of an ancient reality, not a modern fabrication. We are a world of nations, and we have long been one.