Moving beyond nationalism

FOR SEVERAL generations the world has been governed by what today we call “the global liberal order”. Behind these lofty words is the idea that all humans share some core experiences, values and interests, and that no human group is inherently superior to all others. Co-operation is therefore more sensible than conflict. All humans should work together to protect their common values and advance their common interests. And the best way to foster such co-operation is to ease the movement of ideas, goods, money and people across the globe.

Though the global liberal order has many faults and problems, it has proved superior to all alternatives. The liberal world of the early 21st century is more prosperous, healthy and peaceful than ever before. For the first time in human history, starvation kills fewer people than obesity; plagues kill fewer people than old age; and violence kills fewer people than accidents. If you think we should go back to some pre-liberal golden age, please name the year in which humankind was in better shape than in the early 21st century. Was it 1918? 1718? 1218?

Nevertheless, people are losing faith in the liberal order. Governments throughout the world are increasingly restricting immigration, imposing high tariffs, censoring foreign ideas and turning their countries into walled fortresses. If this continues, the global liberal order will collapse. What might replace it? While nationalism has many good ideas about how to run a particular nation, unfortunately it has no viable plan for running the world as a whole.

Some nationalists hope the world will become a network of walled-but-friendly fortresses. Each national fortress will protect its unique identity and interests, but all the fortresses could nevertheless co-operate and trade peacefully. There will be no immigration, no multiculturalism, no global elites—but also no global war. The problem with this vision is that walled fortresses are seldom friendly. In the past, all attempts to divide the world into clear-cut nations have resulted in war. Without some universal values and global organisations, rival nations cannot agree on any common rules.

Other nationalists adopt an even more extreme position, saying that we don’t need any global co-operation whatsoever. Each nation should care only about its own interests, and should have no obligations towards the rest of the world. The fortress should just raise its drawbridge and man its walls—and the rest of the world can then go to hell.

Balancing nationalism with globalism
This nihilistic position is nonsensical. No modern economy can survive without a global trade network. And, like it or not, humankind today faces three common problems that make a mockery of all national borders, and that can be solved only through global co-op­eration. These are nuclear war, climate change and technological disruption.

You cannot build a wall against nuclear winter or against global warming, and no nation can regulate arti­ficial intelligence or bioengineering single-handedly. It won’t be enough if only the European Union forbids producing killer robots or only the United States bans genetically engineering human babies. If even one country decides to pursue these high-risk high-gain paths, other countries will be forced to follow its dangerous lead for fear of being left behind. So whenever a politician says “My Country First”, we should ask him or her: how can your country by itself prevent nuclear war, stop climate change and regulate disruptive technologies?

To successfully confront these three problems we need more, rather than less, global co-operation. We need to create a global identity and encourage people to be loyal to humankind and to planet Earth in addition to their particular nation. Nationalism need not prove an impossible barrier to creating such a global identity. Human identities are quite adaptable.

Today’s nation-states are not an eternal part of human biology or psychology. There were no Italians, Russians or Turks 5,000 years ago. True, humans are social animals through and through, with group loyalty imprinted in our genes. However, for millions of years humans lived in small, intimate communities rather than in large nation-states. Homo sapiens eventually learned to use culture as a basis for large-scale co­operation, which is the key to our success as a species. But cultures are flexible. Unlike ants or chimpanzees, Sapiens can organise themselves in many different ways, none of which is “the natural way”. City-states are not more natural than empires, and nation-states are not more natural than tribes. They are different options on the Sapiens menu, and the choice between them depends on changing circumstances.

Large nations appeared only in the past few thousand years—yesterday morning, on the timetable of evolution—and they developed in order to deal with large-scale problems that small tribes could not solve by themselves. In the 21st century we face global problems that even large nations cannot solve by themselves. Hence it makes sense to switch at least some of our loyalties to a global identity.

It does not mean establishing a global government or abolishing all cultural, religious and national differences. I can be loyal at one and the same time to several identities—to my family, my village, my profession, my country, and also to my planet and the whole human species. It is true that sometimes different loyalties might collide, and then it is not easy to decide what to do. But who said life was easy? Life is difficult. Deal with it. Sometimes we put work before family, sometimes family before work. Similarly, sometimes we need to put the national interest first, but there are occasions when we need to privilege the global interests of humankind.

Vote for visionaries
What does all that mean in practice? Well, when the next elections come along, and politicians want you to vote for them, ask these politicians four questions:

If some politicians don’t understand these questions, or if they constantly talk about the past without being able to formulate a meaningful vision for the future, don’t vote for them.

Copyright © Yuval Noah Harari 2018

This article appears in “The World in 2019”, our annual edition that looks at the year ahead. See more at worldin2019.economist.com