There was no material basis for a nation state prior to the development of capitalist production. Before then, most production is direct production by peasant households. It requires no sizeable markets. It is parochial and hence the existence, during that time, of city-states, and numerous kingdoms and principalities. It is only capitalist production, starting in the 15th century, that starts to need large single markets, with common laws, currency and taxes that creates the need for a nation state, to impose those conditions, and to sweep away all of the old parochial, feudal constraints on that free development of capital.
It is on that basis alone, that Marx and Marxists saw the nation state as a progressive development, making that unfettered development of capital, and with it the preconditions for socialism, possible. It was, and is, a historically specific, and, thereby, limited period, in which it performs that progressive role, before, in the age of imperialism, turning into its opposite, a negation of the negation. In the same way that privately owned capital at one point played a progressive role in centralising all of the scattered, small, means of production of the independent commodity producers (the first negation, expropriation), but turns into its opposite, as the same process of centralisation and concentration, creates large-scale, socialised, monopoly capital the second negation, expropriation of the expropriators), so too the nation state, as the means of facilitating the creation of a single market, plays a progressive role that turns into its opposite, as soon as the nation state is no longer an adequate, minimum size of unit, given the scale of production in the age of imperialism. As with private capital, it becomes a fetter on the further expansion of capital. As Trotsky put it, more than a century ago,
“Capitalism has transferred into the field of international relations the same methods applied by it in “regulating” the internal economic life of the nations. The path of competition is the path of systematically annihilating the small and medium-sized enterprises and of achieving the supremacy of big capital. World competition of the capitalist forces means the systematic subjection of the small, medium-sized and backward nations by the great and greatest capitalist powers. The more developed the technique of capitalism, the greater the role played by finance capital and the higher the demands of militarism, all the more grows the dependency of the small states on the great powers. This process, forming as it does an integral element of imperialist mechanics, flourishes undisturbed also in times of peace by means of state loans, railway and other concessions, military-diplomatic agreements, etc. The war uncovered and accelerated this process by introducing the factor of open violence. The war destroys the last shreds of the “independence” of small states, quite apart from the military outcome, of the conflict between the two basic enemy camps.”
Given that Marxists seek to abolish nations, and nation states, how can they consider “national rights”, thereby, to be some fundamental right, floating around in the ether, waiting for some petty-bourgeois nationalist to discover them, and pluck them from the world of abstraction, and give them corporeal form? And, to be clear, in the age of imperialism, it is only petty-bourgeois nationalists that cling to this reactionary delusion, as manifest, for example, in Brexit/Lexit, but also manifest by all of the various “anti-imperialists”.
The bourgeoisie, long ago, recognised that the nation state had passed its sell-by date, and represented a fetter on the further development of capital, and upon the accumulation and enjoyment of their wealth. As Trotsky sets out in The Programme of Peace, imperialist war and annexation is the inevitable robber manifestation of that, in conditions where competing imperialisms seek to exert their own dominance, but, equally, the voluntary association of nation states, into a multinational state, such as the EU, is also the rational expression of it, the precursor of the kind of voluntary association and dissolution of nation states that socialists desire, as the basis of global socialist society.
In the age of imperialism, the idea of fundamental national rights, of national independence, or national self-determination, is an absurdity, a reactionary delusion, utilised by reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalists. But, as Lenin describes, it is also utilised by the imperialist bourgeoisie itself, not because it believes in such rights, but, in order to delude and divert the workers, and to line them up behind it, in its own imperialist wars. As Lenin noted in WWI, the imperialist bourgeoisie, even as it enslaved millions across the globe, in their own colonial empires, professed their commitment to such “national self-determination”, as the basis of their demand that their own workers be slaughtered, in the cause of “defence of the fatherland”. The same nonsense is spread today in relation to the inter-imperialist war being fought in Ukraine/Russia.
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