nation-state

An imagined national person that school teaches students to love, serve, and remember as if it naturally exists.

A collective fiction that school teaches students to treat as a real person requiring love, obedience, and sacrifice.

In Jiang's contrast, the French-Revolutionary idea that political sovereignty stands above the Church.

A political form combining sovereign territorial authority with a people imagined through shared identity.

He defines the historical evolution of warfare as moving from killing soldiers, to destroying civilian production, to using civilian dissent against the state.

He argues that eight billion people are possible primarily because the nation-state, not science by itself, created the political machinery for mass population growth.

Jiang says liberty and population growth together explain the French Empire's power and the broader power of the nation-state.

Jiang says Bismarck understood that a nation-state must make warriors and keep workers healthy because workers produce the machines of war.

He argues Mussolini understood the nation-state's real purpose as fighting wars and that a mythology of war can make people happily fight and die.

He argues that the nation-state idea became so powerful that defeating it required destroying civilian populations, not merely killing soldiers.

Jiang says medicine and sanitation developed because the nation-state willed science and technology toward growing populations needed for war.

Nation-states are made-up concepts and collections of elite interests; many Asian and Middle Eastern elites are loyal to overseas wealth, family, and networks rather than local people.