nation-state

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.

The new source of sovereignty in Jiang's reading of the Declaration, replacing king and church as supreme political authority.

He argues that AI-centered trade networks are intrinsically fragile because they depend on cooperation among states, while real coercive power still comes from nation-states.

Jiang says any functioning Pax Silica would still need military, resource, and population backing from a nation-state, so if Pax Judaica stands behind it then Israel remains the real power.

Jiang argues that military power comes from the nation-state because the state provides weapons production, financing, and soldiers, so a domestic revolution would force the military to retreat inward rather than keep policing the world.

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.