T. Belman. In essence this is the struggle Israel has waged since its founding. In 1895, Herzl launched the effort to create a Jewish state. It was the age of nationalism. That age ended in WWII when nationalism was discredited to be displaced by universalism, United Nations, European Union, multiculturalism, diversity, and globalism. All these forces have attempted to destroy Zionism, the last bastion of nationalism.
Not only has the nation state been discredited but so has the nation.
Thankfully nationalism is coming back as witnessed by Brexit, the rise of Trump and the rise of nationalistic parties in Europe. The state of Israel is a testament to its virtues. THIS PROFOUND ESSAY WILL BE PUBLISHED IN SIX PARTS.
A conflict is brewing over the shape of the international order. It centers around an idea—a biblical idea—long thought discredited by political elites.
II. The Fall of the Idea of Universal Christian Empire
The Jews were not the only people to recognize the potential of a national form of political organization as a bulwark against the tyranny of universal empire. The Greek historian Polybius blamed the Greek city-states for not having acted as a unified nation in their lost struggle with Rome, and hoped for the future establishment of a united Greece. A Greek national state had never existed in history, but Polybius had before him the examples of the Armenians and of the Jews under the Maccabees—two peoples that, in his lifetime, revolted successfully against the Seleucid-Greek empire and established independent national states for their peoples.
Throughout much of the history of Western peoples, however, this ideal of national independence did not predominate. The Christian Church eventually succeeded in establishing itself as the state religion of Rome, in the process adopting the Roman dream of universal empire, as well as the project of Roman law, which aspired to provide a single framework for a pax romana (“Roman peace”) extending to all nations. For a thousand years, Christianity thus aligned itself, not with the ideal of setting the nations free, as had been proposed by the Israelite prophets, but with much the same aspiration that had given rise to imperial Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia: the aspiration of establishing a universal empire of peace and prosperity.
Regarding itself as the “Catholic” or universal church, the Roman Church was allied, in theory and often in practice as well, with the German Holy Roman emperors, who were entrusted with establishing the universal Christian empire. In this, Roman Catholic political thought paralleled that of the Muslim caliphs, who likewise believed they had been charged with bringing peace and prosperity to the world under the rule of a universal empire of their own.
But Christian political thought differed from that of Islam in at least one crucial respect: Christianity had the Hebrew Bible, with its vision of the justice of a world of independent nations. This vision never ceased to cause trouble for the idea of universal Catholic empire, even if many Christian thinkers were hesitant to embrace the Old Testament too closely. Indeed, it was the presence of the Hebrew Bible in the Christian canon that shaped the peculiar history of French Catholicism, which took on a national character modeled on the biblical Davidic kingdom and stubbornly resisted the control of popes and emperors. It shaped, as well, the unique national-religious traditions of the English, Poles, and Czechs well before the Reformation.
Thus, when Protestantism emerged in the 16th century, along with the invention of the printing press and the widespread circulation of the Bible in vernacular languages, the new call for freedom to interpret Scripture without the intervening authority of the Catholic Church was not a matter of religious doctrine alone. Especially under the influence of Old Testament-oriented thinkers like John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli, Protestantism embraced and quickly became tied to the unique national traditions of various peoples chafing against ideas and institutions that they regarded as foreign to them.
The revolt of the Dutch against their Spanish overlords, for example, pitted a Calvinist insurrection against Catholic empire, culminating in the Dutch declaring themselves an independent nation in 1581. The Scottish national covenants of this period, modeled on the Jewish national covenants of the Bible, were similarly motivated. The English defeat of the Spanish invasion fleet in 1588 was likewise an assertion of the freedom of an English-Anglican nation to reject Catholicism. In these and other cases, the self-image of Protestant peoples as possessing a right to independence and self-determination was explicitly modeled on biblical Israel’s effort to wrest its national and religious freedom from the dictates of Egyptian and Babylonian universal empire.
The Thirty Years’ War, culminating in the peace of Westphalia in 1648, is often presented as a “war of religion” fought between Protestants and Catholics. But this is not quite right. The war is better understood as pitting the emerging national states of France, the Netherlands, and Sweden (nations that, respectively, were Catholic, Calvinist, and Lutheran) against German and Spanish armies devoted to the idea that universal empire reflected God’s will and that it alone could bring true well-being to mankind. It was in the Thirty Years’ War that the concept of a universal Christian empire, which had held sway over the West’s political imagination for thirteen centuries, was decisively defeated.
TO BE CONTINUED IN PART III
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