This comes off as painfully naive to me. The nation state does not exist because we learned it.
The nation state does not exist because it describes the places where different ethnic groups live.
The nation state does not exist to circumscribe natural regions of trade.
The nation state does not exist because someone's gods decreed it.
If it's not learned, then how exactly do you think the notion of the nation state came to be?
Is your problem that it's defined by powerful cabals via force? Is that your complaint? That we can't "unlearn" the point of someone else's gun?
In that case, I suppose I agree.
It comes very close a lot of the time, or decays to that. See the 92% Han China, or the split of Czecho-Slovakia and Yugoslavia along ethnic lines. A split of you're lucky, genocide if you're not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history
And your implication that before WWI, different ethnic groups coexisting peacefully in shared states was the norm, couldn't be more wrong. Even in antiquity, there's examples of one ethnic group banding together to vanquish another, such as the ancient Hebrew genocides of Amalekites [1] and Canaanites [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalek#Amalekites_in_the_Hebre...
Open a map and see just how many borders both historically and today were mountain ranges, rivers and other terrain that served as a natural border.
>The nation state does not exist because it describes the places where different ethnic groups live.
For the most part it very much does. The few exceptions were this didn’t happen and the nation failed to develop a new national ethnic identity those experiments ended up in disaster, see Lebanon, The Balkans etc.
>The nation state does not exist to circumscribe natural regions of trade.
Historically this is very much how city states and later on nation states came to be, even during the imperial age this trade was a key factor in how administrative and autonomous regions came to be.
Plenty of peaceful countries do have a "a shared identity or values" even across the conservative/liberal spectrum.
Even Canada
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/canada-political-c...
The US w/ Trump may have its extremes, but this pattern is playing out in a lot of places.
It is there because they want it to be there and to get rid of it, you need to create something more powerful to overcome that other thing. This historically is possible but just turns into its own state.
Power vacuums are a very real thing though intangible.
But simply having the subjects of a state lose faith in it is not itself sufficient to topple it. I mean look at current congressional approval ratings in the US. They are approaching single digits but it means nothing because there is no real structure in place to challenge it.
I apologize if the initial post was condescending. It's a well written article but I still perceive it as naive to the larger structures which hold this stuff in place.
There's a great YouTube video (imo) on the topic of state level power dynamics if you are interested https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
[edit] First comment on HN and thought I should add more context so it doesn’t sound like a rhetorical question. I’m asking because one of the values you refer to in the article is diversity and how it can be a uniting value among those who espouse it. I understand that to mean valuing differences among people, so I’m asking sincerely if the fact that we coexist with people of all varieties of identities and values fulfills one of the objectives of diversity. If I’m misunderstanding something, happy to be corrected.
It is always easy to dismiss something, which is not perfect --- and what is perfect? But nothing is just removed from society. Something else always takes its place. So usually it is naive and bad idea to concentrate on what is going wrong. If you want to improve the world you have to concentrate on what should be done better and how should it be done better? In this case, what is the alternative to nation states that you envision? Kingdoms? Anarchism? A Star-Trek like utopia? A global communist state? Or simply a failed state, like Afganistan or Somali? If I look at this list, I see nothing that is even remotely as good as western nation states. Although, they have obvious flaws.