“Middle Eastern states are imploding and exploding all around, and what is coming to replace them is, interestingly, not nationalism”

Regionally — we are, finally, witnessing the collapse of the nation state order put together after World War I as the Allies tried to sort out the contradictory promises scattered in all directions under the press of wartime. Middle Eastern states are imploding and exploding all around, and what is coming to replace them is, interestingly, not nationalism. Rather, we are seeing people in Iraq, Syria, Libya and elsewhere turning increasingly to clan-based organization for security, or to a new dispensation of illiberal universalism, namely radical Islam, or, in Egypt, to authoritarians who promise to rein the Islamists in.

Yehudah Mirsky, “What Is A Nation State For?”, Marginalia (11 March 2015) [http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/nation-state-yehudah-mirsky/]