I. Introduction
Nationalism has long stood as both a unifying and divisive force in human history. Defined broadly, it is the belief that a people who share a common identity—whether cultural, linguistic, ethnic, or spiritual—ought to be politically self-governing.¹ Yet the forms that nationalism has taken over time have varied dramatically - largely exploited by the Right wing, but this blog is an attempt to raise its profile among the Left. In its traditional manifestation, nationalism was bound to systems of hierarchy and vassalage, where allegiance to the nation was inseparable from obedience to a feudal lord or monarch. The modern conception, by contrast, situates national identity in a collective biological and cultural continuity—a shared “gene pool” that is NOT defined by race, but by cooperative, self-organising systems of governance, defined by collective endeavour, rather than subservience.
The shift from feudal to modern nationalism reflects deeper transformations in the relationship between ontology (what a people are) and epistemology (how they know themselves). The earlier form was embedded in a theological cosmology that placed God at the apex of an ordered hierarchy: divine right legitimised royal authority, and fealty to a sovereign mediated one’s belonging to the nation.² Modern nationalism, however, internalises the sacred by grounding it in life itself. The nation becomes not merely a political unit but a living organism whose vitality depends upon the protection of its reproductive and moral capacities—its children, its moral “innocence,” and its cultural memory.
This moralised conception of the nation finds a powerful metaphorical antecedent in the biblical story of the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2–3). Humanity’s fall from innocence marks the beginning of moral consciousness and social differentiation; yet within the narrative also lies a divine injunction to preserve life, purity, and continuity. The child, in this schema, becomes the living emblem of the nation’s original innocence—a resource that must be protected from corruption, both moral and physical. In this sense, nationalism evolves from a structure of obedience to one of preservation: the duty owed to the sovereign is replaced by the duty owed to the unborn.
This AI-assisted essay critically analyses that transformation. It will contrast traditional, feudal-nationalist models of subservience with the modern, genealogical understanding of nationhood. It will also explore how this latter view, grounded in the preservation of innocence, leads to a more nuanced understanding of the legal frameworks that sustain the modern nation-state. In tracing this evolution, it will draw on historical examples—from medieval Christendom to Enlightenment revolutions—and theological motifs derived from Abrahamic thought. The argument will conclude that the modern, life-preserving conception of nationalism offers a more coherent ethical and spiritual foundation for national sovereignty than its hierarchical predecessor.
II. Traditional Nationalism and Feudal Dependency
The earliest forms of nationalism in Europe emerged not as democratic assertions of collective will, but as extensions of feudal hierarchy. Allegiance to one’s nation was mediated through personal loyalty to a sovereign or lord who embodied the unity of the realm.³ This arrangement was underpinned by a metaphysical order that saw sovereignty as divinely sanctioned—“the king’s two bodies,” as Ernst Kantorowicz famously described it, represented both the mortal person of the ruler and the immortal continuity of the state.⁴ To serve one’s lord was to serve the nation, and to defy the lord was to transgress against both God and nature.
Feudal nationalism thus linked independence paradoxically to subservience. A peasant’s or knight’s sense of belonging derived not from participation in a collective political will but from the protection and identity granted through hierarchical dependence. The nation existed as an abstract extension of the sovereign’s authority, rather than as a community of equals. The lex terrae—the law of the land—was not an impersonal system of justice but a network of obligations and privileges distributed through oaths of fealty.⁵
This structure was reinforced by the theological imagination of medieval Christendom. The Church mirrored the feudal hierarchy in its own organisation: God was the ultimate lord, Christ the divine mediator, and earthly rulers His stewards. Augustine’s City of God distinguished between the heavenly and earthly orders but maintained that legitimate authority on earth derived from divine providence.⁶ Within this cosmology, the nation could not claim sovereignty independent of the divine order; it was a moral community defined by obedience and sacrifice, not by mutual consent.
However, feudal nationalism contained within it the seeds of its own dissolution. The idea that the sovereign embodied the unity of the people implied a representation of the collective, a principle that would later become central to modern theories of popular sovereignty. Arguably, the Reformation (1517–1648) accelerated this transformation by challenging the universal authority of the Church and asserting the primacy of national churches and vernacular scriptures. In England, Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy (1534) symbolised this shift: national identity became tied to territorial jurisdiction and language rather than to supranational religious authority.⁷
By the seventeenth century, thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin began to theorise sovereignty as absolute yet secular—a necessary condition for order in a world no longer united by shared theology.⁸ Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) described the state as an artificial man whose power derived from the collective surrender of individual wills, while Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576) grounded sovereignty in the indivisible authority of the monarch. The individual’s obedience remained central, but it was now justified in terms of social contract rather than divine command.
This transitional period reveals that traditional nationalism was never static; it evolved through theological and legal innovation. Yet the fundamental logic remained hierarchical: independence was achievable only through dependence. The nation’s identity was concentrated in the body of the ruler, not distributed among its citizens. Consequently, law functioned less as a mechanism of rights than as a codification of duties owed upward. The moral economy of feudal nationalism was therefore one of subservient belonging—a belonging that reflected cosmic order more than collective agency.
In this sense, the “traditional” nation was not a nation in the modern sense at all. It was a sacral hierarchy, a spiritual body governed by grace and fear rather than by birthright or bloodline. Its citizens were subjects before they were members; their selfhood was derived from participation in a divine drama rather than from participation in a civic community. Only with the gradual desacralisation of sovereignty and the biologisation of identity—when belonging became a matter of descent rather than obedience—could nationalism take on the genealogical, self-organising form characteristic of the modern era.
Notes (Section 2):
3. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), pp.
9–22.
4. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval
Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
5. Bloch, Marc. Feudal Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1961), pp. 64–90.
6. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin
Classics, 1972), Book XIX.
7. Greenfeld, Liah. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 45–52.
8. Skinner, Quentin. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol.
II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 287–310.
III. Theological Roots: Eden, Innocence, and Authority
The story of the Garden of Eden has exerted a profound influence on the Western imagination, shaping conceptions of innocence, authority, and the moral justification for law. In the Abrahamic traditions, Eden represents both the perfection of divine order and the fragility of human freedom. The Fall, precipitated by disobedience, introduces the necessity of rule, labour, and protection.⁹ Within this narrative, sovereignty emerges not as an arbitrary imposition but as a divinely ordained response to the loss of innocence: the guardianship of a fallen humanity.
In medieval political theology, this symbolism was transposed directly into the organisation of society. The feudal lord stood as a reflection of the divine patriarch, charged with the stewardship of the land and the protection of his dependants. The very term “lord,” derived from the Old English hlaford (bread-keeper), carries connotations of providence and sustenance. The ruler’s legitimacy depended upon his ability to maintain moral and social order—to guard his subjects from the chaos symbolised by exile from Eden.¹⁰ Law, in this framework, functioned as a means of restoring partial harmony to a fallen world, though always under the sign of divine grace rather than human autonomy.
This theocratic conception of order found philosophical expression in Augustine’s dichotomy between the civitas Dei (City of God) and the civitas terrena (Earthly City). Humanity, having forfeited divine innocence, was condemned to construct provisional forms of justice.¹¹ The earthly state thus arose not from natural sociability but from sin and the need for restraint. In this sense, the political community was an institution of protection—its authority justified by its capacity to limit corruption and preserve what remained of the good. Early nationalisms, bound up with the idea of Christendom, inherited this salvific logic: the ruler’s duty was to defend the moral and spiritual purity of his people against both internal vice and external infidelity.
The Edenic paradigm also informs the symbolism of purity that underlies many later nationalist ideologies. The garden, enclosed and ordered, stands in contrast to the wilderness—an archetype of the “other” as disorder, foreignness, and temptation. The expulsion from Eden, followed by the command to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28; 3:16–19), introduces the dialectic between innocence and reproduction: humanity’s continuity now depends upon the preservation of life within a fallen, dangerous world. The divine commandment to protect the lineage becomes, in time, a principle of social organisation.
It is in this sense that early national identity can be seen as an extension of sacred kinship. The patriarchal family mirrored the cosmic order: the father as ruler, the mother as nurturer, the children as both dependants and inheritors.¹² Medieval monarchies frequently invoked this familial imagery—“the father of the nation” was not merely a metaphor but a theological truth. To rebel against one’s sovereign was tantamount to filial impiety, a repetition of Adam’s disobedience. Hence, loyalty and obedience were both political and spiritual virtues.
Yet even in this hierarchical arrangement, there remained a latent tension between the preservation of innocence and the exercise of authority. While sovereignty claimed to protect purity, it also depended upon the very violence and coercion that marked humanity’s fallen state. The moral economy of feudalism thus reproduced the paradox of Eden: protection through subjugation, order through the denial of freedom. This contradiction would eventually drive the transformation of nationalism from a theologically grounded system of obedience to a biologically and socially grounded project of preservation.
In modern nationalist thought, the sacred centre of innocence shifts from the ruler to the child, and from divine order to natural life. The theological imperative to guard humanity’s spiritual purity becomes, in secularised form, the biological imperative to protect the continuity of the community’s genetic and moral substance. The garden is no longer the sovereign’s domain but the collective inheritance of the people. The nation, like Eden, must be fenced against corruption; yet its guardianship is now the task of the community itself, not its feudal lord.
Notes (Section 3):
9. The Holy Bible, Genesis 2–3 (King James Version).
10. Le Goff, Jacques. Medieval Civilization, 400–1500 (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1988), pp. 103–118.
11. Augustine, The City of God, Book XIX.
12. Duby, Georges. The Knight, the Lady and the Priest: The Making of Modern
Marriage in Medieval France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
IV. Modern Nationalism and the Genealogical Principle
By the late eighteenth century, the theological underpinnings of nationalism had begun to dissolve under the combined pressures of Enlightenment rationalism, scientific humanism, and the emergence of print culture.¹³ The authority once vested in divine order and royal hierarchy migrated into the secular domain of human reason and collective self-awareness. As Benedict Anderson famously argued, nations came to be understood as imagined communities: social constructs that emerged from shared languages, literacies, and temporal consciousness rather than inherited allegiance to a monarch.¹⁴
Yet beneath this rational veneer lay a more organic and genealogical conception of belonging. Where the feudal subject owed loyalty to a lord, the modern citizen owed loyalty to a lineage—to a shared continuity of life. This transformation reoriented nationalism from a vertical structure of obedience to a horizontal structure of kinship. The nation-state became, in effect, a symbolic family: a community bound by blood, culture, and historical memory.
The genealogical model of nationalism found its earliest articulation in the Romantic movement, which reacted against Enlightenment universalism by asserting the uniqueness of national character (Volksgeist). Thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder argued that each people possessed a distinct “soul,” expressed through its language, folklore, and customs.¹⁵ This cultural essentialism had a biological dimension: the nation was a living organism, its vitality dependent on the health and reproduction of its members. Whereas the feudal order had sought to preserve divine hierarchy, Romantic nationalism sought to preserve the continuity of life itself—the natural inheritance of a people’s genetic and moral substance.
This reconfiguration was deeply influenced by Darwinian and proto-evolutionary thought in the nineteenth century, which lent scientific legitimacy to ideas of racial and national preservation. The language of kinship, purity, and inheritance acquired new urgency in an age of industrialisation and urbanisation, where traditional bonds appeared to dissolve under the pressures of capital and empire.¹⁶ The national community was thus imagined as a sanctuary of continuity—a modern Eden threatened by the forces of corruption, degeneration, and foreign incursion.
In this framework, the moral purpose of nationalism shifted from obedience to preservation. To serve the nation was to participate in the protection of the life-giving sources of identity: the land, the family, and the child. The genealogical principle introduced a new moral economy grounded not in fealty but in responsibility—the duty to sustain the vitality of one’s people. This is evident in the emergence of public health systems, education policies, and child protection laws during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all of which reflect a sacralised concern for the moral and biological well-being of the population.¹⁷
The legal frameworks of modern nation-states evolved in tandem with this shift. Citizenship, once a function of feudal privilege, became tied to birthright (jus soli or jus sanguinis). The state’s legitimacy was now derived from its ability to safeguard the continuity of its citizens’ lives, rather than from divine ordination. Constitutions codified this social contract by defining rights and responsibilities in terms of equality before the law—a secular echo of the theological equality of souls. The modern nation thus became a collective guardian of innocence: not the innocence of prelapsarian purity, but the innocence of potential—the untainted future embodied in children and in the continuity of cultural memory.
Crucially, this genealogical conception does not merely replace theology with biology; rather, it transposes the sacred into the natural. The protection of the gene pool, the safeguarding of cultural heritage, and the moral education of the young all represent secularised forms of the ancient command to “be fruitful and multiply” and to “guard the garden.” The Edenic imperative survives, translated into civic virtue. The nation, like the family, becomes the site where life is nurtured against entropy, and where the future is imagined as the restoration of lost harmony.
In this sense, modern nationalism represents not a rejection but a transformation of the sacred. The divine order that once justified subservience is replaced by a collective order justified through biological and ethical continuity. Authority is decentralised, but responsibility is deepened: the citizen becomes both guardian and gardener, responsible for tending the moral and material soil of the nation. This genealogical turn situates nationalism within the broader human effort to reconcile freedom with preservation—to rebuild Eden through the collective cultivation of an eternal resource of innocence.
Notes (Section 4):
13. Hobsbawm, Eric. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth,
Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 10–15.
14. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), pp.
37–46.
15. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Reflections on the Philosophy of the History
of Mankind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968 [1784–91]), pp.
293–310.
16. Spencer, Herbert. The Principles of Biology (London: Williams and
Norgate, 1864), Vol. 1, pp. 74–81.
17. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction
(New York: Vintage, 1978), pp. 137–145.
V. The Role of Law and the State
The transition from feudal allegiance to genealogical preservation redefined not only the moral foundations of nationalism but also the legal architecture of the nation-state. Where the medieval polity derived legitimacy from divine hierarchy, the modern state claimed legitimacy through the codification of rights and duties aimed at the preservation of life and socio-economic continuity. The law thus became both the expression and the instrument of national vitality—a mechanism for translating moral imperatives of protection and purity into institutional form.
In feudal society, the lex terrae (law of the land) had been an expression of status and privilege. Justice was personal and discretionary, exercised by lords and monarchs as extensions of their own authority.¹⁸ With the rise of constitutionalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, law was reimagined as an impersonal structure binding ruler and ruled alike. The English Bill of Rights (1689) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) both marked decisive steps in the secularisation of legal sovereignty.¹⁹ Yet the new legalism did not simply abolish hierarchy; it reoriented it. The locus of sanctity moved from the monarch’s person to the body politic itself—the “people” became the new bearer of sovereignty, and the preservation of their well-being became the state’s supreme law.
This reorientation produced what Max Weber later termed the “rational-legal” authority of the modern state.²⁰ Bureaucracy and codification replaced divine command as the sources of legitimacy, but the underlying aim remained constant: the maintenance of order and protection of life. The law became a secular priesthood, charged with administering the covenant of the nation’s continuity. The moral and biological imperatives that had once justified obedience to a sovereign were now inscribed in the legal obligation to protect citizens, regulate family life, and secure the boundaries of the polity.
From the nineteenth century onward, the state increasingly conceived of its subjects not as vassals but as biopolitical resources—bearers of health, productivity, and fertility.²¹ The introduction of civil registration systems, public health measures, and compulsory education reflected a new understanding of law as an instrument of collective preservation. Marriage, childbirth, and inheritance were regulated not only to distribute property but to safeguard the “moral hygiene” of the nation. This was nationalism as life-management: a legal codification of the duty to protect the living and nurture the yet unborn.
At the same time, the language of rights introduced a paradox. While legal equality ostensibly dissolved feudal hierarchies, it also imposed a new form of collective obligation. The citizen, freed from subservience to a lord, became bound to the state by an ethic of mutual preservation. The law thus embodied both liberation and discipline—what Foucault called “the productive power of modern governance.”²² The national community was no longer a pyramid of divine order but a web of interdependent lives, regulated by law in the name of continuity.
This juridical transformation also reconfigured the concept of ownership. In feudalism, land was the primary basis of sovereignty; in modern nationalism, life itself became the fundamental property to be protected. The protection of children, the regulation of reproduction, and the defence of the “homeland” all express this deeper juridical logic: that the nation is a legal entity grounded in the sanctity of life rather than the sanctity of hierarchy.²³ The Garden of Eden, once guarded by angels and kings, is now protected by constitutions, family courts, and public institutions—each a modern cherubim enforcing the boundary between innocence and corruption.
It is therefore no coincidence that modern legal frameworks place special emphasis on the rights of children and the integrity of the family. These are not merely humanitarian developments but expressions of a nationalist metaphysics in which the preservation of innocence and life constitutes the state’s highest moral duty. The law becomes, in this sense, a theological instrument in secular guise: it enforces the moral memory of Eden. The feudal lord’s authority to protect has been democratised, distributed across institutions and citizens, but its spiritual logic endures. The nation, through its legal order, still seeks to redeem the fall—to preserve the possibility of innocence within a fallen world.
Notes (Section 5):
18. Bloch, Marc. Feudal Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1961), pp. 178–183.
19. Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of
Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 511–528.
20. Weber, Max. Economy and Society, Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978), pp. 212–216.
21. Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de
France, 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 2003), pp. 239–245.
22. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1977),
pp. 133–142.
23. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 83–88.
VI. Gender, Ownership, and the Mother–Child Bond
If the modern nation-state grounds its legitimacy in the protection of life, then the maternal bond represents its most fundamental and enduring metaphor. The relationship between mother and child embodies the intersection of biology, morality, and sovereignty: it is a site where ownership, sacrifice, and continuity converge. Unlike the contractual or feudal forms of allegiance that characterised earlier political orders, the maternal relation is not chosen but given; it derives from a biological covenant that precedes law and underwrites all other forms of belonging.
This primordial connection has profound implications for the structure of nationalist thought. In the same way that the feudal subject owed his life to his lord, the modern citizen owes his life to the maternal body—to the physical and emotional labour through which life is transmitted and preserved.²⁴ Yet the moral logic has inverted: whereas feudal authority required subservience to the father-king (e.g. a Norman version of "Odin"?), the modern nationalist imagination increasingly sanctifies the figure of the mother (e.g. an Anglo-Saxon version of "Britannia"?) as the true guardian of the nation’s continuity. The trauma of childbirth, and the nine months of gestation preceding it, constitute a bond of life and death that is both natural and sacred. This experience, unique to the maternal body, establishes a form of ownership over the child that transcends property and inheritance; it may just be a biased cultural belief, but it represents the foundation of the modern ideal of nurture as the basis of moral and political order.
Historically, this shift can be traced to the Romantic and Victorian elevation of motherhood as a moral ideal. The mother came to symbolise the purity and virtue of the nation itself—the “angel in the house” whose duty was to protect innocence from the corrupting forces of modernity.²⁵ In political iconography, the feminised nation—Marianne in France, Bharat Mata in India, Mother Russia—embodied the nurturing and sacrificial dimensions of sovereignty. This maternal nationalism recast the state as protector not merely of territory but of the conditions of life: health, childhood, education, and moral formation.
The legal system absorbed and reflected this transformation. The doctrine of parens patriae—the state as guardian of those unable to care for themselves—extended the maternal function into the public sphere.²⁶ Family law, child welfare legislation, and public health policies all codified the belief that the care of the young was not only a private duty but a national obligation. The mother’s natural authority thus became the prototype for the state’s protective role. In preserving the innocence of its children, the nation symbolically preserves its own future—its moral, cultural, and biological integrity.
At the same time, the maternal metaphor introduces a subtle but significant form of ownership that transcends both patriarchal and capitalist models. The mother’s claim over her child is not a claim of possession but of stewardship; it arises from an experience of suffering and creation that grants her a unique moral title.²⁷ This title, grounded in the capacity to give and sustain life, supersedes all other forms of ownership—including, in many cases, the paternal or economic. Even within industrialised capitalist societies, the maternal bond retains a privileged status: it is the one form of ownership legitimised not by law or exchange, but by the mystical continuity of life itself.
This maternal logic also reconfigures the moral economy of nationalism. If the father’s role traditionally represented authority, boundary, and discipline, the mother symbolises care, preservation, and renewal. The modern nation integrates both principles, but its moral legitimacy increasingly depends on its capacity to act maternally—to nurture rather than merely to command. The welfare state, for instance, embodies this maternal function on a collective scale: providing for the vulnerable, protecting children, and securing public health in the name of a shared future.²⁸
Thus, the ownership of the mother over her children becomes the archetype for a broader understanding of national responsibility. It expresses the central paradox of modern nationalism: that the preservation of innocence requires power, but that power derives its legitimacy from care rather than domination. The trauma of childbirth, like the struggle of nation-building, is both creative and painful—a passage through suffering that gives rise to new life. In this sense, the maternal body is not merely a biological fact but a spiritual resource, a living analogue for the moral labour of the nation itself.
The Garden of Eden metaphor deepens this insight. Just as Eve’s motherhood continues the divine act of creation beyond the fall, the mother’s care perpetuates the possibility of redemption within history.²⁹ Her bond with the child embodies the reconciliation of freedom and necessity, love and law, that nationalism seeks to institutionalise. The modern nation, viewed through this lens, is a community organised around the maternal principle: it exists to guard the conditions under which innocence—and therefore meaning—can survive in a fallen world.
Notes (Section 6):
24. Kristeva, Julia. Stabat Mater, in Tales of Love, trans. Leon
Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 234–247.
25. Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in
Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp.
3–29.
26. Donzelot, Jacques. The Policing of Families (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 73–81.
27. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (London:
Vintage, 1997), pp. 483–489.
28. Fraser, Nancy and Linda Gordon. “A Genealogy of Dependency,” Signs,
Vol. 19, No. 2 (1994), pp. 309–336.
29. The Holy Bible, Genesis 3:20–23.
VII. Othering, Purity, and Security
If the modern nation-state defines itself as a community devoted to the preservation of life and innocence, it must inevitably confront the problem of the Other—those individuals, groups, or forces that appear to threaten the purity and continuity of the national body. The process of othering thus functions as a structural feature of nationalism: it demarcates the moral and biological boundaries of belonging. In this sense, the modern nation inherits the Edenic logic of exclusion, wherein the preservation of paradise depends upon the expulsion or containment of the corrupting element.³⁰
In traditional feudal nationalism, othering was primarily theological. The enemy was the heretic, the infidel, or the rebel who violated divine and social order.³¹ The feudal ruler’s authority rested upon his ability to defend the sacred hierarchy against chaos, mirroring the archangel’s role in guarding the gates of Eden. In the modern era, however, othering becomes biopolitical: the enemy is no longer merely the spiritual transgressor but the existential threat to the community’s vitality. Disease, degeneracy, and moral corruption replace heresy as the dominant metaphors of danger. The modern nation, as Foucault observed, “must defend society” not only against political enemies but against the biological contamination of its population.³²
This transformation reflects the secularisation of purity. The moral imperative to preserve the nation’s innocence becomes a programme of public health, moral education, and cultural surveillance. Laws regulating marriage, sexual conduct, and migration—all justified in the name of protecting the population—demonstrate how nationalism translates theological notions of purity into legal and administrative terms.³³ The rhetoric of “cleanliness,” “health,” and “hygiene” recurs in nationalist discourse because it captures the biopolitical synthesis of moral and physical preservation: the safeguarding of both the body and the soul of the nation.
The maternal dimension of nationalism reinforces this logic. If the nation is imagined as a mother guarding her children, then foreign or subversive elements are easily construed as predators or sources of contamination. The state, acting as the collective guardian, assumes the role of protector against these external and internal threats.³⁴ The language of security thus mirrors the language of care: to “defend” the nation is to ensure that its children—the future—remain uncorrupted. Yet this protective impulse, while morally grounded, also legitimises mechanisms of exclusion, surveillance, and control. What begins as an ethic of care can easily become an instrument of domination.
Modern history offers many examples of this ambivalence. The nineteenth-century campaigns for public morality in Britain, ostensibly aimed at protecting women and children, also reinforced class and racial hierarchies by pathologising poverty and foreignness.³⁵ Similarly, early twentieth-century eugenic movements in Europe and North America reinterpreted the preservation of the nation’s “gene pool” as a moral duty, blurring the line between protection and persecution.³⁶ These examples illustrate how the sacred value of innocence, when institutionalised, can become a source of coercive power. The Edenic impulse—to guard the purity of the garden—can easily turn into expulsion and violence.
Nevertheless, it would be reductive to interpret modern nationalism solely through its exclusionary tendencies. The process of othering involves a dialectic that also reveals the ethical dimension of belonging: the recognition that innocence, once lost, requires vigilance to preserve. In this light, nationalism embodies a form of collective moral anxiety—a perpetual struggle to reconcile openness with protection, freedom with security. The modern state’s legal and moral boundaries are not simply instruments of repression; they are also the means by which a community affirms its shared sense of responsibility for life.
The key to a more nuanced understanding lies in recognising that purity, in the nationalist imagination, is not absolute but relational. It does not imply the impossibility of contact with others, but rather the maintenance of an identity as difference within a moral order of equality. The healthy garden contains diversity but resists chaos; it cultivates rather than eradicates the adaptation of successful forms and functions. The task of the modern nation, therefore, is to transform the logic of exclusion into one of careful differentiation—to preserve the integrity of its moral and biological life without succumbing to the violence of purity.³⁷
In this reinterpretation, othering becomes a process of moral discernment rather than domination. The foreigner, the stranger, or the dissenter is no longer an enemy to be expelled but a test of the nation’s moral maturity—its ability to preserve innocence without destroying its humanity. This is the point at which the genealogical nationalism grounded in preservation surpasses its feudal and totalitarian predecessors: it recognises that the garden must be tended, not walled off; that protection must coexist with hospitality.
Notes (Section 7):
30. The Holy Bible, Genesis 3:22–24.
31. Bartlett, Robert. The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and
Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993),
pp. 201–215.
32. Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended (New York: Picador,
2003), p. 243.
33. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution
and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), pp. 34–47.
34. Yuval-Davis, Nira. Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997), pp.
45–56.
35. Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger
in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
36. Kevles, Daniel. In the Name of Eugenics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1985), pp. 64–73.
37. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity,
1991), pp. 76–89.
VIII. Conclusion
This essay has traced the evolution of nationalism from its traditional, feudal form—anchored in hierarchy, obedience, and divine authority—to a modern, genealogically informed conception, grounded in the preservation of life, innocence, and continuity. In the feudal model, the nation existed largely as an extension of the sovereign, whose legitimacy derived from divine ordination. Subjects owed loyalty and service, and legal frameworks codified duties rather than rights. The moral and spiritual imperative was obedience; the nation was a sacred hierarchy, with little regard for the autonomy or well-being of the individual.
In contrast, modern nationalism reorients the locus of responsibility from ruler to people, from hierarchy to kinship, from obedience to preservation. Drawing on both the Edenic metaphor and genealogical consciousness, it positions the protection of children, the moral and biological integrity of the population, and the cultivation of cultural memory as the central tasks of the nation-state. The maternal bond becomes a powerful model for understanding political responsibility: just as a mother safeguards her child, so the modern state safeguards the conditions of life and moral growth for its citizens. Legal frameworks, from civil registration to child protection laws, embody this ethic of care, translating moral imperatives into institutions capable of sustaining collective continuity.
The essay has also considered the challenges inherent in this shift. Processes of othering and exclusion remain embedded in modern nationalism, reflecting the Edenic tension between protection and expulsion. Yet the genealogical model reframes these processes as exercises in moral discernment rather than pure domination. Purity, in this conception, is relational: the nation seeks to preserve life and innocence without destroying humanity. Security is thus inseparable from care, and boundaries are maintained not for domination but for the continuity of moral and biological life.
Historical examples—from the constitutional revolutions of the eighteenth century to the biopolitical policies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—demonstrate how this life-preserving nationalism is realised both legally and culturally. Philosophical and theological traditions, particularly the Abrahamic concern with innocence, fertility, and continuity, underpin the ethical rationale for this modern understanding. By synthesising biology, morality, and law, the modern nation-state achieves a more coherent and sustainable form of legitimacy than its feudal predecessor.
Ultimately, the transition from feudal allegiance to genealogical preservation represents a profound moral and philosophical shift. The modern nation recognises that freedom without responsibility is untenable, and that sovereignty must be exercised in the service of life, not merely as a projection of authority. By privileging the protection of children and the cultivation of collective continuity, it integrates the lessons of Eden into the secular, civic realm. This conception of nationalism, grounded in the preservation of innocence and the ethical duty to future generations, provides a morally and institutionally robust foundation for the modern state—a foundation that balances the imperatives of care, security, and moral discernment.
In conclusion, while traditional nationalism relied on hierarchy and obedience to maintain order, the modern, life-preserving form of nationalism offers a more nuanced, ethically coherent, and spiritually resonant model. By translating the sacred responsibilities of the maternal and the Edenic into the institutional, legal, and civic frameworks of the nation, it reconciles freedom with continuity, care with authority, and individuality with collective responsibility. In doing so, it secures not only the survival of the nation but the ethical and moral conditions for its flourishing.
Notes (Section 8):
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), pp.
37–46.
Hobsbawm, Eric. Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), pp. 10–15.
Yuval-Davis, Nira. Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 45–56.
Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended (New York: Picador, 2003),
pp. 239–245.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex (London: Vintage, 1997), pp.
483–489.
Genesis 1–3, The Holy Bible (King James Version).
