ABSTRACT
Since territory is a fundamental ethnic good, the nation state is an ethnic group strategy when it deploys the distinctive power of the state to maintain an ethnic group's monopoly of a territory. Nation states can mobilize their peoples to provide unprecedented economic and defensive collective goods. The social technologies deployed to achieve this high level of mobilization work by mimicking the traditional tribal group strategy. The nation state is thus the implicit promise of an ethnic group strategy. The traditional nation state is failing to fulfil that promise in an era of globalisation due to the pressures of mass migration and the inadequacy of ethnically neutral constitutions. Can the nation state be reformed to better serve peoples' ethnic genetic interests? Ethnic exclusiveness alone is problematic because it tends to degenerate into political chauvinism that works against others' genetic interests, risks the general good through aggressive war, and can become a vehicle for elite free riders. Ethnic solidarity's defensive function should be retained, but its aggressive side effects moderated. A moderating doctrine is that of universal nationalism in the tradition of Bismarck and Woodrow Wilson. The doctrine applies the Golden Rule internationally, respecting a general right to ethnic self rule. Implementation would include replacing warfare with international law, the limiting of free-riding national and global elites, and territorial confinement of unsustainable population growth.
