By Ryan McMaken

The idea of political unity has long been a popular trope and slogan in politics. “He’s a uniter, not a divider” is a sentiment that many American politicians like to cultivate about themselves. Over many centuries and across many jurisdictions we encounter the claim that unity is a political virtue, and that anything that “divides us” must therefore be condemned. Some even label opposition to unity as a type of treason. 

So, it makes sense that political unity is often the language employed by those who seek to enhance and increase the power of the state. Since the advent of nationalism in the late eighteenth century, “unity” has been a common rallying cry in attempts to hammer together strong national states over the objections of local powers and minority populations. Those who weren’t on the winning end of “unification” could see that political unity would actually obliterate the independence and self-determination of those in the minority. Put another way, unity has long been the slogan and goal of those who are in the business of state building. 

Consider, for example, the nationalists of nineteenth-century Italy and Germany. Or the French revolutionaries. The Soviet political system was highly unified within the party and within the state itself. All of these revolutionary regimes proclaimed political unity to be one of their chief goals. The United States has certainly been no different. Thanks to the Civil War in the 1860s, the rise of the administrative state in the 1930s, and the triumph of the national security state since 1945, the United States has become progressively more unified under an increasingly powerful central state. 

In all of these cases, political unity has triumphed over regionalism, secession, and local self-governance. Moreover, the reality of political unity in practice illustrates that it is a tool used to extinguish freedom and the crucial political decentralization that has historically been the foundation of human liberty in the Western tradition. 

While unity sounds like a nice thing to have, when it comes to politics and nation-states, experience repeatedly shows that we can have unity or we can have freedom. We can’t have both. 

Unity is a great thing in the private sector and in private life. With non-state institutions unity is voluntary and not imposed by politicians wielding coercive power. Families and religious groups are wonderful when the people within them enjoy unity. However, no one is forced to “unite” within a family or a parish at the point of a gun. Those who wish to leave the group may do so, and those who remain continue to be unified. 

States do not function this way, and as they become larger and more diverse, the more they tend to rely on coercion. Polities with people of relatively........

© Eurasia Review