17. Witch-Hunts of Today? ✳️Download for free: https://www.istorex.org/post/serguey-ehrlich-memory-identity-and-imagination In 1882, one of the ‘founding fathers’ of French nationalism Ernest Renan (1990: 20, italics added) wrote: ‘The nations are not something eternal. They had their beginnings and they will end. A European confederation will very probably replace them. But such is not the law of the century in which we are living. At the present time, the existence of nations is a good thing, a necessity even. Their existence is the guarantee of liberty, which would be lost if the world had only one law and only one master.’ Some ‘positive minds’ still doubt the realization of a united humankind, and nearly a century and a half after Renan predicted the inevitable end of nations, they continue to believe that even under the conditions of global information civilization the phenomenon of the nation-state will persist forever. They support the ‘incontestable’ argument by pointing to the current rise of nationalism experienced in many Western countries. This can be replied by referring to historical analogies. Catholics and Protestants engaged in ‘medieval’ witch-hunts not at the height of the Middle Ages, but during the end of the Renaissance and the Early Modernity period, roughly from about 1450 to 1750. Tens of thousands were executed in Europe and North America on charges of witchcraft. Historians attribute this irrational reaction to confusion over the challenges posed by the transition to Modernity (Behringer, 2004). We are now experiencing a similar process. The postmodern nation-state, like the early modern church, is unable to respond adequately to current challenges. Trying to maintain its influence, it blames globalization for problems that the nation-state and its capitalist economy have themselves generated: the nuclear threat, ecological collapse, and growing inequality to name a few. State agents who condemn ‘global capitalism’ while simultaneously keeping stolen money offshore are emblematic of this epoch. The nation-state cannot promote public prosperity, but as ‘identity with the nation is superior to all other forms of identity’ (Suny, 2001: 870), it remains capable of unleashing new witch-hunts against ‘anti-national elements’—which could result not in tens of thousands, but in tens of millions of victims. Ronald Inglehart (2018: 214–215) explains why the current nationalist agenda is misguided: ‘High-income societies are currently regressing toward xenophobic authoritarian politics,’ which ‘obscures the fact that the key conflict in contemporary high-income societies is between the majority and the one percent [of the richest people]. … If developed societies excluded all foreigners and all imports, secure jobs would continue to disappear, since the leading cause—overwhelmingly—is automation,’ which, it should be noted, takes place within the obsolete frameworks of the nation-state and capitalism. Accordingly, the current surge of undemocratic nationalist sentiment is triggered by the inherent conflict between outdated nation-state identity and the contemporary reality of the emerging global community. If history teaches us anything, it is that we must make every effort to ensure that the inevitable transition to a global civilization does not include modern witch-hunts.