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No one saw it coming—that the next big thing of the 21st century would be the nation-state, an idea from the 17th. Yet it has suddenly become a global phenomenon—a driving force of politics in the U.S. and around the world and the subject of intense intellectual debate. The news has even come to Harvard, where a professor of history has written a book about American nationhood, and a professor of economics says that “there is something special about the nation-state—it creates reciprocal obligations that don’t exist across national borders.��

There is, to be sure, a resistance. One salvo against the organizers of this week’s National Conservatism Conference in Washington accuses us of injecting “a malignant form of nationalism . . . into the American body politic�� and said we “need to be mercilessly defeated on the battlefield of ideas as if September 1, 1939”—the day Germany invaded Poland—“were approaching.��

But in general, the mood has moved through the stages of grief from denial to anger to acceptance—acceptance that the nation-state is alive and well, not about to die and make way for global progressivism...

Read the full article in the Wall Street Journal "here":