“My case is not that the nation state is the only answer to the problems of modern government, but that it is the only answer that has proved itself.
We may feel tempted to experiment with other forms of political order. But experiments on this scale are dangerous, since nobody knows how to predict or to reverse their results.
The French, Russian, and Nazi Revolutions were bold experiments; but in each case they led to the collapse of legal order, to mass murder at home, and to belligerence abroad.
The wise policy is to accept the arrangements, however imperfect, that have evolved through custom and inheritance, to improve them by small adjustments, but not to jeopardize them by large-scale alterations the consequences of which nobody can really envisage.
The case for this approach was unanswerably set before us by Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution, and subsequent history has repeatedly confirmed his view of things.
The lesson that we should draw, therefore, is that since the nation state has proved to be a stable foundation of democratic government and a secular jurisdiction, we ought to improve it, to adjust it, even to dilute it, but not to throw it away."
— Roger Scruton
