“Another thing that they have tried to get us to believe in the last 150 years… is that the nation as the repository of sovereignty can be both a state and a community. …Why did the English, the French, the Castilians, the Hohenzollerns, and others become the repository of sovereignty as nations… They did so because… weapons made it possible to compel obedience over areas which were approximately the size of these national groups… nationalism is an episode in history, and it fit a certain power structure and a certain configuration in human life in our civilization. Now… They all want autonomy. …The nation or the state, as we now have it as the structure of power, cannot be a community.”

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

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Carroll Quigley79

American historian 1910–1977

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“The League of Nations fell, not because its principles were wrong, but because they were not practised. A new world organization must be created. Its nucleus was in the United Nations, and its foundation stone the close cooperation of the British Commonwealth of Nations, the United States, and the U. S. S. R. … They wanted an organization embracing small as well as great nations, but on the three, on account of their strength, the greatest responsibility for preserving the peace of the world must fall. A world organization to preserve peace must have power at its disposal. So long as there was a danger of wolves the sheep-dog must have strong teeth. It was time that the nations of Europe should settle down as good citizens in a world of States. In the British Commonwealth of Nations it was shown how freedom was compatible with unity. If peace was to be preserved there must be some cession of sovereignty, but membership of a large organization did not conflict with the reasonable claims of nations to live their own lives.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Labour Party Conference in Caxton Hall, London (12 December 1944), quoted in The Times (13 December 1944), p. 2.
War Cabinet

“The world political system is till based on the concept of the national sovereign state. For the first time therefore, in three hundred years economy and sovereignty are becoming divorced from each other.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 3, p. 739

“The 'state' on the modern conception is a legally defined term which refers, at the level of substance, to a state power that possesses both internal and external sovereignty, at the spatial level over a clearly delimited terrain (the state territory) and at the social level over the totality of members (the body of citizens or the people). State power constitutes itself in the forms of positive law, and the people is the bearer of the legal order whose jurisdiction is restricted to the state territory. In political usage, the concepts 'nation' and 'people' have the same extension. But in addition to its legal definition, the term 'nation' has the connotation of a political community shaped by common descent, or at least by a common language, culture, and history. A people becomes a 'nation' in this historical sense only in the concrete form of a particular form of life.”

Jürgen Habermas book The Inclusion of the Other

Habermas (1998) The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, eds. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

“Our constitutional history started with the States retaining all powers of sovereignty unimpaired, save those conferred upon the National Government. The evolution of the constitutional system has consisted largely in determining the line of demarcation between State and national authority. The cases involved are many and complicated, but there is a fairly good popular understanding of this continuing struggle between these contending sovereignties. Because of better communication and transportation, the constant tendency has been to more and more social and economic unification. The present continent-wide union of forty-eight States is much closer than was the original group of thirteen States.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

“Now, suppose that the English community and the army were to leave India, taking with them all their cannons and their splendid weapons and all else, who then would be the rulers of India?…. Is it possible that under these circumstances two nations—the Mohammedans and the Hindus—could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power? Most certainly not. It is necessary that one of them should conquer the other. To hope that both could remain equal is to desire the impossible and the inconceivable… But until one nation has conquered the other and made it obedient, peace cannot reign in the land.”

Syed Ahmed Khan (1820–1898) Indian educator and politician

Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (1817–1898), Speech in March 1888, Quoted by Dilip Hiro, "The Longest August: The Unflinching Rivalry Between India and Pakistan" https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/longest-august-unflinching-rivalry-between-india-and-pakistan

“Robin Day: So you would say, would you – I hope I am not misrepresenting you – that the question of parliamentary sovereignty and national sovereignty as affected by our membership of the EEC, is the issue on which you would like to see most people have as their reason for voting one way or the other?
Enoch Powell: Yes, for – in peace as in war, it is the great, the ultimate, question for any nation. If we still are a nation. So really I am inviting the British people and have been these many years, to say whether or not they intend still to be a nation.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

The Parliamentarians, BBC TV (4 February 1979), from Reflections of a Statesman. The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell (London: Bellew, 1991), p. 263
1970s

“I believe as firmly as I believe any other historical truth—that no nation ever suffered so much from another nation as the Irish have suffered from the English—or for so long a time.”

William Smith O'Brien (1803–1864) Irish nationalist politician (1803-1864)

14 January letter to John Martin: 14, Correspondence between John Martin and William Smith O'Brien relative to a French invasion, 1861 https://books.google.com/books?id=uioenbWx30MC&pg=PA14,

“It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, however powerful. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the imperatives of global environmental cooperation.”

Maurice Strong (1929–2015) Canadian businessman

Maurice Strong, 1992 essay entitled Stockholm to Rio: A Journey Down a Generation
Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=gvIvCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA535

“If we strive only for national reconstruction but neglect to struggle for sovereignty and territorial integrity, national independence will certainly not be recognized and our country will be reduced to an autonomous state.”

Trường Chinh (1907–1988) former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (1907-1988)

Source: The August Revolution (1946) (excerpts), p.68

“The thirteen Colonies were not unaware of the difficulties which these problems presented. We shall find a great deal of wisdom in the method by which they dealt with them. When they were finally separated from Great Britain, the allegiance of their citizens was not to the Nation, for there was none. It was to the States. For the conduct of the war there had been a voluntary confederacy loosely constructed and practically impotent. Continuing after peace was made, when the common peril which had been its chief motive no longer existed, it grew weaker and weaker. Each of the States could have insisted on an entirely separate and independent existence, having full authority over both their internal and external affairs, sovereign in every way. But such sovereignty would have been a vain and empty thing. It would have been unsupported by adequate resources either of property or population, without a real national spirit; ready to fall prey to foreign intrigue or foreign conquest. That kind of sovereignty meant but little. It had no substance in it. The people and their leaders naturally sought for a larger, more inspiring ideal. They realized that while to be a citizen of a State meant something, it meant a great deal more if that State were a part of a national union. The establishment of a Federal Constitution giving power and authority to create a real National Government did not in the end mean a detriment, but rather an increment to the sovereignty of the several States. Under the Constitution there was brought into being a new relationship, which did not detract from but added to the power and the position of each State. It is true that they surrendered the privilege of performing certain acts for themselves, like the regulation of commerce and the maintenance of foreign relations, but in becoming a part of the Union they received more than they gave.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Freedom and its Obligations (1924)

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