People must still look to the nation-state for their military security. Meanwhile, the nation-state has acquired a perverse new economic role. It used to be an engine of progress. Now, in the West at least, it is becoming a comforting symbol of the past, something to hang on to against disturbing forces of change. These then are the ingredients of our disorientation.
Supranational government is needed but unwanted.
Subnational identity is wistfully desired, but is too often little more than a costume parade. Nation-state government is still much desired but is being undressed, as it were, from above and below. Seething realists wish that conviction politics would return and show that this claimed need for a world order would vanish if only the older extroverts among the nation-states could walk tall again. Given some grave danger of war, which is not hard to imagine, those realists might yet be proved right, because the nation-state remains the one entity that people are ready to die for. In such an era of leaderless despond, the habit of supranational government would slowly take hold.