Out of Chaos

How the Nation State Emerged from the Ruins of World War II

By: Jon Wilson

A provocative history of how nation states arose out of the ashes of World War II, showing how catastrophe, compromise, and contested visions forged the fragile order we still live in today

Nation states—self-contained territories with their own economy, population, and culture—dominate today’s world. Nationalists claim the modern nation state is rooted in deep historical time, while many scholars say it was a nineteenth-century creation. In Out of Chaos, historian Jon Wilson challenges these narratives, arguing instead that the nation state emerged suddenly and unexpectedly in the years following World War II and brought order to a world in crisis.

Wilson traces how political leaders still reeling from the chaos of war debated how to partition the people, land, and economies of the world. The nation state emerged as the only form of organization leaders from different ideological positions—communist and capitalist, former colonizer and former colonized—could agree upon. But this new order never fully displaced other ways of imagining political power. From separatist movements in Nigeria and Indonesia, to apologists for empire, to human rights activists fighting for universal justice, non-national groups continued to challenge the nation state’s authority.

Out of Chaos restores the history of the nation state, revealing it as a recent and contested construction that has ordered global society for the last seventy-five years and will continue to shape geopolitics in the future.