It is human nature to identify with more than the self, to belong to a group. From family to faction, clan to country, the fabric of human history is defined, in a large sense, by the changing patterns and trends of this group belonging.
But it is the tone and nature of that belonging that has begun to change ... strap in and follow me below.
In the big pictures of economy and politics, geography has been the dominant force of this identification for thousands of years. As technology and necessity have made travel easier and trade more frequent, the size of the region with which an individual can feel part has increased. Thus, the politics of antiquity - even characterized as they were by the clashes of empires - were really the stories of city-states with names like Athens and Sparta, Venice and Rome, and even Jerusalem.
Generally, the Treaty of Westphalia is thought of as beginning the transition from city-state and feudal holding to the modern concept of a nation. Certainly, Europeans developed more pronounced feelings of national identity during the 17th and 18th centuries (although some such beliefs were already well-established, such as Dutch culture). And it is this identification with the nation, this nationalism, that has defined two centuries of warfare.
Many people believed, and others feared, that the changes wrought upon the political landscape by the economic globalization of the 20th and 21st centuries would invariably lead to a transnationalism defined by regional governing organizations like the EU. Citizens of Europe would be Europeans, and the tensions and rivalries of nationalism - along with the ugly baggage that has cleaved to that concept - would be swept aside.
Clearly, that hasn't happened.
In fact, much of the current hostilities occurring worldwide are an outright rejection of geographic group identification. Just as the spread of humanity has enabled people of similar interests and ethnicities to hold wider swathes of territory, so too has it allowed such people to become more dispersed and commingled with others ... others with whom they would just as soon not identify. Nowhere is this change more visible than in the Middle East, where the doctrines of fundamentalist Islam reinforce the shift from geography to ideology as the primary means of group identification. Under strict Islamic interpretation, no government (save for the divine governance of an Islamic caliphate) is legitimate. And, indeed, the very fact that most of the nations of the Middle East are the artificial constructions of colonialism and decolonialism in the wake of the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the World War I has ensured that the appeal of nationalism in such nations is limited at best.
It should have been no surprise then that a freed Iraq did not begin in earnest the building of a nation; many of its residents do not believe in the nation Iraq, do not feel their first loyalties are to such a concept. They are Sunni or Shi'a, Arab or Kurd first, and Iraqi second - if at all. Our insistence in dealing with the Middle East in terms of countries is, perhaps, the single most crippling misunderstanding regarding our foreign policy at the moment (save, clearly, whether we should be where we are to begin with). We conflated the Taliban with Afghanistan, and believed that once the organization was removed from power, that it was gone. We - in many ways - discounted the reach and durability of al'Qaeda because it was not a state actor. In fact, it is the contrast between nations and organizations is the very reason we have used to justify the abrogation of Geneva, the culture of torture and the out-of-hand discarding of treaties and rights.
This failure of concept is repeating itself to the west of Iraq. Israel, very likely the most nationalist of the Middle Eastern players, is arrayed against not one, but two, non-state entities: Hamas and Hezbollah. They have responded to the first by crippling the infrastructure of Gaza, and to the second by waging war against the infrastructure of Lebanon. The Israeli belief has been that, because these agencies have a role (more so in the case of Hamas, clearly) in the government of their respective territories, that they can be equated with those nations (a term used loosely in regards to Palestine, of course). But the lesson should have been learned from the Taliban and from al'Qaeda. These new associations are at once both sub-national and super-national. They exist within, and yet apart from, the governments with which we have had familiar dealings.
And most importantly, they are not bound by exclusive geographical association. It is easy to attack Lebanon (or Iraq, or Afghanistan...). Any one with access to the Internet or an atlas can find their boundaries. Anyone with a missile, or a bomb, or a soldier can arrange for those weapons of war to do their work within those boundaries. But no such strategy maps out how to attack an ideological entity. Sure, Hezbollah has buildings in some suburb south of Beirut. But blowing up blocks of residential neighborhoods does not wound Hezbollah the same way it wounds Lebanon.
This is more than the next generation of war; it may be the next generation of social structure. America is not immune to this shift. We are a nation divided; the talk of red versus blue, of Democrat versus Republican, of conservative versus liberal is not just the political rhetoric of fifteen years ago. It is a war of words that marks the division of the country into two camps who despise each other on concept, heedless of logic or debate. We are a much more orderly and lawful state than in Iraq, so the outright violence is less than between Shi'a and Sunni. But the difference between death squads and Coulter's eliminationist spiels is only in the actual implementation of the violence.
There are no easy answers. We - as individual activists and thinkers, and as a country as a whole - need to give careful thought to these changes. To find peace, both abroad and at home, we will need to adapt to the strong appeal of ideological affiliation without allowing the outright collapse of governmental structure as has happened in Iraq. But we must also steel ourselves against an over-dependence on nationalistic identity in the face of growing non-nationalist appeal: down such a path the specters of Weimar threaten.