Nation-states are historically a new phenomenon. As people began rising up against the oppression of monarchies and aristocracies in the 18th and 19th centuries, they looked around for a new basis for political community. Many European thinkers found it in something called “the nation.” A legitimate government should embody the will of the people, they argued, and the people are the “nation.”

But who is the nation? Answering that question ended up being both liberating and extremely bloody. Revolutionaries and political theorists across Europe defined the nation as based on shared language, religion, customs, or race—or some combination of these. The trouble with all of these definitions was that within virtually any geographic territory, there were many people who did not “fit the description” of the nation. What should be done with them?

Some nationalist movements adopted a pluralist notion of “nation,” conceiving of the nation as a set of ideals and principles that anyone from any background could subscribe to. But other nationalist movements doubled down on race, religion, language, and narrow definitions of culture to demarcate who was “in” and who was “out.” (In the United States, for example, there has been an ongoing civil war—sometimes military and sometimes cultural—between pluralist and essentialist notions of nation that still continues today.)

As a result, nationalism became an ideology that, even as it helped people overthrow their kings and build democracies, also led them to murder and expel their countrymen at extraordinary scale. With the advent of industrialized warfare and the bureaucratic state, nationalism propelled the worst genocides and ethnic cleansings the world had ever seen. The seemingly “natural” borders of many countries around the world today are the result of this massive violence and displacement.

The lesson from the “era of nationalism” is not, as some would argue, that such violence is a regrettable but necessary step on the path to “self-determination” for various “nations.” Rather, we are now challenged to find a better basis for political community—one that does not require the extermination of inconvenient “others.” Why? Simply because the murder of human beings and the theft of their property are immoral. We cannot continue to organize our political lives based on founding acts of violation and dispossession.

We can, of course, choose to adopt a pluralist notion of nation. But perhaps we need to begin thinking beyond the nation as the sole repository of political community. Perhaps that paradigm has run its course. Perhaps, in a world of instant, global information technology, there are more humane and just ways to organize politically. What could these be?

So often, the solution to seemingly unsolvable problems begins with believing better things.

To believe better things, we must first think.

To begin thinking, we must suspend our current beliefs and stop assuming that all the options are already on the table.

What else is possible? Of what is possible, what is desirable? Of what is desirable, what is best? And why?