In my own constituency (where I estimate that about 10 per cent of the population are immigrants from Asia or the Caribbean) I have the impression th… - Enoch Powell

The nation state is the product of that logic. In England ... it was worked out to its final conclusion at the Henrician reformation, the event by which the English nation state was fully realised. All exertion of authority, whether the making or the enforcement of law, the taking of collective decisions of an executive (i.e. not legislable) character, the imposition and collection of taxes, the judgment of causes—in short, all duress brought to bear by the society upon the individual—proceeds from one source, and that source an internal and native one. The England of Henry VIII found it impossible that its laws should be made, that its causes should be judged, or that a revenue should be procured from it by an external authority. In other words, there was no such thing as external authority: the expression was a contradiction in terms... There is a name for appealing over the head of the Crown to an authority outside the realm, and that name is treason. The word may be disused, but the thing is not; and the penalties of praemunire, which those guilty of it formerly incurred, were not disproportionate to its seriousness.

The right of free association, which is pleaded on behalf of collective price-fixing by trade unions, means nothing unless there is an equal right of non-association. It is contrary to the Rule of Law that any private association of citizens should be permitted to exercise, let alone to be endowed with the positive power to exercise, coercion over those who do not choose to belong to it. This power of coercion derives primarily from the legal privileges which trade unions, and trade unions uniquely, have enjoyed for the last sixty years, privileges which enable them to behave in ways that for any other associations would be unlawful and would result in damages for those who suffered injury at their hands... [N]o one has succeeded in showing that today these coercive powers are other than superfluous at best and at worst harmful, and that...the state of the law on which those privileges rest is ripe for urgent reform. The law of picketing, intimidation, contracting-out, immunity from process is not at this day defensible, either in itself or in its economic consequences. When combination to fix the price of labour enjoys no privileges which are denied to combinations for the purpose of fixing other prices, then the right of free association will be a reality and not a phrase, and one of the most serious obstacles will have been removed which impede at present the use of this nation's abilities and resources for the benefit of all her people.

I do not know if the doctrine that the nation-state arose in the 19th century was still being taught ... but it is erroneous. The nation-state reaches back far into the origins of Europe itself and perhaps beyond. If Europe was not always a Europe of nations, it was always a Europe in which nations existed, and were taken for granted, as a basic form of the State.