Why do nations act the way they do? More prosaically, what are the sources of behavior of the modern collectivities we call nations? Hans Morgenthau famously answered: “the struggle for power and peace,” and many scholars in his wake have offered variants on the theme of how the threat of violence and dispossession shapes nations.

In The Mortality and Morality of Nations, Uriel Abulof offers a novel twist on this theme: The behavior of a nation is shaped by a shared sense among citizens that the nation may cease to exist. While we know that threats, whether construed in material terms like invasion by a bigger neighbor or in more capacious terms such as a civilizational threat, drive behavior, Abulof argues that our theorizations of these threats rarely approach them in an existential sense (pp. 23–24). That is, threats are usually not theorized as they appear to and are made sense of by those threatened, or as if the threat is to the continued existence of the collectivity. Now, there are reasonable theoretical and empirical grounds for this neglect. Theoretically, modern nationalism is built on a sense of a long past and what Benedict Anderson called a “limitless future” (quoted on p. 6). Empirically, the size of modern polities combined with norms against conquest and genocide have meant that, since 1950, states and communities rarely die out. That nations are not expected to die out is an idea of recent origin—right through the nineteenth century, even the mightiest empires were expected to decline—and for that reason, it is unsurprising that a sense of collective mortality is not studied more broadly.

Abulof contends that this neglect impoverishes our theories of collective behavior. To reveal this, he turns to “small” nations, in Milan Kundera’s sense of nations that, whatever their material size, understand themselves as small because they feel that they may not be around in the future (p. 7). In three such “small nations”—French Canadians, Israelis, and Afrikaners—the book examines what politics looks like when members of a community constantly articulate a fear that their physical and collective existence may very well come to an end (p. 29).

First, one has to specify what mortality might mean in a national context (pp. 28–43). A nation’s sense of mortality operates on two dimensions: whether the people will physically survive in the future, and whether their identity as a people will persist. Abulof idiosyncratically (and somewhat oddly) terms these, respectively, epistemic and ontological insecurity (e.g., pp. 135–36). The terminology notwithstanding, the distinction is useful, because nations will be concerned about one or the other dimension; for example, the Quebecois cared about their identity eroding but not their physical survival, and vice versa for the Israelis and Afrikaners (and conversely, a “mighty” nation is a nation that is not concerned on either dimension) (pp. 237, 303).

Abulof’s central arguments are that the moral claims of nations are shaped by their sense of collective mortality (“mortality makes morality”), and these moral claims animate the nation’s use of force (“right makes might”) (p. 9). The second argument has prominent predecessors, and not just among liberals and constructivists; E. H. Carr highlighted the necessity of “utopian” ideas in motivating political action in The Twenty Years Crisis (1946). The former claim is more surprising, as we might have expected concerns about survival to operate at a different level from abstract ideas of right and wrong. Abulof argues that survival is itself a moral project, what he calls a causa sui, or cause of itself (pp. 4–5). A cause of itself suggests a somewhat solipsistic project, and this leads to two objections.

For two of the cases—the Israelis and the Afrikaners—a skeptic might argue that casting survival as a self-justifying moral project operates to obfuscate discrimination against the Palestinians and black South Africans, respectively. A more sympathetic critic might argue that, at the very least, the moral claims of these societies serve to manage the cognitive dissonance of maintaining individual and social decency in the context of explicit repression. Both of these objections presume a distinction between the fact of a policy and the norm that justifies it. Abulof suggests that this distinction between facts and norms is not a meaningful one in small nations. There is no Rawlsian “original position” where one can evaluate facts in relation to norms developed through abstracting oneself from the messiness of political life. We see this in the end of apartheid rule: Initially justified as moral because it ensured the survival of a threatened minority among a majority black population, apartheid came to be seen as compromising the moral standing of Afrikaners, even as it preserved their material privileges. Explaining why apartheid had to end, F. W. de Klerk said, “We could have carried on for another ten years, but that would have involved killing a lot of people. Where’s the morality in that?” (quoted at p. 292). Here right made might . . . until it did not, and the use of might was altered.

The Afrikaner example reveals that many policy changes where collective survival is at stake are not just about material considerations but also involve making meaning (pp. 22–25). To use the language of existentialism, they are about the facticity of collective survival rather than the fact of it. This makes policy changes more costly than a utilitarian approach might have it, but also often unpredictable. When Ariel Sharon sought to dismantle settlements in Gaza, he called Israeli rule “occupation” and as such “a bad thing” (p. 63), revealing the costly moral stakes of what might otherwise appear purely strategic considerations. That it was Sharon, the architect of the settlements in the 1970s and 1980s, who said this also reveals the unpredictability of the relationship between mortality and morality. He may well not have believed that occupation was immoral, and he may have been motivated by sheer pragmatism in withdrawing from Gaza and tightening the Israeli border. But, and this is Abulof’s point, to achieve his preferred policy, Sharon had to imply that his own past behavior was morally questionable. Not only was such a move more costly than one justified on utilitarian grounds, but it was also harder to anticipate.

One of the book’s virtues is that the cases challenge conventional wisdom on “securitization,” namely, that threats to national security are often depoliticized and managed through legal (e.g., state of exception) or technocratic (e.g., risk) means. In Israel, South Africa, and Quebec, collective mortality has the opposite effect, informing debates over the Hebrew language in Israel, the church in South Africa, and, most obviously, the independence referendums in Quebec. What many Jewish and Israeli observers have called the “abyss” threatening to swallow their people has led to vibrant debate about how to build a safety net above it (pp. 138–43). This debate is animated, not chilled, by what the novelist David Grossman calls, “the thing that scares me most . . . losing my confidence in Israel’s existence” (quoted on p. 139).

Illuminating as the cases are, the limitation of the analysis to three existentially threatened or “small” nations leads to two misspecifications: of the theoretical relationship between mortality and morality, and of the empirical conditions under which this relationship holds. Recall that Abulof’s two major claims are that mortality makes morality, and this morality leads, second, to the deployment of might. Power and purpose flow from a societal sense of mortality. This begs the question: Are “big nations”—those that do not confront their mortality—bereft of morality? Do only “mortal nations seek moral standing” (p. 43)? Clearly, the answer must be “no”; the search for moral standing characterizes nations like the United States and India that would doubtless be classified as “mighty” nations for whom future existence seems almost certain.

That nations, whether preoccupied by their mortality or not, seek moral standing requires the central arguments to be qualified. First, mortality appears to not be a necessary condition for a nation’s search for moral standing, nor for its deployment of might. Put differently, it seems that morality can be made and might be deployed in the absence of mortality. Second, in small nations where a sense of collective mortality suffuses politics, issues of right and wrong are never abstract philosophical questions but disputes embedded in everyday politics; right may not make might, but the two are inseparable. Empirically, these qualifications, if correct, would limit the scope of the argument to small nations because in the absence of a pressing sense of mortality, morality and the deployment of might in mighty nations would have to be animated by different logics.

Abulof’s thoughtful book adds to recent work that locates meaning making as central to national security (e.g., see Ronald Krebs, Narrative and the Making of National Security, 2015). Uniquely, it shows that the behavior of small nations is affected by their sense of collective mortality, and how. It illuminates the far-ranging effects that the fear of the society disappearing created for the Afrikaaners, and continues to create, in varying degrees, in Israel and Quebec. While collective mortality may not play such a role everywhere, to ignore it is to have an impoverished view of certain societies in particular and politics in general.