Not necessarily. It can also reinforce petty nationalism and separatist identities as counter forces to globalization.
[WS:] True, but such "reactionary" nationalism has little institutional foundations. It is reduced to cursing, shaking its fist, stomping its feet, but otherwise weak and inconsequential (just like the US ultra left :)). The current nationalism and separatist identity politics, by contrast, has strong institutional backing of the state, and thus can be very dangerous.
Mind that if there is no strong between-state competition, nationalism loses its appeal. This can be illustrated by comparing Europe to the US. In Europe, inter-state competition was strong, and so was nationalism to the point of culminating as Nazism or *national* socialism. In the US, inter-state competition was weak, and thus separatist identities and authoritarian sentiments expressed themselves mainly through religion (and thus never became the overwhelmingly dominant force like most European nationalisms.) What is more, US nationalism became stronger and more salient only when the US engaged in stronger between-state competition during the Cold War.
>From my viewpoint, a takeover of one set of state institutions by another
set of state institutions is not intrinsically bad. In fact, it is how
human civilization developed - one group expanding its influence by taking
over other groups. That is the basic law of social evolution, if you will.
The important thing is what happens after the takeover. If the "subsumed" group is physically exterminated, enslaved, or forcibly deprived of material goods, means of survival, etc. this is obviously a bad thing. But if the "subsumed" group merely loses its cultural identity as it is absorbed to the new larger society in which it can function on more or less equal terms, this is fundamentally a good thing because it unifies people, or at least creates material foundations for such unification.
It is no coincidence that lands occupied by small fragmented groups almost invariable lived in the state of constant conflict if not open war. By contrast, whatever we think of the modern state, it certainly reduced within-state violence and warfare (as Hobbes aptly observed.)
I also think that everything else being equal, the chances of establishing socialism are greater in a single state spanning many human groups than in many smaller states divided by their national identities and pursuing their narrowly defined national interests.
Wojtek