What are nations? Now there's a big question.

They are territorial yet their laws of domicile can cover assets far away from their homelands whether as informal or formal empire. They are certainly not the possessions of their peoples in any meaningful way despite the elaborate liberal theory claiming otherwise.

Can a nation have a mind? Nothing can have a mind existentially except an individual person (unless you are a believer in some world-soul), yet nations behave as if they have personalities or minds of their own. They appear to have essentialised existence after the fact.

Nations raise major philosophical questions about our own humanity. How can a single person or a committee of persons, elected or in power through a coup or by chance, become the epicentre of the destinies of millions - and, in great wars, hundreds of millions?

How was it that Napoleon Bonaparte could so manage his society that he could leave Poland with 690,000 men in 1812 and return with only 93,000 yet see not one assassination attempt or coup from the relations of his apparently willing victims?

It seems that we can be managed into a lemming-like state with surprising ease.

Whatever the answers, national societies, almost all of either dynastic origin (essentially the war band) or outgrowths of party-led liberation struggles against the heirs of war bands, seem to have developed 'social personalities' and something close to an organic life cycle.

National defence and security policies appear to follow the patterns of behaviour of persons in a Hobbesian universe. Every state at any time appears to be somewhere on the following continuum, each phase shading into the next ...

• the expansion of the war band into a vacuum - or rather an apparent vacuum created by the differential in technologies between a predator and the predated, with the only difference between imperialisms being whether the predation is for profit (dynastic) or ideological (liberatory)
• the settling of interstitiary vacuums between rival powers of equivalent or near-equivalent strength - this is the boundary-setting and soft power competition in a multi-power world that seems to be taking place today
• the defence of integrity, with varying degrees of fear that stronger powers might decide to become a nouveau war band (as national socialism decided to do quite consciously), instead of looking elsewhere and in other ways for profit and influence (assuming such options are available)

Although we might like to fantasise about world government and about noble democracies maintaining peace in our time, the reality is that even the most open democracies behave somewhere along this continuum in ways that are less than altruistic.

If anything, because of the need to justify their position to themselves (another 'human' trait), a hybridisation of inherited dynastic self interest and of the export of values in the Western democracies muddies the water further.

Internal contradictions will always create more heat than light in internal foreign policy debate about the precise nature of the national interest. That is why Gordon Brown appears terrified of admitting the truth about energy and strategic interests in relation to Libya and falls back on the 'war on terror' chestnut.

This is all being raised because we (TPPR) tend to take a hyper-realist view of international relations, one that emphasises that there is little new under the sun and that the primal drives of nations, like persons, are only thinly veneered by reason.

Wherever we look, we see 'histories' that are redacted to maintain cohesion and inconvenient interpretations or alternative explanations of the past and of others' pasts being edited out, much as personal memories are self-edited in order to construct personality.

Wherever we look, we see, regardless of the huge diversity of individual personalities within nations, the observable fact of a 'national character', predispositions and attitudes that are not imposed by elites on people but appear to be shared by both elites and people in a dialectic of mutual myth creation.

Mircea Eliade was a pioneer in bringing to our attention how myth was not something Greeks did but something that is omni-present in our own contemporary narratives. The interplay between past, emotion, reason, convention and obligations or guilt are present in nations as in persons.

It might even be argued that new mythic personalities have emerged for trans-national ideologies that compete within nations for control of nations and that nations themselves are constantly struggling to 'square' contradictory mythic personalities internally in order to maintain their cohesion.

International relations might also be considered analogous to relations between persons. Persons can be rational in pursuing their interests externally but the interests themselves (or 'constructed personality') are not necessarily wholly rational.

We reject, however, the idea of the psychotic State (the liberal myth of Nazi Germany) because a psychotic State would not be able to hold its own personality together. Somalia may be psychotic, interwar Germany was not - it was deeply neurotic.

But we do retain the notion of the neurotic State, the functioning State that is still highly disturbed and capable of causing friction and even a fist fight with its neighbours - or blundering into slighting the fragile ego of another State so that it throws a punch.

All this sounds like conservative pessimism but there is no reason to believe that we are doomed to centuries of Napoleonic egos leading sheep to slaughter.

As in 'real life' (international affairs has an air of fantasy sometimes little different from tales of Narnia or of Middle Earth), bad behaviour can be contained.

In 'real life', we have a police force (or a strong headteacher or parents), or we have a culture of constraint and restraint from birth or we learn to be less neurotic over time through experience, will or therapy. To some liberals, our police force might be world government or a truly dominant hegemon.

The problem here is one liberals refuse to face. Whether world government or hegemon, this single 'State' would still have a personality of sorts, would still be the creature of its history and the mythic presumptions of its constituents and would not be the rational actor of progressive fantasy.

Moreover, neither of the two great hegemons of the last two hundred years (the Pax Britannica from 1815 to 1914 or the US informal imperium which subsisted briefly over the two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union) have evidenced anything other than self interest and self regard as to values.

Like Rome, they merely expanded to fill a vacuum and they were forced to retreat when their values and claims were resisted by equal and countervailing forces and when the costs of filling the vacuum proved greater than the benefits.

On the other hand, the model of a culture of constraint that accept the neurotics and psychopaths in our midst and works around them, calling in the police only when necessary, was the ideal of the failed League of Nations and the failing United Nations.

It depends on everyone knowing the rules, everyone abiding by the rules and effective police power being in place when the rules are broken. This consensus is breaking down within liberal democracies so there is every reason to believe the situation is no better at a global level.

Unfortunately, the 'real world' analogy for our current international legal framework is village policing in the eighteenth century. The global village is run by the squire and parson with one rule for them and another for the local peasants.

Given that (to extend the analogy) the squire's sons are partial to seducing or even raping the village girls occasionally, an international system like this is doomed to create resentment and resistance.

A third way of dealing with the situation is the analogically personal - that each person/nation becomes emotionally stable in themselves, compassionate towards others but realistic about the need to retain their own reserve power when faced by others less stable and less giving.

You might call this benign nationalism, integral, non-interfering elsewhere, concentrating on economic strength and security yet supportive of any measures that remove the anarchy 'out there' within its means.

Unfortunately, many persons 'out there' have the illusion that they are emotionally stable when they are not. This lack of self-knowledge also applies to the complacent faux-democracies of the West.

If nations have minds and personalities and there is little that we as individuals can do except our bit in rewiring a few of the national neurones in competition with millions of others, where should we direct that tiny bit of energy?

Free-for-all Hobbesian international affairs, like the market, works but at immense cost. Like punctuated equilibrium in evolution, long periods of peace and trade get interrupted by horrible episodes of limbic breakdown, like the Thirty Years War or the horrors of China between 1911 and 1949 and beyond.

If we want to live like that, fine, but progressive dreams of 'world government' are no solution. In the end, without other reforms, it will become an 'authoritarian personality' that begs for its own revolt and resistance. Its eventual collapse will mean that we are back where we started.

If we want better, then there are only two ways forward. The first is the radical reform of the United Nations so that it is no longer the vehicle of the squire and the parson but acts in a more limited way than it has been doing to provide basic rule of law and justice for the peasants (the weak nations).

Second, and equally important, national personalities have to be recognised and encouraged to develop in ways that are far less dynastic, far less ideological and far more attuned to the actual life needs of the general population.

I suppose we are saying that, in order to preclude another case where 690,000 men (and women) are directed into some snowy waste and then only 93,000 return, foreign and security policy needs to be taken out of the hands of dynastic successor politicians such as Presidents and be democratised.

If liberals want to avoid the conservative pessimism of our realpolitik analysis, then they need to stop flaffing around with grand visions and get down to basics:

• a more limited in scope but stronger, fairer and more independent UN with teeth and
• the radical democratisation of their own bourgeois democracies before they interfere in the affairs of less developed states.

Strong stable and responsive democracies prepared to concede some of their own interest to the international rule of law - now that's the basis for peace and security!

This is not perhaps what the functional heirs to Sceaf of the Angles or Ascaric of the Franks want to hear but, hey, a mature personality eventually grows up and put away the toy guns and childhood gangs and so should nations.