The CSS Point

NATION-STATE

Nations and states may seem identical, but they are not. States govern
people in a territory with boundaries. They have laws, taxes, officials,
currencies, postal services, police, and (usually) armies. They wage war,
negotiate treaties, put people in prison, and regulate life in thousands of
ways. They claim sovereignty within their territory. By contrast, nations are
groups of people claiming common bonds like language, culture, and
historical identity. Some groups claiming to be nations have a state of their
own, like the French, Dutch, Egyptians, and Japanese. Others want a state
but do not have one: Tibetans, Chechnyans, and Palestinians, for example.
Others do not want statehood but claim and enjoy some autonomy. The
Karen claim to be a nation trapped within the state of Burma/Myanmar. The
Sioux are a nation within the boundaries of the United States. Each of these
nations has its own special territory, rights, laws, and culture, but not
statehood. Some imagined nations are larger than states or cross-state
boundaries. The Arab nation embraces more than a dozen states, while the
nation of the Kurds takes in large areas of four states. Some people assume
that states are fixed and permanently established across most of the globe.
But in fact states are in flux.

State boundaries are often changed – by war, negotiation, arbitration, or

even by the sale of territory for money (Russia sold Alaska to the United
States, for example). A few states have endured, but others may be here
today and gone tomorrow. Over the past decade a number of states have
disappeared – Czechoslovakia, East Germany, North and South Yemen, and
of course the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

www.thecsspoint.com
www.facebook.com/thecsspointOfficial
 The CSS Point
Diplomatic recognition confers legitimacy on a new state (or on the
government of a state) but sometimes there is a lack of consensus within
the international community. For example, the Palestinian people are largely
under the jurisdiction of other states, although they are seen by the majority
of the international community as having strong claims to independent
statehood. Other nations claiming the right to independent statehood fail to
win backing and are dismissed as frivolous or illegitimate (such as Kosovo).
When the United Nations was founded, it was composed of just 51
member states. Today there are nearly 190. The great majority of today’s
members were then either colonies (as in most of Africa) or parts of other
states (such as those that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union).

The classical nation-states in Northern and Western Europe evolved within

the boundaries of existing territorial states. They were part of the European
state system that took on a recognizable shape with the Peace of
Westphalia in 1648. By contrast, the ‘belated’ nations – beginning with
Italy and Germany – followed a different course, one that was also typical
for the formation of nation-states in Central and Eastern Europe; here the
formation of the state followed the trail blazed by an anticipatory national
consciousness. The difference between these two paths (from state to nation
versus from nation to state) is reflected in the backgrounds of the actors
who formed the vanguard of nation and state builders. In the former case,
they were lawyers, diplomats, and military officers who belonged to the
king’s administrative staff and together constructed a state bureaucracy. In
the latter case, it was writers, historians, scholars, and intellectuals who laid
the groundwork for the subsequent diplomatic and military unification of
the state. After the Second World War, a third generation of very different
nation-states emerged from the process of decolonization, primarily in
Africa and Asia. Often these states, which were founded within the frontiers

www.thecsspoint.com
www.facebook.com/thecsspointOfficial
 The CSS Point
established by the former colonial regimes, acquired sovereignty before the
imported forms of state organisation could take root in a national identity
that transcended tribal differences. In these cases, artificial states had first
to be filled by a process of nation-building. Finally, with the collapse of the
Soviet Empire, the trend towards the formation of independent nation-states
in Eastern and Southern Europe has followed the path of more or less violent
secessions. In the socially and economically precarious situation in which
these countries found themselves, the old ethno national slogans had the
power to mobilize distraught populations for independence.

The nation-state at one time represented a response to the historical

challenge of finding a functional equivalent for the early modern form of
social integration that was in the process of disintegrating. Today we are
confronting an analogous challenge. The globalization of commerce and
communication, of economic production and finance, of the spread of
technology and weapons, and above all of ecological and military risks,
poses problems that can no longer be solved within the framework of nation-
states or by the traditional method of agreements between sovereign states.
If current trends continue, the progressive undermining of national
sovereignty may necessitate the founding and expansion of political
institutions on the supranational level.

Some observers believe that the role of the nation-state has been reduced to
that of a municipality within the global capitalist system, responsible for
providing the necessary infrastructure and services to attract capital
investment. However, this is much too simplistic. Societies also demand
identity, and the nation-state has sometimes been successful in providing
this where other identities have been weak. It can therefore play an
important part in expressing to the outside world a unique identity

www.thecsspoint.com
www.facebook.com/thecsspointOfficial
 The CSS Point
associated with a particular locality. The nation-state is less successful in
those situations where the population is fragmented between several large
groups who do not wish to surrender portions of their different identities in
order to produce a national identity. Malaysia, Indonesia, and Yugoslavia are
just a few particularly good contemporary examples. In these cases, the
national ideology for various reasons fails to assimilate large sections of the
population, causing an ongoing crisis of belief within the society, that is
generally responded to with the use of (sometimes violent) coercion by the
apparatus of the state and by the dominant group.

The cultural effects of accelerating globalisation have brought with them

disintegrating factors that tend towards the atomization of societies, and
towards the breakdown of older social, political, and cultural units, including
that of the nuclear family unit. This tendency is most pronounced in the
economically advanced nation-states of the West, and has tended to reduce
the authority, importance, and relevance of the nation-state as an
institution.

Alongside this atomization within societies, especially Western societies, has

come a seemingly contradictory tendency towards regionalism. The
surrender of many of the economic functions of nation-states to regional
entities has been a feature of this latest round of globalisation. Perhaps
more significant has been the growth of global cities and their increasing
independence from the nation-state to which they ostensibly belong. New
York, London, and Tokyo have been identified as being global cities of the
first order, whilst Los Angeles, Frankfurt, Zurich, Paris, Sydney, and
Singapore, among a dozen or so others, can be considered second-order
global cities. The relationship of these global cities to national governments

www.thecsspoint.com
www.facebook.com/thecsspointOfficial
 The CSS Point
is changing, especially in critical areas such as monetary policy, interest
rates, commercial treaties, and immigration.

The development of global cities has been accompanied by the growth of

territory that has become peripheral from the major social and economic
processes, and which cuts across the boundaries of rich and poor countries.
Whilst including much of what was known as the Third World and the
countries of the former communist bloc, this peripheral economic
wilderness now includes large regions within the developed countries
themselves. However, it should be remembered that controlling population
movements has become a key function of the modern nation-state, and
keeping the poor immobile has become a principal concern, especially for
those wealthy regions of the world that do not want their cities ‘flooded’ with
people – usually unskilled – for whom their economy has no useful purpose.

In the next century we may witness the further decay of the nation-state as
the all-powerful and sole centre of power, and with that we will see the
further growth of non-state organizations and the concentration of actual
power within the global cities. Some of these organizations stand above the
state – for example, the European Union. Others are of a completely
different kind, such as international bodies and multinational
corporations. What they all have in common is that they either assume
some of the functions of the nation-state or manage to escape its control.
Being either much larger than states or without geographical borders, they
are better positioned to take advantage of recent developments in
transportation and communications. The result is that their power seems to
be growing while that of the nation-state declines.

www.thecsspoint.com
www.facebook.com/thecsspointOfficial