Nations and States: The Rise of the Nation-State

A multicultural state in which no ethnic group dominates (such a state may also be considered a multicultural state depending on the degree of cultural assimilation of various groups). A city-state that is smaller than a “nation” in the sense of a “large sovereign country,” but is dominated by all or part of a single “nation” in the sense of a shared ethnicity. An empire is a collection of countries and nationalities ruled by a single monarch or ruling state. A confederation is a collection of sovereign nations, which may or may not include nation-states. A federated state within a larger federation that is only partially self-governing and may or may not be a nation-state (for example, the state boundaries of Bosnia and Herzegovina are drawn along ethnic lines, but those of the United States are not).

Rise of Nation State:

A nation-state is a sovereign government (i.e., a state) ruled in the name of a group of citizens who identify as a nation. The right to self-determination of a core national group within the state (which may include all or only some of its residents) underpins a nation-authority state’s control over a territory and the people who live there. Members of the core national group believe that the state is theirs and that the approximate territory of the state is their homeland. As a result, they demand that other organisations, both internal and external to the state, recognise and accept their authority. Nation-states, as defined by American sociologist Rogers Brubaker in Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe, are “states of and for certain nations” (1996).

As a political model, the nation-state combines two principles: state sovereignty, which was first articulated in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and recognises states’ right to govern their territories without external interference, and national sovereignty, which recognises national communities’ right to govern themselves. National sovereignty is founded on the moral-philosophical premise of popular sovereignty, which holds that states belong to their peoples. According to the latter principle, legitimate state control necessitates some form of popular agreement. This requirement, however, does not imply that all nation-states are democratic. Indeed, many authoritarian rulers have presented themselves to the outside world and to the people they rule as ruling in the name of a sovereign nation.

Creating a Nation-State

Although France is widely regarded as the first nation-state following the French Revolution (1787–99), some experts believe the English Commonwealth, established in 1649, was the first. Since the late 18th century, the nation-state has steadily replaced polities governed by alternative legitimacy concepts as the dominant vehicle of authority over geographic territory. The latter included dynastic monarchies (such as the Habsburg and Ethiopian empires), theocratic states (such as the Dalai Lama’s rule over Tibet and the prince-bishops of Montenegro), colonial empires (justified by colonising powers as a means of spreading a “true” religion or bringing progress to “backward” peoples), and communist revolutionary governments (ostensibly acting in the name of a communist revolution) (see proletariat; social class: Characteristics of the principal classes).

Although some nation-states arose from polity-seeking national movements, others arise from existing polities being nationalised—that is, transformed into nation-states—either because theocrats or monarchs ceded authority to parliaments (as in Britain and France) or because empires retreated or disintegrated (as did the British and French colonial empires in the mid-20th century and the Soviet empire in eastern Europe beginning in the late 1980s).

Conclusion:

Nationalism, as a political ideal, strives for a match between state borders and national community boundaries, so that the national group is contained within the territory of the state and the state exclusively encompasses that nation. In practise, state and national borders usually only partially overlap: not all state residents are members of the core national group (often not even all citizens), and some nationals live in other states. Several phenomena have resulted from this lack of congruence: wars that break out around the time of nation-state formation; citizenship regimes (see below Citizenship in Nation-States) that embrace co-national immigrants but exclude other immigrants; nation-state efforts to nationalise additional territories and populations; and state policies that manage ethnic, religious, and national dissent.