The Nature of the Nation-State System

A nation-state is a territorially defined sovereign polity (i.e., a state) governed in the name of a group of individuals who identify as a nation. The right of a core national group within the state (which may include all or merely some of its residents) to self-determination underlies a nation-authority state over a territory and the people who live there. Members of the core national group believe that the state belongs to them and that the state’s approximate region is their homeland. As a result, they demand that other groups, both inside and outside the state, acknowledge and accept their authority.

Nation-State Building

Since the late 18th century, the nation-state has steadily replaced politics ruled by alternative concepts of legitimacy as the main vehicle of authority over geographic territory. 

As a political ideal, nationalism strives for a match between state borders and national community boundaries, such that the national group is contained inside the state’s territory and the state exclusively contains that nation. In practise, state and national borders generally only partially overlap: not all state inhabitants belong to the core national group (often not even all citizens), and some members of the country live in other states. Several phenomena have resulted from the lack of congruence between state and nation: wars that break out around the time of nation-state formation; citizenship regimes (Citizenship in Nation-States) that embrace co-national immigrants but exclude other immigrants; efforts by nation-states to nationalise additional territories and populations; and state policies that manage ethnic, religious, and national diversity.

Citizenship in Nation-States

Citizenship regimes, or established conditions for naturalisation, are strictly enforced by nation-states. Citizenship regimes represent distinct views on who is a valid citizen of a country. Citizen regimes based on the principle of jus sanguinis (“right of blood”), which allocates citizenship based on an individual’s organic ties (through family descent) to the national community and homeland, are common in nation-states where the core nation is conceived as a primordial ethno-cultural community. Citizenship allocation based on the principle of jus soli (“right of the soil”), on the other hand, presupposes a civic-republican conception of the core nation, in which national membership is contingent on acquiring loyalty to state institutions and acceptance of a shared political culture through socialisation.

Nationalisation

The idea of a nation-state is promoted not just by citizenship rules, but also by procedures that enhance national integration and establish and preserve emotional attachment to the country. Curricula in schools, for example, are designed to teach children an official narrative about the nation’s history and legacy, the history of the state, and the shared national culture; official national calendars designate specific days as national holidays, which are commemorated with core commemorative rituals; nationalisation of physical space is promoted by naming localities, streets, infrastructure (e.g., roads and bridges), and natural features (e.g., rivers and mountains).

Diversity Management

Despite their best efforts, nation-states have a fundamental issue in managing ethnic, religious, and national diversity inside their boundaries. Assimilation, exclusion, and accommodation are three opposing ideas that have been used to manage “diversity management” in groups that were not originally part of the core national group. Distinct approaches have been used to different minority groups in several circumstances, resulting in varying degrees of social integration, cultural assimilation, and estrangement.

Multiculturalism is an intellectual framework that seeks to welcome variety and minorities rather than remove or suppress them, providing an alternative to both assimilation and exclusionary policies. 

Challenges to Nation-States

The majority of present problems to nation-states are not new, and some are older than the nation-state itself. However, nation-states’ ability to contain, control, and harness flows of people, economic capital, and cultural materials, as well as confine politics to public spheres and institutions and relationships with other nation-states, has been challenged for decades by accelerating globalisation processes. States in various areas of the world differ in their vulnerability to globalization-induced pressures, as well as their capacity to resist or adapt to such demands. The following are some of the pressures that all nation-states face to varying degrees.

Global Risks

Environmental issues that threaten humanity’s survival, as well as the worldwide attention these issues have received, conflict with nation-states’ historic tendency to emphasise their particularistic national interests. Transitional social movements (networks of activists from various countries committed to acting for a common cause) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that focus on global issues (currently, especially global warming) have challenged nation-states in two ways: they question the authority of individual nation-states and coalitions of nation-states to make their own policies regarding environmental problems, and, more broadly, they question national authority itself by discrimination.

Conclusion

A nation in the sense of a common ethnicity may include a diaspora or refugees living outside of the nation state; some countries in this sense lack a state where that ethnicity predominates. A nation state is a big, politically sovereign country or administrative area in a broader sense.

Both proponents of globalisation and numerous science fiction writers have suggested that the concept of a country state may vanish as the globe becomes increasingly linked. Such ideas are sometimes stated in terms of a global government. Another scenario is social collapse and communal anarchy, or zero world government, in which nation states cease to exist.