Nation-State

The term nation-state reflects both a geopolitical and a political entity. Nation refers to a sociocultural entity—peoples who share the same culture, history, and language; state refers to a legal and political entity that is a defined sovereign territory. While the origins and early history of the nation-state are disputed, most theories view the nation-state as a 19th-and 20th-century Western phenomenon deriving from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which many historians identify as marking the beginning of the modern European idea of a nation-state in which the national community and the sovereign ruler are identified as a single entity.

The earliest predecessors of modern nation-states are the city-states of ancient Greece, or polis. In the Medieval and Renaissance periods, this notion of localized government existed in return for loyalty to an absent central leader or monarch. With improvements in communications and transportation, the state then began to assert more authority, leading to the elaboration of the relationship between a citizen and the monarch or state. The Treaty, or Peace, of Westphalia in 1648, ending the Thirty Years War, laid the foundation for modern nation-state sovereignty. Coinciding in part with the Protestant Reformation, this treaty further weakened papal authority throughout much of Europe, marking the transition from feudal principalities to sovereign states. The treaty also established the concepts of territorial integrity and sovereignty—nonintervention of one state in the internal affairs of another state, legal equality between states, and the state's right of self-determination.

Throughout the subsequent period of the Enlightenment or Age of Reason (dated from roughly 1650 to 1800), French and British philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Baron de Montesquieu, and David Hume also sought to lessen the role of religion and the church in state affairs, to replace it with a political system advocating human reason and common identity. After the French Revolution, which ended in 1799, the nation-state was cemented in international relations as society became increasingly secularized and the dynastic state was replaced.

The nation-state is challenged both by globalization and by the rise of civil society as they signal the increasingly interconnected nature of the world's regional and transnational forms of networks. The porous nature of international economy, communications, and technology arguably lessens the significance of the nation-state, and in its place, a global political system based on international agreements and exchanges plus supranational blocs, such as the European and African Unions, now characterizing [Page 868]the developing economic and geopolitical world of the 21st century, has substantially altered the conditions under which nation-states function.