Westphalian Ideal State

Defining the Ideal State

What is the state? Prevailing opinion considers it to be coeval with civilization; thus, as far as “Western” civilization is concerned, the Sumerians are usually credited with its invention and with passing it on to peoples further west. Both the “city-state” and imperial structures that transcended it have, since the 19th century, been held to be instantiations of “statehood,” in the case of the Sumerians as well as in the case of the pre-Christian Greeks and Romans or of the kingdoms of ancien régime Europe.

Semantically, this attribution of statehood to the political structures of bygone eras was necessarily retrospective, since the process by which words such as state in English and its homologues in other European languages came to designate the state as we know it did not get under way until the 15th century at the earliest and was not complete until the 19th century; the Latin status, from which those words are derived, has never had this meaning. Retrospective attribution of statehood also necessarily presupposes that statehood is in fact independent of the words used to designate it, that the state exists independently of political [Page 2753]discourse—a premise that constructivists, in particular, must question.

Moreover, this notion of the timelessness and ubiquity of the state has always sat somewhat uneasily with the realization that political structures have varied greatly in history. That realization has virtually never, as yet, led modern writers to challenge the belief in the inescapable historic necessity of the state for civilization in principle. It has, however, encouraged attempts to track the evolution of concrete historical forms that the state is thought to have taken—more particularly, the evolution of the modern state over the past few centuries.

Such attempts were helped—indeed made possible—by the efforts of social scientists around the turn of the 20th century to define what could be called the ideal state. Most important, Georg Jellinek in 1900 posited that the state needs a territory, a people, and a government. Max Weber, in his lecture Politics as a Vocation (1918), identified the state as an “entity which claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force.” In practice, this monopoly, which the wording chosen by Weber vests in the state as such, can of course only be wielded by the government or those empowered by it.

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