Nation State
Nation state describes a context in which the whole of a geographical area that
is the homeland for people who identify themselves as a community because of
shared culture, history, and probably language and ethnic character, is governed
by one political system. Such contexts are the common experience today, but
are not necessarily any more natural than other forms that have been common
in history. There were, after all, no nation states in classical Greece, though
there was clearly a Greeknation, which sensed that all Greeks had more in
common than a Greek could have with a barbarian, and shared language,
religion, culture and historical identity. Instead there were a number of, often
warring, city states (seepolis), and no sense of what we mean by ‘civil war’
attached to, for example, the Sparta–Athens conflicts.
Historically the growth of the nation state, and its developing legitimacy,
came after the collapse of the Roman Empire and only when its successor in
the West, the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, could no longer pretend to rule
an international collection of separate sub-states. To some extent the growth of
the earliest nation-states, especially France and England, were historical
accidents, for the seeds of national identity, especially the linguistic and cultural
homogeneity, actually came after rather than preceded the political hegemony
of the national governments. Later important nation states, for example Italy
and Germany, although clearly possessing many of the characteristics of
nationhood, only united into nation states late in the 19th century. Even more
to the point, a large number of nation states in the modern world are the
arbitrary result of external power. Thus Pakistan, as it existed from 1947 to
1971, was almost entirely the creation of the British on leaving the Indian sub-
continent, while Czechoslovakia was the creation of the victorious powers
after the First World War. One of the underlying problems in conflicts in the
Middle Easthas been the artificial creation of nation states such as Iraq by
external powers early in the 20th century. Indeed the idea of ‘nation-building’
has been an important topic in the study ofpolitical development, where it
has been expressly recognized thatThird Worldstates, once they have come
into existence (frequently as a result of actions by departing colonial powers),
have to create a sense of national identity before they can become sufficiently
politically stable to hope for socio-economic progress.
Movements for regional autonomy or actual independence have continued
to grow in political importance even in what might be seen as the historical
leaders in nationhood, as well as being major problems for many new states,
thus weakening the assumption that it is natural for large states to rule the
populations of geographically-identifiable ‘nations’. Nation states have been
seen as desirable largely for the assumed benefits of the large scale in political
systems, and a key element here has been the perceived threats to political and
Nation State