The Modern State Concept: Past, Present, and Future
City-States.
We have defined a state as a politically organized territory with a permanent population, a defined
territory, sovereignty (the right to control its territory), and recognition by other states. It may seem
very natural to you to view the entire world as neatly divided up into the roughly 200 such states that
appear on political maps of the world. But the division of the world into a collection of such states is
less than 400 years old. Prior to the 1800's, the Earth's surface was organized in other ways, such as
tribes, city-states, empires, and kingdoms. In addition, much of the earth's territory until very recently
consisted of frontier regions that were not politically organized at all.
The development of states can be traced to the ancient Middle East, in an area known as the Fertile
Crescent. The eastern end of the Fertile Crescent was centered on the valley between the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers, in present day Iraq. The first states to evolve were the city-states in Mesopotamia and
Greece. A city state is a sovereign state that comprises a town and the surrounding countryside. Walls
clearly delineated the boundaries of the city and outside the walls the city controlled agricultural land
which supported the urban residents and provided the city-state with an outer line of defense against
attack by other city-states. Vast undefined frontier regions separated these ancient city-states from
one another.
Empires
Periodically one city-state would gain military dominance over the others and form an empire. An
empire is a territory in which a central power extends its control over “weaker” areas and rules them
as colonies. In the ancient Middle East the dominant central power exerting its influence over a broad
area was typically the dominant city-state. The boundaries of these empires, sometimes marked by
walls, were imposed on distant frontier regions, often ignoring local conditions in those areas. But vast
frontier regions still existed both within and between these empires. In time the ancient Middle East
came to be organized into a succession of such empires by the Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians,
Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, and finally Romans, under whom the political unity of ancient world
reached its peak in first centuries of the common era (AD).
Kingdoms
When the Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century, its European territories fragmented into a
complicated patchwork of estates, many with poorly defined borders, ruled by competing kings, dukes,
barons, and other nobles. Beginning around the year 1100, a handful of powerful kings gained control
over many of these previously fragmented estates unifying them into kingdoms. A kingdom is a
territory defined by allegiance to a king. Though not yet legally or universally recognized, vague
boundaries began to emerge between these European kingdoms thus reducing the size and number of
undefined frontier areas. This consolidation of neighboring estates under the control of kings formed
the basis of the development of such modern states as England, France, and Spain. But even in the case
of the early medieval kingdoms of England, France, and Spain, there was not yet a collective agreement
among these rulers how there territories would be organized (territoriality) and what they could or
could not do within their respective domains (sovereignty). Moreover, much of Central Europe-notably present day Germany and Italy--remained fragmented into a large number estates that were
not consolidated into states until the nineteenth centuries.
The Peace of Westphalia
The event in European history that marks the beginning of the state system is the Peace of Westphalia,
negotiated in 1648 among the princes of the states making up the Holy Roman Empire as well as a few
neighboring states. The Peace of Westphalia brought an end to what was perhaps Europe's most
destructive religious struggles, the Thirty Years' War. The treaties comprising this peace contained
language recognizing the rights of rulers within defined, demarcated territories, hence laying the
foundation for a Europe made up of mutually recognized territorial states.
The rise of the Westphalian state system marked a fundamental change in the relationship between
people and territory. Before Westphalia, one's loyalty was to a king or other local ruler and that ruler's
territory comprised any lands inhabited by his loyal subjects. Boundaries were poorly defined because
loyalties could change frequently. To the extent that people had mixed loyalties, the territory ruled by
different kings could overlap. In a sense, before Westphalia, loyalty defined territory. After the Peace
of Westphalia, however, territory defined loyalty. Now the king and laws one was expected to obey
was determined by where one lived. In theory, after Westphalia there were no longer overlapping
areas of influence or loyalty.
Well after the Peace of Westphalia, absolutist rulers controlled these newly defined European states.
During the latter part of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, however, the development of
an increasingly wealthy middle class proved to be the undoing of absolutism in parts of Western
Europe. City-based merchants gained money, influence, and prestige. The traditional measure of
affluence—land—became less important and the power of the nobility declined. These merchants and
businesspeople demanded political recognition. In 1789, a democratic revolution in France, conducted
in the name of the French people, ushered in an era in which the one's ultimate loyalty within a
territory was seen as not to a hereditary monarch but rather to an imagined nation, a group of people
who think of themselves as one based on a shared history and culture. (Exactly how a nation is defined
depends on how people see themselves as part of a nation. Nations may variously see themselves as
sharing a religion, a language, an ethnicity, a religion, or, in the case of the United States, even a set of
civic principles that tie them together.)
The Nation-State Ideal
With the French Revolution the idea of the nation-state, a politically organized area in which a nation
and state occupy the same space, became the aspiration of political elites around the world. The idea
that the map of states should look like a map of nations was consciously promoted by European
philosophers and elites as a way of controlling the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states after
the fall of the monarchies in Europe. The problem for these elites was that nation-states--well-defined,
stable nations living within discrete territories--were an ideal that, then as now, didn't actually exist.
In reality, all nations are ultimately mixtures of different peoples. The French are often considered to
be the classic example of a nation, but France as a nation is very much an invention of 18th and 19th
century European elites. Only about 20% of peoples living in France spoke French at the time of the
French Revolution. Even the most French feeling person today is the product of a melding together of a
wide variety of culture groups over time, including Celts, Ancient Romans, Franks, Goths, and many
others. Nations are created, not born of some distinct, mythical, primordial ancestral group.
Since nation-states, thought necessary to maintain the territorial integrity of the states of Europe, did
not really exist, they had to be created. In some cases this meant privileging one ethnic at the expense
of others. In other cases it meant absorbing smaller entities into their borders. It often meant
redrawing national borders to fit "nations", most often determined by language. But mostly the
creation of nation-states took the form of an explicit attempt by elites to create a single national
identity out of the diverse peoples within their borders. They did this by promoting a sense of shared
history and culture (whether based in fact or not) through public education, and through the
promotion of national languages and dictionaries, symbols, holidays, cemeteries, songs, and dress (the
Scottish kilt was an invention of 19th century Scottish nationalism).
Nationalism
Thus cultivated by European elites in the century or so after the French Revolution, nationalism
reached its peak in the nineteenth century. In some cases the pursuit of nationalist ambitions produced
greater cohesion in long-established states, such as in France and Spain. In other cases nationalism
became the rallying cry for bringing together people with some shared historical or cultural elements
into a single state, as in the cases of Germany and Italy, both of which became states only at the end of
the nineteenth century. Similarly, people who saw themselves as separate nations within other states
launched successful separatist movements, as in Ireland, Poland, and Norway.
Colonialism
In addition to using nationalism to unify diverse peoples within their borders and strengthen the state
system at home, European leaders also exported the nation-state system around the world during two
waves of colonialism between 1500 and 1975. Colonialism is the effort by one country to establish
settlements in a sparsely populated or uninhabited territory and to impose its political, economic, and
cultural principles on that territory. European states established colonies for three basic reasons: first,
to promote Christianity; second, to extract useful resources for their growing industrial economies; and
third, to promote establish their relative power through the number and extent of the colonial
possessions. Historians sometimes summarize these motives with the phrase "God, Gold, and Glory."
The British had by far the largest colonial empire, followed by the French, the Netherlands, Belgium,
Germany, and Italy. The colonizing powers met at the Berlin Conference in 1884-1885 European
colonialism and arbitrarily laid out the colonial map of Africa based on the limits of the each colonizing
power's influence in Africa and with no regard for existing indigenous cultural or political
arrangements. European colonies projected European power and the European approach to organizing
space politically throughout the non-European world. It was through colonialism that the European
concept of the nation-state became the model adopted around the world.
During the heyday of colonialism, the imperial powers exercised ruthless control over their domains
and organized them for maximum economic exploitation. The tangible evidence of that organization
(plantations, ports, mines, railroads) are still visible on the cultural landscape today. The concentration
of wealth that colonialism brought to Europe and to parts of the world dominated by European
settlers, including the United States, Canada, and Australia, is at the heart of the highly uneven
distribution of power that continues to this day. The forces of colonialism also played a key role in
knitting together the economies of far flung areas of the world into our modern interdependent world
economy.
The Modern State System
The first political organization of states based on the ideas of territoriality and sovereignty go all the
way back to the early city-states of the Fertile Crescent. The philosophical origins of the modern state
begin already with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The concept of the nation-state and nationalism
took hold in Europe in the nineteenth century and was exported around the world through European
colonization.
Even so, the modern concept of state grew very slowly at first and has expanded rapidly only very
recently. As of the time of the Declaration of Independence, there were only some 35 empires,
kingdoms, and countries in the entire world. By the beginning of WWII, that number had only doubled
to around 70. Following WWII, many former European colonies, finally achieved independence and
consciously choose to retain their colonial borders, languages, and the very concept of statehood itself
as a way of avoiding territorial and ethnic conflicts that might otherwise have torn these newly
independent states apart. With the creation of these newly independent countries, the number of
states skyrocketed. In the forty years following 1945 some ninety African and Asian states were
admitted to the United Nations. By 1990 independent states totaled some 180, and their number
increased again following the disintegration in the 1990's of the USSR, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia
which created more than 20 new countries where only three had existed before. With the admittance
of South Sudan in July of 1911, the number of member states of the United Nations stands as of this
writing at stands at 193.
The Future of the State System
Sixth graders the world over still memorize the names of countries on colorful political maps, whose
mosaic of colors and lines are a testament to the endurance of the 400 year old European concept of
states. Sixth graders a hundred years from now will almost certainly be memorizing a very different
map of the world. But what will that map look like? Will the European model of nation-states remain
the dominant model of political organization around the world? Will the number of independent states
increase as new countries emerge through the process of fragmentation that created the newest state,
South Sudan? Or will supranationalism in the form of such organizations as the European Union
eventually lead to the unification of many current states into larger regional states in which old nationstate loyalties are gradually replaced by larger regional identifications? Can we imagine a world in the
distant future with only one state or with no states at all? History cannot answer these questions with
any certainty. It does suggest however that the human organization of political space will continue to
evolve in dynamic and unpredictable ways.