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
affluencelandbecame 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 nation-state 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.