Nation-state

In general discussion, a nation-state is variously called a "country," a "nation," or a "state." But technically, it is a specific form of state (a political entity on a territory) that provides governance for a sovereign nation (a cultural entity), and which derives its legitimacy from successfully performing that function. The Compact OED defines "nation-state": a sovereign state of which most of the citizens or subjects are united also by factors which define a nation, such as language or common descent. The nation-state implies that a state and a nation coincide.

The modern nation-state is relatively new to human history, emerging after the renaissance and reformation. It was given impetus by the throwing off of Kings, for example, the Netherlands and the United States, and the rise of the machinery of efficient state bureaucracies that could govern large groups of people impersonally. Frederick the Great in Germany is frequently cited as one of the originators of modern state bureaucracy. It is based on the idea that a people can live harmoniously in a state that has laws consistent with the principles of the national cultural group.

Some modern nation-states, for example in Europe or North America, prospered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and were promoted as a model of social organization. The League of Nations and the United Nations are predicated on the concept of a community of nation states. However, the concept of a modern nation-state is more an ideal than a reality. There are very few geographic territories in which a single religious, ethnic or other cultural group reside. This has been increasingly true as a result of globalization and the dispersion of people of countless national cultures all over the globe.

The attempt to force such cultural homogeneity on all residents of a country has been one of the greatest scourges on human society, but it takes on a particularly onerous quality in an increasingly integrated world. Genocides, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, and religious persecutions are rooted in the concept of creating a nation-state by force—a state in which a specific set of cultural norms are imposed on all.

Oppressed peoples have consistently risen up to advocated freedom of religion, speech and cultural expression. Bloody uprisings, revolutions, and the arduous hardship of civil disobedience and outside campaigns by human rights organizations of all sorts has worked to counteract the mistreatment of minorities in the modern state. Checks and balances on power, representation of all, and equal freedom, rights, and opportunities for all are ideals of the modern democratic and pluralistic state which concept of "nationality." For example, a citizen of the United States gives his loyalty to the United States as a nation that is bound together by a common Constitution and general set of laws. These general "nation-state" laws allow citizens to practice their inherited national traditions so long as they do not infringe upon the basic rights of others. While this balance is a requirement for peace in a multi-national society, it is an uneasy balance to maintain.

The concept of an "ideal nation-state"

In the "ideal nation-state," the entire population of the territory pledges allegiance to the national culture. Thus, the population can be considered homogeneous on the state level, even if there is diversity at lower levels of social and political organization. The state not only houses the nation, but protects it and its national identity. Every member of the nation is a permanent resident of the nation-state, and no member of the nation permanently resides outside it. There are no pure nation-states, but examples that come close might include Japan and Iceland. This ideal, which grew out of feudal states, has influenced almost all existing modern states, and they cannot be understood without reference to that model. Thus, the term nation-state traditionally has been used, imprecisely, for a state that attempts to promote a single national identity, often beginning with a single national language, government, and economic system.

Origins

There are two directions for the formation of a nation-state.

From State to Nation

In the first case a territory is conquered or controlled by a monarch or government which attempts to impose national identity. Historians Benedict Anderson and the Communist author Eric Hobsbawm have pointed out that the existence of a state often precedes nationalism. For example, French nationalism emerged in the 19th century, once the French nation-state already constituted through the unification of various dialects and languages into the French language, and also by the means of conscription and the Third Republic's 1880s laws on public instruction. Another example of the attempt to create a nation-state "from above," would be the colonial states in which occupying powers have drawn boundaries across the territories inhabited by various tribal and ethnic groups.

From Nation to State

In the second case a common national identity is developed among the peoples of a geographical territory and they organize a state based on this common identity. One of the earliest examples of the formation of such a nation-state was the Dutch Republic (1581 and 1795). The Eighty Years' War that began in 1568, triggered a process of what we might now call "nation-building." The following chain of events occurred in this process:

1. The Dutch rebelled against Hapsburg Spain, the largest and most powerful empire at that time. This created a "standing alone together" mentality which served as the initial basis for national identity (a common enemy).
2. William of Orange, a man of the people and a man of noble birth, served as a charismatic and emblematic leader of the Dutch people throughout the Eighty Years' War even though he died in the middle of the war and did not literally found the nation. Yet, he is regarded as the Father of the Nation in the Netherlands.
3. Protestantism was the dominant Dutch religion at that time, and they fought against a Catholic empire the ruler Phillip II. This created both another common enemy, a common protestant worldview, and respect for religious freedom.
4. The Dutch had their own language, which is considered one of the most important parts of a nation-state.
5. The war was very cruel compared to other wars of that era. Especially with the Spanish religious persecutions, and assaults on civilians as reprisals for the constant guerrilla attacks by the Dutch. This was the source of a common hate for the enemy, and stimulated a common sense of destiny which strengthened "national" feelings.

When the war had finally ended, with a complete Dutch victory, the Dutch could not find a king for their country, essential in the 16th century Europe. After asking, and practically begging, a large number of royal families, it was decided that the Dutch nation should govern itself in the form of a republic. During this time, the Dutch Republic became a world superpower, launching a golden age in which the Dutch people made many discoveries and inventions, and conquered vast areas of the globe. This made the Dutch people feel they were a special people, another feature of 19th century nationalism.

What states existed before nation-states?

Division of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into nation states in 1918

Border of Austria-Hungary in 1914

Borders in 1914

Borders in 1920

██ Empire of Austria in 1914 ██ Kingdom of Hungary in 1914 ██ Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1914

In Europe, in the eighteenth century the classic non-national states were the multi-ethnic empires (Austria-Hungary, Russia, Ottoman Empire, etc.), and the sub-national micro-state. Indeed, many historians argue that nationalism and the appearance of nation-states must be traced to the 19th century. The multi-ethnic empire was a monarchy ruled by a king or emperor (or in the case of the Ottoman Empire, by a Sultan). The population belonged to many ethnic groups and they spoke many languages. The empire was dominated by one ethnic group, and their language was usually the language of public administration. The ruling dynasty was usually, but not always, from that group. This type of state is not specifically European: such empires existed on all continents. Some of the smaller European states were not so ethnically diverse, but were also dynastic states, ruled by a royal house. Their territory could expand by royal marriage, or merge with another state when the dynasty merged. In some parts of Europe, notably Germany, very small territorial units existed. They were recognized by their neighbors as independent, and had their own government and laws. Some were ruled by princes or other hereditary rulers, some were governed by bishops or abbots. Because they were so small, however, they had no separate language or culture: the inhabitants shared the language of the surrounding region.

In some cases these states were simply overthrown by nationalist uprisings, which were inspired by the so-called ideal of the nation-state, meaning a state with a uniform national identity. In other cases a nation-state seems to have grown by accretion of smaller entities. Some grew to unification by trade and political integration. Some were unified by force. The transition was complex. This nation-state became the standard ideal in France during the French revolution, and quickly the nationalist idea spread through Europe, and later the rest of the world. However island nations such as the English (and later British) or the Japanese tended to acquire a nation-state sooner than this, not intentionally (on the French revolutionary model) but by chance, because the island situation made the clear natural limits of state and nation coincide.

The nation-state, at least in theory, has a uniform population, language and culture. It stops where the nation stops, and it does not swap territory with other states simply, for example, because the king’s daughter got married. For example, at least in theory, there is a uniform French identity which is different from a supposed uniform German identity, despite the fact that the French-German state border is not the French-German ethnic border and there are some who would consider themselves of German ethnicity on the French side of the border and vice versa. The ideal of the nation-state is actually a state which has attempted to define a national identity which justifies its existence, internally and externally; this process is often called nation-building.

In many cases, regions acquire their national identity from the nation-state: Possible examples are Alsace, Lorraine, Catalunya, Brittany, Sicily, Corsica.

By this model, non-national entities have survived in Europe: the independent principalities of Liechtenstein, Andorra, and Monaco, the republic of San Marino, and Vatican City.

Examples of nation-states

Oddly, the confederation of cantons and former city-states known in English as Switzerland is often called a nation-state, despite having no dominant ethnic group, no national identity, and several national languages (see also Culture of Switzerland). This is odd because Switzerland's primary raison d'être is to protect against a state, internal or external, attempting to enforce a statewide national identity. A classic nation-state, by definition, is inhabited by one ethnic group, who speak one language, have one culture, and share one religion. The population, in other words, is homogeneous. This group is referred to as ‘the nation’ or ‘the people’. They all live inside the border of the nation-state. No other ethnic or cultural group lives there. It is often said that island states are the best place to find something like this, and Iceland is often cited as the best example of a nation-state. Although the inhabitants are ethnically related to other Scandinavian groups, the national culture and language are found only in Iceland. There are no cross-border minorities, the nearest land is too far away. Japan, see also Japanese Demographics and Ethnic issues in Japan, is traditionally seen as a good example, although it includes minorities of ethnically distinct Ryukyuans in the south, Koreans, Chinese, Filipinos and Brazilians, and in the north, the indigenous Ainu minority of Hokkaido. The Republic of Ireland was until recently inhabited almost entirely by ethnic Irish, but the national territory is not considered complete by nationalists because it does not include Northern Ireland.

Very few others approach the ideal model of the nation-state: the border does not correspond to the distribution of the national group. Sometimes that is impossible, because population is ethnically mixed, down to the level of individual streets or buildings. Where part of the national group lives in a neighboring nation-state, it is usually called a national minority. In some cases states have reciprocal national minorities, for instance the Slovaks in Hungary and the Hungarian in Slovakia.

National minorities should not be confused with a national diaspora, which is typically located far from the national border. Most modern diasporas result from economic migration. The existence of an Irish diaspora does not make the Republic of Ireland any less a nation-state, and does not affect Northern Ireland, since few emigrants go there anyway.

The possession of dependent territories does influence the status of nation-state. A state with large colonial possessions is obviously inhabited by many ethnic groups, and does not conform to the ideal of a single-culture state. However, in most cases, the colonies were not considered an integral part of the motherland anyway, and were separately administered. Some European nation-states have dependent territories in Europe. Denmark contains virtually all ethnic Danes and has relatively few foreign nationals within it. However, it exercises sovereignty over the Faroe Islands and Greenland. If these are considered separate nations, then Denmark is not a classic nation-state.

Minorities and irredentism

Existing nation-states differ from the ideal as defined above in two main ways: the population includes minorities, and the border does not include all the national group or its territory. Both have led to violent responses by nation-states, and nationalist movements.

The nationalist definition of a nation is always exclusive: no nation has open membership. In most cases, there is a clear idea that surrounding nations are different. There are also historical examples of groups within the nation-state's territory who are specifically singled out as outsiders, such as the Roma and Jews in Europe. Negative responses to minorities within the nation-state have ranged from assimilation to extermination. Typically these responses are effected as state policy, though non-state violence in the form of mob violence such as lynching or pogroms often takes place. However, many nation-states do accept specific minorities as being in some way part of the nation, and the term national minority is often used in this sense. The Sorbs in Germany are an example: for centuries they have lived in German-speaking states, surrounded by a much larger ethnic German population, and they have no other historical territory. They are now generally considered to be part of the German nation, and are accepted as such by the Federal Republic of Germany, which constitutionally guarantees their cultural rights. Of the thousands of minorities and underlying ethnic nationalities in nation-states across the world, only a few have this level of acceptance and protection.

Main article: Irredentism.

The response to the non-inclusion of territory and population may take the form of irredentism, demands to annex unredeemed territory and incorporate it into the evolving nation-state, as part of the national homeland. Irredentist claims are usually based on the fact that an identifiable part of the national group lives across the border, in another nation-state. However, they can include claims to territory where no members of that nation live at present, either because they lived there in the past, or because the national language is spoken in that region, or because the national culture has influenced it, or because of geographical unity with the existing territory, or for a wide variety of other reasons. Past grievances are usually involved (see Revanchism). It is sometimes difficult to distinguish irredentism from pan-nationalism, since both claim that all members of an ethnic and cultural natio belong in one specific state. Pan-nationalism is less likely to ethnically specify the nation. For instance, variants of Pan-Germanism has different ideas about what constituted Greater Germany, including the confusing term Grossdeutschland - which in fact implied the inclusion of huge Slavic minorities from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Typically, irredentist demands are at first made by members of non-state nationalist movements. When they are adopted by a state, they result in tensions, and actual attempts at annexation are always considered a casus belli, a cause for war. In many cases, such claims result in long-term hostile relations between neighbouring states. Irredentist movements typically circulate maps of the claimed national territory, the greater nation-state. That territory, which is often much larger than the existing state, plays a central role in their propaganda. Examples include:

• Greater Albania
• Greater China
• Greater Finland
• Greater Germany, an expression of Pan-Germanism: compare Pan-Slavism
• Greater Greece, expressed in the policy of Megali Idea
• Greater Hungary
• Greater India
• Greater Iran
• Greater Israel
• Greater Macedonia
• Greater Mongolia
• Greater Morocco
• Greater Netherlands
• Greater Romania
• Greater Serbia
• Greater Somalia
• Greater Syria

Irredentism should not be confused with claims to overseas colonies, which are not generally considered part of the national homeland. Some French overseas colonies would be an exception: French rule in Algeria did indeed treat the colony legally as a département of France, unsuccessfully. The US was more successful in Hawaii.

Conflicting nationalisms

Iceland not only has clear borders, it is inhabited by people who are either immigrants or self-identify as Icelandic. In many nation-states, all or part of the territory is claimed on behalf of more than one nation, by more than one nationalist movement. The intensity of the claims varies: some are no more than a suggestion, others are backed by armed secessionist groups. Belgium is a classic example of a disputed nation-state. The state was formed by secession from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1830, and the Flemish population in the north speaks Dutch. The Flemish identity is also ethnic and cultural, and there is a strong separatist movement. The Walloon identity is linguistic (French-speaking) and regionalist. There is also a unitary Belgian nationalism, several versions of a Greater Netherlands ideal, and a German-speaking region annexed from Prussia in 1920, and re-annexed by Germany in 1940-1944.

The fact that a nation-state has a disputed territory in this way, does not make it less of a nation-state. If large sections of the population reject the national identity, the legitimacy of the state is undermined, and the efficiency of government is reduced, That is certainly the case in Belgium, where the inter-communal tensions dominate politics.

Most states now declare themselves to be nation-states, that is states that attempt to define and enforce a state sponsored national identity. In the case of very large states, there are many competing claims and often many separatist movements. These movements usually dispute that the larger state is a real nation-state, and refer to it as an empire and what is called nation-building is actually empire-building. There is no objective standard for assessing which claim is correct, they are competing political claims. Large nation-states certainly need to define the nation on a broad basis. China, for example, uses the concept of "Zhonghua minzu," a Chinese people, although it also officially recognises the majority Han ethnic group, and no less than 55 national minorities.

History

Some theories see nation-state as a 19th-century European invention, the product of nationalist movements, facilitated by developments such as mass literacy and the early mass media. In France, as Eric Hobsbawm argues, the French state preceded the formation of the French people — Hobsbawm considers that the state made the French nation, and not nationalism, which emerged at the end of the 19th century around the Dreyfus Affair period. At the time of the 1789 French Revolution, only half of the French people somehow spoke French, and between 12 to 13% spoke it "fairly", according to Hobsbawm. In Italy, the number of people speaking the Italian language was even lower. Benedict Anderson has also argued that nations form "imagined communities", and that the main causes of nationalism and the creation of an imagined community are the reduction of privileged access to particular script languages (e.g. Latin), the movement to abolish the ideas of divine rule and monarchy, as well as the emergence of the printing press under a system of capitalism (or, as Anderson calls it, 'print-capitalism'). Some see the nation-state as emerging in a few specific states, such as France and its rival England. They expanded from core regions, Paris and London, and developed a national consciousness, and sense of national identity (Frenchness and Englishness). Both assimilated peripheral regions and their cultures (Wales, Brittany, Aquitaine and Occitania), where regionalism and nationalism resurfaced in the 19th century. ^{[citation needed]}

The idea of a nation-state is associated with the rise of the modern system of states, usually dated to the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) ^{[citation needed]}. The balance of power, which characterises that system, depends for its effectiveness on clearly-defined, centrally controlled, independent entities, whether empires or nation-states. The nation-state received a philosophical underpinning from the era of Romanticism, at first as the 'natural' expression of the individual peoples (romantic nationalism - see Fichte's conception of the Volk, which would be later opposed by Ernest Renan).

"The most important lesson that Grotius learned from the Thirty Years War (1618-48), in the midst of which he wrote The Law of War and Peace, was that no single superpower can or should rule the world." Explaining the classical work of Grotius, Legal Scholar L. Ali Khan, in his book The Extinction of Nation-States (1996) traces the origin of the nation-states in the shared and universal human aspirations to "live in intimate communities free of all forms of foreign domination." Accordingly, religious and secular empries were dismantled to make room for the emergence of the nation-state. See [1]

The increasing emphasis on the ethnic and racial origins of the nation, during the 19th century, led to a redefinition of the nation-state in ethnic and racial terms. Racism, which in Boulainvilliers' theories was inherently anti-patriotic and anti-nationalist, joined itself with colonialist imperialism and "continental imperialism", most notably in pan-germanic and pan-slavism movements . This relation between racism and nationalism atteigned its height in the fascist and nazi movements of the 20th century. The combination of 'nation' ('people') and 'state' expressed in such terms as the Völkische Staat and implemented in laws such as the 1935 Nuremberg laws made fascist states such as early Nazi Germany qualitatively different from non-fascist nation-states. Obviously minorities — not only Jews; Hannah Arendt points out how the Nazis had a law project which defined German nationality in exclusion to any foreign ascendancy, not just Jewish ascendancy as in the precedent Nuremberg laws —, who are not part of the Volk, have no authentic or legitimate role in such a state.

In recent years, the nation-state's claim to absolute sovereignty within its borders has been much criticised. A global political system based on international agreements, and supernational blocs characterized the post-war era. Non-state actors, such as international corporations and non-governmental organizations, are widely seen as eroding the economic and political power of the nation-states. This erosion will result in the extinction of nation-states

Bibliography

• Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities, ISBN 0860913295
• Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (1951)
• Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation (1807-1808)
• Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (1983)
• Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 : programme, myth, reality (1990)
• L. Ali Khan, The Extinction of Nation-States (1996)
• Ernest Renan, Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? (1882)
• Saskia Sassen, Global Cities (1991)

See also

• State
• City-state
• Nation
• Nationalism
• Expansionism
• Non-Intervention

• Identity and the Nation-state — From Paris to Cairo: Resistance of the Unacculturated
• Oxford University publications — Do Nation States matter anymore?

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