Learning Objectives:

AT THE END OF THIS LESSON, THE STUDENTS WILL BE ABLE TO:

• Define the concept of the nation, state, and nation-state

• Appreciate the differences and importance of the nation, state, and nation-state
• Know how to contribute to national and global progress.
• Discuss the historical background of the nation-state

I. What is a Nation-State?

What is a Nation?
● It is a group of people who see themselves as a cohesive and coherent unit based
on shared cultural or historical criteria. Nations are socially constructed units,
not given by nature. Their existence, definition, and members can change
dramatically based on circumstances. Nations in some ways can be thought of as
“imagined communities” that are bound together by notions of unity that can
pivot around religion, ethnic identity, language, cultural practice and so forth.
The concept and practice of a nation work to establish who belongs and who
does not (insider vs. outsider). Such conceptions often ignore political
boundaries such that a single nation may “spill over” into multiple states.
Furthermore, states ≠ nations: not every nation has a state (e.g., Kurds; Roma;
Palestine). Some states may contain all or parts of multiple nations.
● Is a union of people who can be identified or shared culture and language,
history, and ethnicity.
● No political union is necessary. (Hawkins 2006:9)

Formation of people's national identities:

One state, many nations - Australia has many migrant nations & indigenous nations, all
occupying one territory, ruled by one government, imagining themselves as sharing one
identity and calling themselves a nation-state (Fozdar, Wilding & Hawkins 2009: 45).
What is a State?
 It is an independent, sovereign government exercising control over a certain
spatially defined and bounded area, whose borders are usually clearly defined
and internationally recognized by other states.
 Government changes, but states endure. A state is the means of rule over a
defined or "sovereign" territory. It is composed of an executive, a bureaucracy,
courts, and other institutions.

 State refers to a legal and political entity, which combines the following:
Permanent population, defined territory, government, and ability to enter into a
formal relation with another state.
1. States are tied to territory
 Sovereign or state as absolute ruler over territory
 Have clear borders
 Defends and controls its territory within those borders
 Is recognized by other countries (diplomatic recognition, passports,
treaties, etc.)
2. States have bureaucracies staffed by state’s own personnel
 Has a national bureaucracy staffed by government personnel (legal
system, educational system, hierarchical governmental units, etc.)
3. States monopolize certain functions within its territory (sovereign)
 Controls legitimate use of force within its territory
 Controls money at national scale (prints currency; collects taxes)
 Make rules within its territory (law, regulations, taxes, citizenship, etc.)
 Controls much information within its territory

Differences between Nation and State.

 The state has four elements–population, territory, government, and
sovereignty. In the absence of even one element, a state cannot be really a state
. A state is always characterized by all elements. While the nation is a group of
people who have a strong sense of unity and similarities: common consciousness,
common territory, common race, common religion, common language, common
 history, common literature, and common political aspirations, which are the
elements which help the formation of a nation, and yet none of these is an
absolutely essential element. The elements which go to build a nation keep on
changing.
 Furthermore, states ≠ nations: not every nation has a state (e.g., Kurds; Roma;
Palestine). Some states may contain all or parts of multiple nations.

4 Elements of a state:
Population - A total of individuals occupying an area or making up a whole
Territory - Is the area that controlled by the government
Government- The group of people that makes a rule or laws and controls the country
Sovereignty- Is the most exclusive element of state. Without sovereignty no state can
exist.

What is a Nation-state?
 According to Encyclopedia Britannica, a nation-state is "a territorially bounded
sovereign polity—i.e., a state that is ruled in the name of a community of citizens
who identify themselves as a nation. The legitimacy of a nation-state’s rule over a
territory and over the population inhabiting it stems from the right of a core
national group within the state (which may include all or only some of its
citizens) to self-determination. Members of the core national group see the state
as belonging to them and consider the approximate territory of the state to be
their homeland". It is the idea of a homogenous nation governed by its own
sovereign state—where each state contains one nation. The concept of a nation-
state is notoriously difficult to define. A working and imprecise definition is [that
it is] a type of state that conjoins the political entity of a state to the cultural
entity of a nation, from which it aims to derive its political legitimacy to rule and
potentially its status as a sovereign state. The origins and early history of nation-
states are disputed. Two major theoretical questions have been debated. First,
“Which came first, the nation or the nation-state?” Second, “Is nation-state a
modern or an ancient idea?” Scholars continue to debate a number of possible
hypotheses. Most commonly, the idea of a nation-state was and is associated
with
 the rise of the modern system of states, often called the “Westphalian system” in
reference to the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). (ER services, n.d.)
 As defined by Merriam-Webster dictionary, a nation-state is "a form of political
organization under which a relatively homogeneous people inhabit a sovereign
state". Nation-states have their own characteristics that today may be taken-for-
granted factors shaping a modern state, but that all developed in contrast to pre
- national states. The most obvious impact of the nation-state is the creation of a
uniform national culture through state policy. Its most demonstrative examples
are national systems of compulsory primary education that usually popularize a
common language and historical narratives. (ER services, n.d)
 Refers to political, economic, social, and cultural actors in the international system. it is
an imagined political community. (Anderson, in Robins 2011:99)
 Nation-States determine an official language, system of law, manage a currency system,
use a bureaucracy to order the elements of society and foster loyalty to abstract entities.

Functions of nation-states:
Modern nation-states have the following tasks:
1. Ensure obedience and gain monopoly on force
2. Exert control over economic life
3. Ensure orderly circulation of goods
4. Take a share of the nation income for its expenditures
5. Protect the movement of traders and corporation
6. Maintain marketplaces
7. Protect traders & manufacturers
 For any nation-state to create wealth, they require success in its trade and
manufactures. Some of the ways nation-states protect its manufacturers and
traders is by imposing protective tariffs on imported goods. billing out their
national corporation, they could actually use the military to open markets in
peripheral areas.

The Significance of nation-states in the global era:

 Due to global change in terms of culture, politics, social class and economics (Held, in
Walby 2005: 530). Furthermore, religion as the main carrier of ethnic, national and
gender projects into global and regional conflicts, for example states with
fundamentalism and Western ideology. Egypt & Arab Spring revolution.
Why do Nation-states need power & authority in a global era?
 The nation-state waning power and authority due to supra economic, legal, and
symbolic power and the ability of coordinating this power to maintain global control
achievement. Globalization has encouraged global markets and economies to be more
open which has a significant impact on nation-states. Macroeconomic fluctuations in one
nation-state tend to spill over to other nation-states.

II. THE RISE AND DOMINANCE OF NATION-STATES

 Back in the 1500s in Europe, there was no such thing as a nation-state. Most individuals
did not consider themselves to be citizens of a nation at the time; they seldom left their
village and had no knowledge of the outside world. People were more inclined to
identify with their territory or local ruler. At the same time, state rulers typically had
little authority over their own countries. Instead, local feudal lords wielded enormous
authority, and kings frequently had to rely on the goodwill of their subordinates to rule.
Laws and practices differed greatly from one region of the country to another.
 Several kings began to consolidate power in the early modern era by weakening feudal
lords and allying themselves with the growing economic classes. This difficult process
involved the use of violence at times. It also took a long time to consolidate authority.
Kings and queens fought hard to unite the people of their realms under one authority.
Not unexpectedly, the formation of the nation-state coincided with the first stirrings of
nationalism, as rulers pushed their subjects to feel devoted to the newly constituted
nations. During the nineteenth century, much of Europe saw the emergence of the
modern, integrated nation-state.

THE BEGINNING OF THE NATION-STATE

 The nation-state system arose in medieval Western Europe as a result of feudal lords
and the Catholic Church's diminishing political dominance. Both the Renaissance and the
Reformation were shattering the Church's political influence. The men of the
Renaissance (the "rebirth") began to seek learning direction from classical forms. The
Reformation suggested that folks do not need to go through the Church to go to heaven.
Each believer was a priest in the eyes of God. So now, both the road to knowledge and to
heaven need not go through Rome.
 With the collapse of the Roman Church came the decline of feudalism in Europe.
Following the Crusades, the crusaders began to return to the west, carrying with them
stories of wealth in the east as well as part of that money. Because of this thirst for
money, improved trade routes between the east and west were developed. Towns
began
 to grow as centers of commerce as a result of increased trade. Some of these cities
eventually demanded independence (or at least semi-independence) from their feudal
overlords. The leaders of the towns would sometimes revolt against their feudal rulers,
while other times they would buy their freedom from their master, who was constantly
in need of money.
 Under feudalism, land was the source of wealth and rank, but that system was giving
way to a burgeoning commercial elite that derived its fortune in commerce and money.
The feudal manors gradually lost their political dominance to trade and accumulation of
money. Mobile capital was a new form of emerging state's resource.
 The power vacuum created by the decline of feudal lord authority gave birth to a new
form of ruler: a single national monarch. However, feudalism was not only stressed by
the emerging commercial society; it also stood in the way of business. As merchants
traveled around Europe, they were continually required to pay tolls and taxes in order
to pass through a lord's domain. Because there were so many of these minor domains,
merchants preferred fewer of them, giving birth to a desire for a more united Europe
with fewer rulers but greater protection for merchants.

SOVEREIGNTY AND THE NATION-STATE

 These conditions, feudalism, the loss of the Church's dominance, and the development of
a bourgeoisie class, set the groundwork for the establishment of powerful monarchs
and, with them, the modern nation-state system. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648),
signed in 1648, essentially ended the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). The Thirty Years
War was a bloody religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants. The Treaty of
Westphalia ended the conflict by allowing German rulers to choose the official religion
of their dominion, whether Catholic, Calvinist, or Lutheran. More importantly,
Westphalia marked the birth of state sovereignty, with each of these kings being the
single sovereign in his area.
 While it was generally accepted that God was the sovereign and that rulers governed as
God's ministers, some attempted to separate government from the domain of heaven.
Thomas Hobbes, an English political philosopher, made such an effort (1588-1679).
Hobbes sets the foundation for a ruler who is not subject to God but is the ultimate
master of his domain in his work Leviathan (1651). Hobbes was "the first political
philosopher to explicitly propose that government may be based on an anti-religious
foundation," according to political scholar Walter Berns.
 Hobbes' absolute state is built on dread, a fear of chaos and disorder in which life would
be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." As a result, man's only option is to
 surrender his natural rights to an absolute king who will protect him from chaos, but he
must follow him completely. Hobbes' ideal monarch was an absolute ruler who enforced
order in top-down fashion on his territory.
 While others (like the Christian John Locke) modified Hobbes' theory of an absolute
monarch, Hobbes still helped lay the groundwork for the modern state and the coming
Beast by promoting a king to whom no greater appeal could be made. Sovereignty is
now a major idea that nation-states assert for themselves. However, democratic
governments do not usually refer to the ruler as sovereign. Sovereignty can be found in
the legislature (as in the United Kingdom) or in the people (as in the United States).

GROWTH OF THE NATION-STATES

● There were only approximately twenty nation-states in the globe when the United States
approved the Constitution in 1788. However, as the nineteenth century approached, a
succession of independence movements against colonial powers like Spain and France
fueled the formation of new states. The nineteenth century saw the rise of nationalism
as well. This demolition of empires continued throughout the twentieth century as more
ethnic groups embraced national solidarity and asserted their right to determine their
own political destiny.
References:

Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. (n.d.). Nation-state. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved March 29,
2022, from https://www.britannica.com/topic/nation-state

Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Nation-state definition & meaning. Merriam-Webster. Retrieved

March 29, 2022, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nation-state

Right Castillo. (2021). Philippine Politics and Governance Module 4: Nation, State, and
Globalization. [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/8lVkK7nkRa0

State, nation and nation-state: Clarifying misused terminology. State, Nation and Nation-State:
Clarifying Misused Terminology | GEOG 128: Geography of International Affairs. (n.d.).
Retrieved March 29, 2022, from https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog128/node/534