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 Greek nation, 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 (see polis), 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 subcontinent, while Czechoslovakia was the creation of the victorious powers after the First World War. One of the underlying problems in conflicts in the Middle East has 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 of political development, where it has been expressly recognized that Third World states, 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 economic interests from other nation states. Ironically, while the significance of the concept appears to be weakening in Western Europe, where those nation states previously to be regarded as the most established are moving towards integration through the European Union, in other parts of the world, and particularly in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, new nation states have been born or historic ones re-established. There can be no better example than the former Yugoslavia that geography does not always coincide with national and cultural identity. In the long term the increasing internationalization of world society may prove the nation state to have been historically artificial and relatively short-lived, with global interests and concerns coming to be seen as more important than localized cultural and ethnic identities.
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