Their territory is considered semi-sacred and nontransferable. Nation-states use the state as an instrument of national unity, in economic, social, and cultural life. Nation-states typically have a more centralized and uniform public administration than their imperial predecessors because they are smaller and less diverse.
After the 19th-century triumph of the nation-state in Europe, regional identity was usually subordinate to national identity. In many cases, the regional administration was also subordinate to central national government. This process has been partially reversed from the s onward, with the introduction of various forms of regional autonomy in formerly centralized states e. The most obvious impact of the nation-state, as compared to its non-national predecessors, is the creation of a uniform national culture through state policy.
The model of the nation-state implies that its population constitutes a nation, united by a common descent, a common language, and many forms of shared culture. When the implied unity was absent, the nation-state often tried to create it. The creation of national systems of compulsory primary education is usually linked with the popularization of nationalist narratives.
Even today, primary and secondary schools around the world often teach a mythologized version of national history. While some European nation-states emerged throughout the 19th century, the end of World War I meant the end of empires on the continent. They all broke down into a number of smaller states. However, not until the tragedy of World War II and the post-war shifts of borders and population resettlement did many European states become more ethnically and culturally homogeneous and thus closer to the ideal nation-state.
Skip to main content. In comparing two Middle Eastern states Turkey and Syria with South Korea and Taiwan, David Waldner claims that premature incorporation of popular classes during the state-building process had an adverse effect on economic development Waldner South Korea and Taiwan, by contrast, managed to hold back participation and distributive pressures.
Thus rather than see differential external factors as causes for successful economic takeoff and state formation, this alternative line of enquiry explains variation by different internal trajectories of coalition building.
Other newly emerging states have followed alternative paths of economic mobilization. In the standard European developmental path, internal mobilization for war and economic development often meant a tradeoff for the ruler between mobilization and participation. In common parlance, taxation required representation. Absolutist rulers could only circumvent the connection by making potential opponents of royal centralization tax exempt. The lack of taxation of the aristocracy thus correlated with the absence of effective parliamentary oversight in pre-revolutionary France, Spain, and Prussia.
Some of the newly independent states that possess considerable natural resources, however, can obtain resources without making such tradeoffs. Rents accruing from natural resources, particularly in natural gas and oil, allow governments to provide essential public goods, or side payments to potential dissidents, without having to p. The rentier state literature thus argues that rentier economies show an inverse correlation with democracy Anderson ; Chaudhry ; Dillman ; Karl ; Vandewalle The standard rentier argument was developed with particular reference to the Middle East, but the argument has been applied to other states as well.
Intriguingly, the notion of rents might also be extended to other export commodities, or even foreign aid. But there is some debate whether rentier states inevitably lead to societal acquiescence. In one perspective, rentier economies might generate the very conditions that precipitate dissidence. Because governments selectively allocate rents to select groups, the presence of considerable financial resources makes it worthwhile for the excluded group to mobilize its constituency to challenge the existing authority Okruhlik In another intriguing line of enquiry, some scholars have examined the relation between economic context and the state through formal models.
This has yielded interesting observations with regards to efficient state size and the number of states in the international system. Alesina and Spolaore start from the premiss that public goods provision is more efficient in larger units.
Thus, a fictitious social planner could maximize world average utility by designing states of optimal size with an equilibrium number of units.
Several factors, however, will offset the benefits of large jurisdictions. First, heterogeneous populations will make uniform public goods provision more costly. Second, given diverse preferences and the declining efficiency of provision the further one resides from the center of the country, democratic rulers will not be able to create optimal redistributive systems as efficiently as rulers who can unilaterally maximize utility.
Third, an international liberal trading scheme will decrease the costs for small jurisdictions. They have extended this line of analysis to the provision of security as a public good Alesina and Spolaore A geopolitical hostile environment creates benefits for large jurisdictions, as security provision will be more efficient.
With declining international competition such benefits will recede and the number of nations will expand. International relations scholars have made similar observations, albeit from different analytic perspectives.
Michael Desch thus argued, following realist views in international relations scholarship, that the durability of alliances and territorial integrity were heavily dependent on the presence of external threat. Events since the end of the Cold War seem to have borne such expectations out. Moreover, if Alesina and Spolaore are correct, the attempts to foster democratic regimes in many of the new states will not necessarily lead to economically efficient outcomes.
The artificial borders of many African states, which thus comprise many diverse ethnic communities, have coincided with inefficient economic outcomes and the suboptimal provision of public goods. The preceding observations have serious consequences for rulers seeking to legitimize their rule and the existing territorial borders. The ideological legitimation of the sovereign, territorial state in Europe involved a threefold process. First, it required the triumph of rule based on territoriality.
The idea of a theocratic, universalist non-territorial organization based on a Christian community had to be displaced in favor of territorial identification. Already by the fourteenth century kings had started to challenge papal claims to rule. And by the sixteenth century, by the principle cuius regio , eius religio , territorial rulers came to determine the dominant religious identification of their state.
Second, the state had to contend with alternative forms of identification and loyalty—ethnic community, clans, kinship structures, and trans-territorial loyalties as with feudal obligations. The emergence of national armies and citizenship went hand in hand.
In exchange for public goods provision and protection, citizens had to do more than pay taxes; they had to serve with life and limb to defend the national community Levi The creation of a nation to identify with the particular territorial space, consequently, involved a destruction of local variation and identification and a reconstruction of a national citizen.
Third, in the process of contractual bargaining or even by coercive imposition of authority over time, the state acquired a taken-for-granted character. The greater the contractarian nature of the state, the greater the ability of the state to acquire legitimacy. But even authoritarian states, once they had attached legitimate rule to the disembodied state, rather than a particular dynastic lineage, could count on popular support in moments of crisis, such as war.
Few of these processes are at work in the newly independent states of the last decades. Territorial identification has not uniformly displaced trans-territorial affinity based on language and religion. For example, whether the idea of territorially demarcated authority is compatible with theocratic organization in the Muslim world still remains a matter of debate Piscatori Even within the same country territorial rulers themselves have at particular junctures championed trans-territorial affinities while their successors denied such claims.
While many Middle East rulers Gause have largely abjured the trans-territorial claims of their early independence, the legitimacy of their authority remains contested. The newly independent states of the former Soviet Union have not been immune either. Some scholars have suggested an attraction of pan-Turkic identification Mandelbaum Others see legitimization problems which look similar to those of the Middle Eastern states given the tensions between secular p.
In many newly independent states local affinities of tribe, ethnic community, clan, and kin dominate any sense of national citizenship. In the Middle East and North Africa, states such as Tunisia and Egypt, which were historically relatively autonomous entities prior to colonial subjugation, have had a longer track record of melding local identity with territory Anderson Other states, such as on the Arabian peninsula, have had to contend with various alternate loci of identification, some of which were fostered by colonial rule.
This pattern holds equally in Africa as in many states of Asia. Even where nationalist elites gained their independence by force of arms rather than by metropolitan retreat, these elites have not always been successful in creating a national identity.
For instance, although the Indonesian army obtained considerable popular support in its struggles with the Dutch, the national project has largely been seen as a Javanese one. Ethnic and regional tensions have thus resurfaced in such places as Borneo, Atjeh, and Ambon. In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet area as well, nationalist elites have had mixed success. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia dissolved altogether, while Romania, Hungary, and many of the former Union republics continue to face multiple challenges.
Within the former Soviet Union, the Baltics, who could fall back on a prior historical legacy of independence, have fared better in muting virulent tensions. As said, these states emerged due to a mixture of imperial collapse, metropolitan withdrawal, international delegitimization of empire, and nationalist resistance. In very few instances were elites involved in contractarian bargaining with social actors. Nationalist alliances were often agreements of convenience rather than durable quid pro quo exchanges as in European state formation.
The internal features of successful state making were absent and thus logically the means through which rulers could justify their authority. This is not to say that national elites in all newly emerged states are doomed to failure. Although public goods provision might be suboptimal in heterogeneous populations, and although there are reasons to fear deleterious overall effects of ethnic diversity on economic growth, strategic choices to mitigate the effects of ethnic cleavages can bear fruit.
For example, there is some evidence that nation-building efforts in Tanzania, despite a highly heterogeneous population, and despite limited resources, have met with considerable success. In Tanzania, the government chose a national language policy, reformed local governments following independence, distributed public expenditures equitably, and adopted a national school curriculum.
As a result public school expenditures show far less correlation with ethnicity and the nation-building project as a whole has been relatively successful. In Kenya, conversely, public goods have been distributed far less equitably and nation building has stalled Miguel There is, given the observations above, a broad consensus that late state formation outside of the Western experience, and particularly in the developing countries, occurs in a vastly different environment and will thus diverge from the European model.
In addition to a different geopolitical and economic milieu, the newly independent states differ from the European trajectory in that many of them emerged in the wake of imperial disintegration and retreat. The study of emerging states thus sparked enquiry into the institutional consequences of imperial rule.
The former Soviet space and Eastern Europe have proven particularly fertile ground for comparative political studies. Given the relative similarity of background conditions particularly in the former USSR , these states lend themselves to cross-case analyses regarding institutional choice and the consequences of institutional type Laitin ; Elster What kinds of institutions emerged during this third wave of democratization?
With scarcely more than a decade gone by, it appears evident that many polities in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have opted for strong presidential systems Easter One hardly needs to mention that the consequences of presidential and parliamentary systems remain a matter of debate within the comparative politics literature.
Those in favor of parliamentary forms of government argue that presidential systems lend themselves to abuse of power and are poorly equipped to deal with multiethnic societies Lijphart ; Linz ; Skach and Stepan.
Presidential systems will thus be prone to eroding democratic rights and to limiting parliamentarian opposition. Conversely, others argue that parliamentary systems might be as prone to abuse and winner-take-all policies as presidential systems Mainwaring and Shugart Comparative study of these states in the years ahead will be a fruitful avenue of enquiry to test these rival arguments. Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics also provide a laboratory for the study of economic transition.
Subsequent analysis, partially on the basis of comparisons with Western European state formation and economic development, remained far more skeptical. Political and social conditions that had accompanied takeoff in Western Europe seemed absent. Paradoxically, states which seemed to have inherited fewer institutional and material resources from the USSR, such as the Ukraine, proved p.
Finally, this region has provided generalizable theoretical insights about institutional arrangements and territorial fragmentation. Valerie Bunce suggests in her comparative analysis of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the USSR that civil—military relations and ethnofederal institutions are key elements that may contribute to territorial dissolution Bunce A balance between the core region and other units might be critical for the stability of the ethnofederal arrangement Hale The Soviet ethnofederal system also had some unique features that contributed to its demise.
The Soviet titular elite policy officially linked particular nationalities to territorial entities but also created incentives for the agents the titular elites to disregard commands from the principal the Communist Party , particularly when oversight mechanisms declined while at the same time rewards from the center diminished. Steven Solnick utilizes such a principal—agent framework to contrast Chinese territorial integrity during its economic transition with the collapse of the USSR Solnick Finally, scholarship has also turned to the question whether colonial legacies show commonalities across time and space, despite widely divergent historical and cultural trajectories.
A growing body of research has started to compare the states of Central Asia and African states Beissinger and Young ; Jones-Luong These states share various features in common that do not bode well for their subsequent development. They share poverty, a history of institutionalized corruption, patrimonial institutions, and weak state development due to imperial domination. Nevertheless some of these states have embarked on modest democratic trajectories such as Kyrgyzstan while others remain authoritarian such as Uzbekistan.
Similarly, some sub-Saharan states show modest economic success such as Botswana while others evince abject failure such as Zimbabwe. Cross-regional comparison, therefore, might allow greater specification of the causal variables for state failure, economic takeoff, and democratic reform. To conclude, the study of the state is alive and well. Indeed, there has been a dramatic revival of studies of state formation, the linkage between state formation and regime type, as well as of state failure.
It is also clear that subfield boundaries fade into the background in the study of such substantive macro-level questions. While the integration of subfields has been most manifest within comparative politics and international relations, other subfields may contribute greatly as well. American politics, in its nuanced understanding of institutional choices and their consequences, can shed light on how electoral reforms might enable or constrain economic growth p.
Questions of citizenship, identity politics, and legitimacy inevitably involve political philosophy. Aside from multidisciplinarity, the study of the state must be historical. For better or for worse, it is the European state system which has been superimposed on the rest of the world. The differences in historical environment and the divergent trajectories not only shed light on the problems confronting the newly independent states of the last half-century, but possibly point the way to remedies which might start to address the dire effects of state failure.
Alesina, A. On the number and size of nations. Quarterly Journal of Economics , 4 : — Find this resource:. War, peace, and the size of countries. Journal of Public Economics , — Ames, E. The birth and death of taxes: a hypothesis. Journal of Economic History , — Amsden, A.
New York: Oxford University Press. Anderson, B. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso. Anderson, L. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The state in the Middle East and North Africa. Comparative Politics , 20 1 : 1— Anderson, P. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. London: Verso. Lineages of the Absolutist State.
Aslund, A. How Russia Became a Market Economy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Avant, D. New York: Cambridge University Press. Badie, B. The Sociology of the State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Bean, R. War and the birth of the nation state. Journal of Economic History , 33 1 : — Beissinger, M. Beyond State Crisis?
Bendix, R. Kings or People. Benn, S. New York: Macmillan. Brewer, J. The Sinews of Power. New York: Alfred Knopf. Brubaker, R. Nationhood and the national question in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Eurasia: an institutionalist account. Theory and Society , 47— Bunce, V. Subversive Institutions.
Chaudhry, K. Collins, K. The logic of clan politics: evidence from Central Asian trajectories. World Politics , 56 2 : — Collins, R. Weberian Sociological Theory.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Booms and busts: theorizing institutional formation and change in oil states.
Review of International Political Economy , 8 1 : — Corrigan, P. The Great Arch. New York: Blackwell. Cowhey, P. Elect locally—order globally: domestic politics and multilateral cooperation. New York: Columbia University Press. David, S. Explaining Third World alignment. World Politics , 43 2 : — Desch, M. War and strong states, peace and weak states? International Organization , 50 2 : — Deyo, F.
Dillman, B. State and Private Sector in Algeria. Boulder, Colo. DiMaggio, P. The iron cage revisited: institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review , — The Anglo-German naval race as a study in grand strategy. Rosecrance and A. Downing, B. The Military Revolution and Political Change. Duby, G. The Three Orders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Easter, G. Preference for presidentialism: postcommunist regime change in Russia and the NIS.
World Politics , 49 2 : — Elster, J. Afterword: the making of postcommunist presidencies. Ertman, T. Birth of the Leviathan. Fearon, J. Domestic political audiences and the escalation of international disputes. American Political Science Review , — Garrett, G.
International Organization , 46 2 : — Gause, G. Sovereignty, statecraft and stability in the Middle East. Journal of International Affairs , 45 2 : — Gellner, E. Nations and Nationalism. Gerschenkron, A. Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective.
Cambridge, Mass. Giddens, A. The Nation-State and Violence. Haggard, S. The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions. Hale, H. Divided we stand: institutional sources of ethnofederal state survival and collapse. Hall, P. Governing the Economy. Cambridge: Polity. Herbst, J. The creation and maintenance of national boundaries in Africa.
International Organization , 43 4 : — States and Power in Africa. Herz, J. New York: David McKay. Hinsley, F. Hintze, O. The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze , ed. Felix Gilbert. Hui, V. Centralization, or the process by which law- and policymaking become centrally located, helped spur the development of nation-states.
Final power rested with the central government, which made the laws and practices more uniform across the country. A single centralized authority, rather than many diverse local authorities, allowed nation-states to quickly develop their economies.
Merchants could trade throughout the nation without worrying about local taxes and regulations. Also, the nation-state was much stronger militarily than the feudal state. Rulers were able to create national armies, which were not dependent on the nobility. The armies could receive consistent training so that all units could work well together. In many cases, the newly emerging nation-states dominated the older forms of political organization.
Example: In the eighteenth century, nobles held most of the power in Poland. The monarch was very weak. As a result, Poland could not defeat its powerful neighbors Austria, Prussia, and Russia. These three centralized nation-states partitioned Poland on three different occasions—, , and —eventually eliminating Poland until , when a new Republic of Poland formed.
Napoleon Bonaparte was a key figure in the development of the nation-state. Amid the chaos of the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century, most remaining medieval and feudal laws were overturned and a truly national law code was established. Similarly, a national military was created. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Summary The Rise of the Nation-State. The Catholic Church and the Rise of the Nation-State Newly emerging nation-states in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a complex relationship with the predominant transnational power of the time, the Catholic Church.
0コメント