The Nation-State 1648–2148

When Russia invaded Ukraine, in that winter of 2022, it had seemed to many a return to a world past. Tanks, maps, borders, territories, crossings, flags, foot soldiers, liberation chants, artillery fire, underground shelters, were these not the stuff of the twentieth century? People were now fleeing right in the heart of Europe, commentators said in shock, right there where state boundaries had long been well established. It had seemed to work so well there that some thought history had perhaps ended—good riddance—only to rear its head again, in the form of an unhinged Vladimir Putin who did not respect that axiomatic principle of world politics, state sovereignty.

It was only a few months before this invasion that almost one and a half million people had fled another country. That displacement was sad and terrible—but not shocking. For the country they were fleeing was not in the heart of Europe. It was the antithesis of Europe: the Afghanistan of the Taliban. Before that, news of conflict, violence, and suffering had come from El Salvador, Ethiopia, Yemen, Haiti, Palestine, Myanmar, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Mexico, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Lebanon, Congo, Mali, North Korea, Sri Lanka, Honduras, the Central African Republic, Somalia, Guatemala, and many others. This was all history happening in those parts of the world where it was somehow stuck, and had yet to end.

What seems obvious today, in 2148, had long remained largely overlooked. First, that those non-European parts of the world witnessing one crisis after the other made up a huge swath of the world. And second, that what they suffered from was not a deficit of liberal commitment. The symptom had been confused with the cause, which was deeper and lay in what had been slowly unraveling before the eyes of the twenty-first-century observer: the nation-state.

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It was long thought that the sovereign nation-state was born, or at least consolidated, in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia. At the same time, and as “the sovereign state was occupying the European continent, piece by piece . . . contemporary political philosophers embraced this form of polity and described what made it legitimate” (Philpott 2020). Jean Bodin and, almost a century later, Thomas Hobbes, were the best known of the philosophers of sovereignty.

These two origin stories, the empirical and the ideational one, can be traced back to a single antecedent: the Protestant Reformation. It was the Reformation that brought about the Thirty Years’ War that, in turn, brought about Westphalia and its sovereign states (Philpott 2001, 4). It was also the Reformation that brought about the various religious conflicts against the background of which Bodin and Hobbes wrote, inspiring both to argue for absolute and undivided sovereignty.

Or one could opt for an earlier antecedent: Roman law. In their conflicts against the papacy in the decades preceding Westphalia, “secular rulers would find justification for their sovereignty in Roman law” (Spruyt 1994, 57) since the “idea of exclusive authority over territorial space corresponded with the definition of property rights in Roman law” (104). For his part, Bodin had also drawn on Roman law, particularly its notion of obligation (Lee 2021, 66), in developing his concept of sovereignty.

One could also perhaps go back even further, drawing a line from the Romans back to the Greeks. It was with Aristotle that ideas of the political, which constitute the background for the later development of sovereignty, emerged (Skinner 1978, 349). Or, on a different take, it was the “critical and rational components” of the Greek world that gave early modern Europe its edge (Anderson 2013, 426).

Or one could start later, as others do, emphasizing the French Revolution of 1789. The Enlightenment’s contribution to all of the previous historical threads begins then; it was then that “the philosophes argued that political authority had to be based on the ends of individuals in civil society, rather than on the caprice of belligerent sovereigns” (Bickerton et al. 2007, 9).

Sharing none of these antecedents—no Westphalia, no Reformation, no Rome, no Bodin, no Greece, no Hobbes, no French Revolution—non-Western countries made their appearance in histories of the modern, sovereign state as byproducts of colonialism, and then decolonization, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Perhaps there was “nothing inevitable about the emergence of the sovereign territorial state” (Spruyt 1996, 18); it just emerged “because of a particular conjuncture of social and political interests in Europe” (19). Or perhaps the nation-state’s emergence was both necessary and inevitable, being the product, on a certain Marxist view, of capitalism. Or perhaps its rise was not contingent but not inevitable either; on this view, “both capitalism and industrialism . . . decisively influenced the rise of nation-states” even while “the nation-state system cannot be reductively explained in terms of their existence” (Giddens 1985, 4–5). None of these views leads to the conclusion that the nation-state was here to stay, that nothing else was ever going to be possible, that politics was forever synonymous with it.

And yet it is a remarkable feature of much political thinking of the past two centuries that those who advocated liberal political ideals, democracy, freedom, rights, and popular mandates simply took the nation-state for granted—an understated Leviathan if there ever was one. The development of constitutionalism, for example, involved “a near-universal acceptance of what the target of constitutional limitations must be—that is, the impersonal sovereign nation-state and its institutional structure of a territorially bound public authority” (Lee 2016, 6). The recommended solution to many political problems around the world was thus to double down on the same normative principles, regardless of the underlying status of the polity to which these were meant to apply.

Liberalism was even sometimes thought to have emerged in the same historical moment as the state: “the historical origin of political liberalism (and of liberalism more generally) is the Reformation and its aftermath, with the long controversies over religious toleration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Rawls 1993, xxiv). Given that the nation-state was established in many parts of the world a few centuries after that, the nagging question concerned the possibility for the emergence of liberalism in those parts. Perhaps the societies that experienced the Reformation, modern states, and modern science all together (xxii) were set on a particular trajectory that ended—with the controversies that the Reformation provoked—in “something like the modern understanding of liberty of conscience and freedom of thought” (xxiv). Conversely, one could perhaps “conjecture” (Rawls 1999, 12) that the inapplicability of liberalism in other parts of the world was the result of states arising outside of such controversies, in societies sharing a common worldview (64).

And yet neither diversity nor toleration were distinctive of Western history. Toleration, historians argued, was in fact more characteristic of early modern Asian empires than of their Western counterparts (Subrahmanyam 2006, 85). This toleration—even if it was more strategic than principled (Barkey 2008, 110)—meant that “many Asian empires entered the nineteenth century more culturally heterogenous (within continuous territories) than their European counterparts” (Zarakol 2022, 41). This, in turn, likely contributed to modern predicaments like conflict and authoritarianism in Asian states, rendering as it did “nationalisation projects difficult (and later violent)” (Zarakol 2022, 41).

The problem, in other words, was perhaps not at the level of pluralism and liberalism. It was perhaps precisely the adoption of the Westphalian sovereignty arrangement in a world that had experienced “alternative sovereignty arrangements” (Zarakol 2022, 18) for much of its history that created conditions ripe for various kinds of dislocation.

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The mismatch between the adopted form of political organization and the underlying conditions was a predicament for a host of developing countries. Recognized on the international scene as states but unable to exercise control over the territories under their authority, African states were said to enjoy de jure, but not de facto sovereignty; they were “quasi-states” (Jackson 1993). “State failure” became the new buzzword on the global scene, as well as a blanket justification for intervention in postcolonial states by international organizations (Bickerton 2007, 102). Instead of questioning the role of these organizations, let alone the existing rules of the game—who got to participate and who did not in the “Westphalian commonsense” (Grovogui 2002, 325)—the interventions doubled down on these precedents. They were the solution that was in fact a continuation of the very problem, making anything other than quasi-statehood impossible to achieve.

The idea that African states were only “quasi-states” missed the point that the question was political, not administrative, and that anticolonial movements did not emerge from “colonial administrators” but from “a historical process of violent political struggles” (Bickerton 2007, 103), which laid the ground for the possibility of “political self-creation” for which sovereignty was a necessary condition (102). It also missed the crucial appeal of “claims of sovereignty and sovereign equality” for anticolonial nationalists, for whom they served as the “foundations of anti-imperial visions of international justice” (Getachew 2019, 34).

On this view, sovereignty was the “form that collective activity for public purposes takes” under capitalism (Bickerton et al. 2007, 10); to consider sovereignty itself as the problem, and to reject, instead of reinforcing, it risked emptying political life of meaning. When the debate over the United Kingdom leaving the European Union raged in the second half of the 2010s, that was the view in favor of what was known as Brexit, adopted by various scholars on the left of the political spectrum. They argued that democracy was better protected within the confines of the sovereign state; the supranational project that was the EU embodied “a constitutional order tailor-made for the interests of global capitalism and managerial politics” (Tuck 2016). Only sovereignty could afford some protection, some possibility of collective life, against such interests. The case for sovereignty could only be even stronger for postcolonial societies if sovereignty and anti-imperialism did indeed go hand in hand.

But if the long-lived, well-resourced UK democracy could not avoid, or recover from, the dismantling of universal welfare provision, the attacks on public education, and the constant proliferation of neoliberal economic policies, how could the states in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean do so? How could they survive the disillusionment with the postcolonial moment, the promise of welfare and development of the 1950s and 1960s that was never fulfilled? Was “self-creation” still a possibility for many of these societies even as they grew poorer and more unequal, and even as various popular protests gave way to authoritarian and populist backlash? Perhaps it was never even a possibility that the world system afforded them. Could anticolonial struggles on their own have created the “self” and maintained its ability to create in future decades? Did capitalism not guarantee external intervention, even after formal colonial liberation, and even outside the fanfare of “state failure”?

Indeed, anticolonial thinkers were deeply sensitive to these questions and had themselves advocated “anti-statist projects,” including various models of federation (Getachew 2019, 109; Mantena 2016, 313). Within Indian anticolonialism, the proposals for a “new popular, decentralised, postimperial polity” included Gandhi’s “radically decentralised peasant democracy based upon the revitalised village community as its core” (Mantena 2016, 312). In the Black Atlantic world, anticolonial nationalists envisioned “international institutions that would meaningfully transcend the nation-state” (Getachew 2019, 28), including a New International Economic Order that would address questions like the “ownership of natural resources on land and in the seas, the relationship of multinational corporations to state authority, and the transportation and distribution of traded goods” (144).

Although these anticolonial visions were defeated, the ascendancy of neoliberal international institutions that followed was always also met with resistance. Resistance sometimes took the form of resisting capitalism; it also, though perhaps less loudly, took the form of imagining a world Beyond Leviathan (Mészáros 2022).

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If political theorists’ gaze had been turned to that possibility, the possibility of political organization beyond the state, they would have caught glimpses of a world that eventually took them by surprise. While the EU represented the main example of a supranational form of organization and remained an object of both fascination and alarm (Anderson 2021), less conspicuous projects proceeded apace.

The “ongoing and structural project to acquire and maintain land, and to eliminate those on it, did not work completely. There are still Indians, some still know this, and some will defend what they have left” (Simpson 2014, 12). The Haudenosaunee Confederacy in North America, comprised of six nations, issued its own passports in an example of “nested sovereignty” (11), or “negotiated sovereignty” (Lightfoot 2021, 990), either way rejecting “strict, static boundaries of territorially based Westphalian sovereignty” (990).

There was also the Zomia of Southeast Asia, “the largest remaining region of the world whose peoples had not yet been fully incorporated into nation-states” (Scott 2009, ix). The “anarchist history” of Zomia was a “history of deliberate and reactive statelessness,” the opposite of what “the huge literature on state-making” had devoted itself to (x).

Various scholars suggested “unbundled territoriality” as an approach to “global ecology” (Ruggie 1993, 173) or a “place-based approach to territorial politics” in which “climate, water, and landforms and the way people relate to them take precedence over identity” (Espejo 2020, 14). On such a view, “different scales of governance, where some networks connect horizontally and others nest vertically with higher levels of authority and abstraction, can collaborate to create better governance at different levels” (194).

The push against state sovereignty, on the practical and on the conceptual level, came from below. Not having the aura or the clout of institutions like the EU or the United Nations, it was less noticeable, much slower, more covert. It garnered its steady force from local efforts to protect rivers, forests, lakes, and animal habitats; from communities constituting themselves on the peripheries of urban centers, in “political society” not in “civil society” (Chatterjee 2011, 219); from migrant groups recreating borderland areas; from refugees recreating homes; from cities allying in networks of subnational, and sometimes supranational, governance; from international legal initiatives to diversify legal frameworks and establish nested jurisdictions; and from resistance movements that pushed to disperse, delegate, and federate authority, sometimes intentionally, sometimes surreptitiously, acting against borders, turning them into less clearly demarcated frontiers.

These efforts stealthily unraveled the state from within, in some cases claiming some of its sovereign powers, in others modifying them, and in others yet, simply rejecting them. The map of the world slowly blurred, losing its bold contours. The new formations that are taking shape have elements of the old—some of the participatory politics heralded by the egalitarian promise of the modern world but operating through overlapping, local efforts and combined with federative arrangements, as well as the nested, flexible authority regimes of premodern forms of governance. They have solved some problems; they have also created new ones. Throughout this process, the nation-state has been dying a slow death, too slow, indeed, for the eulogy its modern supporters probably wished for it to form clearly, to arise and to mark the passing of this pivotal, but peculiar, moment in history.