2 Structuring Europe: The Experience of the ‘Nation‐State’

Abstract

Abstract The analytical framework sketched in Chapter One is used to review the history of state formation in Europe at a number of critical junctures from the sixteenth to the twentieth century: state formation, capitalist development and market formation, nation formation, generalisation of participation rights (democratization), and development of social sharing institutions (welfare systems). The recasting emphasizes how the processes of boundary control in various spheres contributed to the specific and historically unique constellation of centre-periphery structuring, interest intermediation structuring, and cleavage structuring in the Western experience. This key idea — that domestic political structures are historically grounded in specific configurations of economic, cultural, administrative and coercion confinement of actors and resources — suggests that political developments affecting the boundary configuration of the nation state will also affect the domestic forms of its political structures. This is the starting point for the succeeding chapters devoted to the European integration process.