Abstract
Abstract The position of the territorially sovereign nation-state as the fundamental building block of the contemporary world order has come under increasing challenge. Historians have long focused on social, cultural, economic, and technological factors to examine the constructed nature of the nation-state. In this article, I explore the role of law, and specifically the concept of sovereignty, in the creation of the unified spatial entity constituting the nation-state. I focus in particular on the decolonisation of South Asia and analyse legal arguments made in two international disputes (over Hyderabad and the river Indus) to understand the process through which the Indian nation-state came into being.
Highlights
The contemporary world order is built around nation-states
I focus in particular on the decolonisation of South Asia and analyse legal arguments made in two international disputes to understand the process through which the Indian nation-state came into being
Alternatives to the British Empire, for instance, included the creation of independent nation-states, the articulation of anti-imperial internationalisms,3 the espousal of federations as a political form to balance competing interests,4 and the advocacy of the Commonwealth of Nations as a mechanism for refashioning the empire
Summary
The contemporary world order is built around nation-states. Despite significant scholarly challenge to the idea that the nation-state is the ‘natural’ or ‘fundamental’ building block of the modern world order, it remains the primary. Anti-colonial nationalists were part of a broader transnational mode of economic thought that favoured a strong role for the state in the economy This national developmentalist framework can be traced to the influence of late nineteenthcentury political economists like Friedrich List, there were additional international examples by the 1930s, including Soviet planning, New Deal interventions in the United States, Nazi and Fascist economics, and Japanese development policies.. The ability to compete in an increasingly international economic order instead required centralised control, planning, co-ordination, and the consolidation of the state’s territories This unified national space for development had to be created and it was done through the articulation of a version of sovereignty that privileged exclusive and absolute control over defined territory. 52 Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments 1993 (n. 35), 200–205
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