Is there a contemporary crisis of the nation state?

Abstract

Formulating the question Nations consist of those who belong together by birth (genetically, lineally, through familially inherited language and culture). States consist of those who are fully subject to their own sovereign legal authority. A true nation state, therefore, would consist only of those who belonged to it by birth and of those who were fully subject to its sovereign legal authority. By this (for practical purposes, no doubt absurdly stipulative) criterion it is unlikely that there is a single nation state in the world at present, and moderately unlikely that any such state has ever existed. But, as with most political ideas, the force of the idea of the nation state has never come principally from its descriptive precision. What it offers is a precarious fusion of two very different modes of thinking: one explicitly subjective, urgent and identificatory, and the other presumptively objective, detached and independent of the vagaries of popular consciousness. (It is hard to exaggerate the shaping impact of this second mode in forming the category of state (Skinner 1989).) Common birth is both a ground for, and a source of, allegiance. External authority is a device for furnishing protection. Taken together, they furnish a basis for rulers and subjects to live together with greater imaginative ease than either party would be likely to draw from the other taken separately: a contemporary version of xhepactum subjectionis (chapter 3 above).