National Political Cultures

Abstract

Abstract The global system of sovereign states solidified in the nineteenth century as European peoples engaged in political projects that solidified the boundaries between them and regularized warfare and governance, not as the hereditary prerogative of princes, but the lawful activity of peoples forming “nationalities.” European experiences were both emulated voluntarily and exported violently through a process of aggressively military colonization, resulting in the global system of states that govern the political boundaries of the world today. These states may or may not be nationalities (that is, where a majority of the people share common ethnic and linguistic origins), but they are frequently imagined as such (Smith, 1995). States claim the sole prerogative to exercise the legitimate use of violence within their boundaries, and are often the only recognized political entities that other states recognize as having the power to govern. Hence, the multilingual and multicultural empires that governed large parts of the world until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (e.g., the Spanish Empire, the Austro‐Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Turkish Empire) have disappeared, creating many new states but leaving other peoples who aspire to sovereignty but do not have that status.