Establishing the Nation

For SOCECON 10 sections ACC, XB, YB

The Contemporary World
Lecture provided by Conan Tan
Community
• Group of people who have something in common
• Remains the basis of a nation, a people who feel
they share a common identity and belong together
(Weber 1921/1978, 395-398)
 CONTEXT
• The Treaty of Westphalia (1648)
• Ended the 30- and 80-years wars in Europe.
• Instituted an international system that recognizes
the sovereign states at its core.
COMPONENTS OF NATION-STATES
• Nation (Cerney 2007: 845)
o “A social group that is linked through a common
descent, culture, language, and territorial
contiguity”.
 COMPONENTS OF NATION-STATES
• State (Cerney 2007: 855)
o “Institutional form in the wake of the demise of feudal
system”
o More centralized (than city-states).
o Office holders are outside the socio-economic
hierarchies.
o Rules and resources are coming from taxes rather than
from feudal, personal, or religious obligations.
COMPONENTS OF NATION-STATES
• State (Cerney 2007: 855)
o Has the ability to engage in collective action both
internally (e.g. collect taxes) and externally (e.g.
deal with other states, to engage in warfare, etc.)
 NATION-STATE
• What is a nation-state?
o Integrates sub-groups that define themselves as a
nation with the organizational structure of the
state.
 NATION-STATES
• National Identity (Guibernau 2007: 849-53)
o “Fluid and dynamic form of collective identity, founded
upon a community’s subjective belief that the members
of the community share a set of characteristics that make
them different from other groups”.
o E.g. monarchy, sports, religion.
 NATION-STATES
• Nationalism
o A doctrine or national movement that seeks to
make the nation the basis of a political structure,
especially a state.
 IMAGINED COMMUNITY
• Benedict Anderson (2006: 6): “Imagined political
community”.
• The nation exists within the realm of ideas,
subjectively within people’s minds as an image.
 CHARACTERISTICS OF IMAGINED
COMMUNITY
• Impossibility of personal contact:
o Must imagine who they are, what they believe, what
holds them together.
• National Boundaries:
o No nation imagines itself as coterminous with mankind.
• Sovereignty:
o Being free.
 CHARACTERISTICS OF IMAGINED
COMMUNITY
• Deep and horizontal comradeship:
o Regardless of the actual inequality and
exploitation that may prevail in each nation.
 IMAGINED COMMUNITY
• Indicators:
o Print media (i.e. novels and newspapers)
o Digital media (i.e. cellphones, emails, internet,
blogs).
o Allow widely dispersed populations to maintain,
create, and disseminate a continuing sense of
imagined community.
Treaty of Westphalia
• By 1648,most European princes and kings were
bankrupt by the expense of war.
• Münster and Osnabrück
• Holy Roman Empire
• Catholicism
• Lutheranism
• Calvinism
• Sovereignty, territory, freedom
Principles
• States were all free and equal.
• There was no temporal authority higher than the
state
• States had ultimate authority over the conduct of
their internal and external affairs.
• The capacity to exercise rule over a territory
bestowed the right to rule - might makes right
• Whoever gained or seized power had authority to
act as the head of the state and...
Principles (cont’d)
• ...enter into agreements on behalf of the people,
regardless of their constitutional standing.
• How a state maintained its power did not reflect on
the states' legitimacy in the view of the world
community
• The activity of the a state outside of its own
boundaries and the treatment of individuals who
were not citizens were not expected to conform to
the same standards as a state's activity within its
borders or treatment of its own citizens.
Principles (cont’d)
• Groups and other non-state actors had no right to
contest territorial borders (Held 2000, 162-163).

• Treaty became the basis of “an association of states,

each of which claimed sovereignty within its
political boundaries and legitimacy based on the
nation within.”