Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Sovereignty means having a recognized right to control a
territory both politically and militarily. The states of the
world have the last say, legally, at least, over their respective
territories. When the international community recognizes
an entity as a state, it also recognizes the entity as being sov-
ereign within its borders. Under international law, states
are sovereign, and they have the right to defend their
territorial integrity
against incursion from other states.
minor German states created a complicated patchwork of
political entities, many with poorly defi ned borders. The
emerging political state was accompanied by
mercantilism
,
which led to the accumulation of wealth through plun-
der, colonization, and the protection of home industries
and foreign markets. Rivalry and competition intensi-
fi ed in Europe as well as abroad. Powerful royal families
struggled for dominance in eastern and southern Europe.
Instability was the rule, strife occurred frequently, and
repressive governments prevailed.
The event in European history that marks the
beginning of the modern state system is the
Peace of
Westphalia
, negotiated in 1648 among the princes of
the states making up the Holy Roman Empire, as well
as a few neighboring states. The treaties that constituted
this peace concluded Europe's most destructive internal
struggle over religion during the Thirty Years' War. They
contained new language recognizing the rights of rulers
within defi ned, demarcated territories. The language of
the treaties laid the foundations for a Europe made up of
mutually recognized territorial states.
The rise of the Westphalian state system marked a
fundamental change in the relationship between people
and territory. In previous eras,
where
a society lived con-
stituted its territory; in the Westphalian system it became
the
territory
that defi ned the
society
. Territory is treated as
a fi xed element of political identifi cation, and states defi ne
exclusive, nonoverlapping territories.
Even well after the Peace of Westphalia, absolutist
rulers controlled most European states. During the later
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, the devel-
opment of an increasingly wealthy middle class proved to
be the undoing of absolutism in parts of western Europe.
City-based merchants gained money, infl uence, and pres-
tige, while the power of the nobility declined. The tra-
ditional measure of affl uence—land—became less impor-
tant. The merchants and businessmen demanded political
recognition. In the 1780s, a series of upheavals began that
changed the sociopolitical face of the continent, most
notably the French Revolution of 1789. The revolution,
conducted in the name of the French people, ushered in
an era in which the foundations for political authority
came to be seen as resting with a state's citizenry, not with
a hereditary monarch.
The Modern State Idea
In the 1600s, Europeans were not the only ones who
behaved territorially, organized themselves into distinct
political units, or claimed sovereignty. Because territorial-
ity manifests itself in different ways, the idea of the state
appeared in a variety of forms across world regions 400
or 500 years ago. The role territory played in defi ning the
state and the sovereign varied by region.
In North America, American Indian tribes behaved
territorially but not necessarily exclusively. Plains tribes
shared hunting grounds with neighboring tribes who
were friendly, and they fought over hunting grounds
with neighboring tribes who were unfriendly. Terri-
torial boundaries were usually not delineated on the
ground. Plains tribes also held territory communally
so that individual tribal members did not “own” land.
In a political sense, territoriality was most expressed by
tribes within the Plains. Similarly, in Southeast Asia and
in Africa, state-like political entities also existed. In all
of these places, and in Europe before the mid-1600s,
rulers held sway over a people, but there was no collec-
tive agreement among rulers about how territory would
be organized or what rulers could do within their respec-
tive domains.
The European state idea deserves particular atten-
tion because it most infl uenced the development of
the modern state system. We can see traces of this state
idea more than two millennia ago near the southeastern
shores of the Mediterranean Sea, where distinct kingdoms
emerged within discrete territories. Greek philosophy on
governance and aspects of Ancient Greece and Rome play
parts in the modern state idea. Political geographer Rhys
Jones studied state formation in the United Kingdom
during the European Middle Ages. He found the fi rst
states in Wales were small in size but had the attributes of
the modern state. In the late Middle Ages, powerful rul-
ers constructed more sizable states in what are now the
United Kingdom, France, and Spain. We cannot trace a
clear evolution in the European state idea, but we can see
aspects of the modern state in many places and at many
points in European history.
By the early seventeenth century, states including
the Republic of Venice, Brandenburg, the Papal States
of central Italy, the Kingdom of Hungary, and several
Nations
The popular media and press often use the words
nation
,
state
, and
country
interchangeably. Political geographers
use
state
and
country
interchangeably (often preferring
state), but the word
nation
is distinct. State is a legal term
in international law, and the international political com-
munity has some agreement about what this term means.
Nation
, on the other hand, is a culturally defi ned term, and
