Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Westphalia the political map of Europe was a
complex amalgam of city-states, commonwealths,
empires and kingdoms, which often had ill-defined
and highly contested boundaries. The key outcome
of the Peace of Westphalia was to define the
principle of the sovereign state. A sovereign state
is a political community with a clearly demarcated
territory, which has the ability to determine its own
internal affairs. While the nature and form of the
sovereign state system has been through many
forms since the Treaties of Westphalia, it has
become the dominant way of organizing political
life throughout the world.
series of specialized
institutions
(including parlia-
ments, courts and government departments), and
have control over the legitimate use of force (in the
forms of the military and police authorities). While
definitions like the one provided by Mann are
helpful in enabling us to identify nation states and
differentiate them from other forms of political
institution, they can be misleading. While nation
states are territorial entities, few would claim that
their power stops at the borders' edge. In a related
sense, while nation states are clearly defined by a
set of identifiable central institutions, it is very
simplistic to believe that power simply radiates out
from these points to uniformly affect what occurs
within a given national territory (Allen, 2003).
Finally, while such definitions may tell us what
nation states are, they actually reveal very little
about the underlying purposes of state systems
(for a more detailed overview of these arguments
see Whitehead, 2008).
The work of the French philosopher Michel
Foucault casts light on the deeper purposes of
the modern state. According to Foucault, the con-
temporary role of the nation state is closely tied
to the practices of
government
. For Foucault,
governing involves a sense of care within the
operation of states; a care that is directed at
national populations, and seeks to ensure that
society is ordered in such a way that it can func-
tion effectively in relation to the economic pro-
duction of wealth (Foucault, 2007 [2004]). It is
important to note that the practices of govern-
ing identified by Foucault predate the formation
of nation states in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries (Foucault actually traces such systems of
collective care back to the early nomadic Hebrew
nation). It is also clear that governing has not
always been the primary function of the nation
state (early state systems were largely about
securing the absolute power of a sovereign over
their territory). Crucially, however, the idea of
governing has become the organizing principle
behind which nation states have emerged and
gained support and legitimacy. Such forms of
governing can been seen in fields as diverse as the
The evolution of the nation
state system in Europe
An interesting way of observing the
evolving and ever-changing nation state
system in Europe is to watch the graphic
Political Borders of Europe from 1519 to
2006, which can be found on YouTube.
Before moving on to consider the relationship
between states and the environment, it is impor-
tant to provide some more detailed definitions of
precisely what the modern nation state is and
does. To these ends, the sociologist and historian
Michael Mann (1984: 185) defines the nation
state as:
[a] differentiated set of institutions and
personnel embodying centrality in the sense
that political relations radiate outwards from
a centre to cover a territorially demarcated
area over which it exercises a monopoly of
authoritative rule-making, backed up by a
monopoly of the means of physical violence.
In Mann's definition, the idea of the nation state
as a
territorial
entity is accompanied by an
appreciation of the ways in which states tend to
centralize
power within a series of prominent
locations (such as capital cities), be made up of
