Nation state

• 1. Introduction

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  The nation state is the political architecture most of us take for granted. We carry passports stamped with its name, sing its anthem, and feel its pull when a national team wins. Yet scholars have spent centuries arguing about whether the nation state is a natural growth rooted in blood and soil or a political construction assembled by governments for their own purposes.

  The tension at the heart of this debate goes like this: did nations exist first, generating states to protect them, or did states come first, manufacturing nations to justify themselves? Historians and scholars of nationalism studies are divided. But they are agreed on one thing: the nineteenth century, after the age of revolutions, was the key period when the nation state rose as the dominant form of political organisation. What drove that rise, what violence it unleashed, and whether it is already fading - those are the threads this documentary pulls.

• 2. A Disputed Origin

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  Steven Weber, David Woodward, Michel Foucault, and Jeremy Black have all advanced the same provocative hypothesis: the nation state was not invented. Nobody sat down and designed it. Instead, it was an inadvertent by-product of fifteenth-century intellectual discoveries in political economy, capitalism, mercantilism, and geography combined with cartography and advances in map-making technologies. The state, on this reading, slipped into existence through the back door of commerce and navigation.

  Others, known in the literature as primordialists, push back. For them, the nation came first - a community sharing blood, language, and memory - and nationalist movements arose demanding a state to match. The state was the reward, not the origin.

  Adrian Hastings pushed the question of origins even further back, arguing that ancient Israel as depicted in the Hebrew Bible gave the world the model of nationhood and even nation-statehood. After the fall of Jerusalem, Hastings noted, the Jewish people lost state status for nearly two millennia while still preserving a distinct national identity, until what he called the more inevitable rise of Zionism in modern times.

  Eric Hobsbawm offered a cooler, more structural account for France. He argued that the establishment of a French nation was not the result of French nationalism, which would not emerge until the end of the nineteenth century, but rather the policies implemented by pre-existing French states. At the time of the French Revolution, only half of the French people spoke any French at all, and only a quarter spoke the version found in literature and places of learning. The Italian situation was even more stark: the number of Italian speakers in Italy was even lower at the time of Italian unification.

• 3. Westphalia and Its Limits

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  The year 1648 is the conventional starting gun for the modern state system. The Treaty of Westphalia ended decades of European war and established what scholars call the Westphalian system: clearly defined, centrally controlled, independent entities that recognise each other's sovereignty and territory. The balance of power that characterised this system depended on those entities having firm, legible borders.

  The Westphalian system did not create the nation state; it created the conditions in which the nation state could flourish. An entity qualifies for the Westphalian order by assuming there is no disputed territory - a condition most states have never fully met.

  Before Europe's Westphalian settlement, a comparable order had already existed in East Asia. In 1005, the Treaty of Chanyuan established defined national borders between China's Song dynasty and the semi-nomadic Liao dynasty. Like the Westphalian peace treaties, the Chanyuan system designated formal frontiers between independent regimes. That East Asian system was copied and developed in the following centuries until the establishment of the pan-Eurasian Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century effectively dissolved it.

  Philosophically, the nation state received its clearest intellectual backing during the era of Romanticism. Johann Gottlieb Fichte's conception of the Volk framed the nation as the natural expression of a people. Later, Ernest Renan offered a competing view. By the end of the nineteenth century, the increasing emphasis on ethnic and racial origins had pulled the nation-state concept toward territory defined by blood, a trajectory that would have catastrophic results in the twentieth century.

• 4. What Nation States Actually Do

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  "Legitimate states that govern effectively and dynamic industrial economies are widely regarded today as the defining characteristics of a modern nation-state." That summary, written in 2004, captures the standard against which these entities are measured.

  Nation states behave differently toward their territory than dynastic monarchies did. Territory is treated as semisacred and nontransferable; no nation would swap land simply because a king's daughter married into the neighbouring dynasty. Borders, in principle, are defined by where the national group settles, though many nation states have also sought natural frontiers such as rivers and mountain ranges.

  Economically, nation states promoted unity by abolishing internal customs and tolls. Germany's Zollverein - a customs union - actually preceded formal national unification. Transport networks followed the same logic. The French rail network, with its main lines radiating from Paris to every corner of France, is often cited as a physical expression of the centralised French state, which directed its construction. National motorway networks continue that tradition, while transnational programmes such as the Trans-European Networks represent a newer layer on top.

  Culturally, the most powerful instrument was compulsory primary education. National systems of uniform schooling spread national languages and, as the source notes, often taught national history in propagandistic and mythologised versions. Language prohibitions were sometimes used to accelerate the adoption of national languages and the decline of minority languages - a list that spans Anglicisation, Francisation, Germanisation, Russification, Turkification, and many more. Where these policies worked, cultural homogeneity increased and the cultural divergence at national borders sharpened correspondingly.

• 5. The Problem of Minorities

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  Ethnic nations typically do not have open membership. The logic of national identity is necessarily exclusive: to belong to one people implies that others do not. Historical examples of groups specifically singled out as outsiders are the Roma and Jews across Europe.

  Negative responses to minorities within nation states have ranged from cultural assimilation enforced by the state, to expulsion, persecution, violence, and extermination. Violence against minorities is not always state-initiated: it can occur as mob violence, lynching, or pogroms. But nation states are responsible for some of the worst historical examples of organised violence against minorities.

  The relationship between racism and ethnic nationalism reached its most extreme expression through fascism and Nazism in the twentieth century. The 1935 Nuremberg laws defined "German" based on German ancestry, excluding all non-Germans from the Volk. In that framework, neither Jews nor the Roma were considered part of the people, and both were specifically targeted for persecution.

  Not all outcomes were extermination. The Sorbs in Germany offer a different model: for centuries they lived within German-speaking states, surrounded by a much larger ethnic German population, without any other historical territory. They are now generally considered part of the German nation, and the Federal Republic of Germany constitutionally guarantees their cultural rights. Of the thousands of ethnic and cultural minorities in nation states worldwide, only a small number have achieved that level of acceptance and legal protection.

• 6. Spain and the Catalan Case

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  After the War of the Spanish Succession, the assimilation of the Crown of Aragon by the Castilian Crown through the Decrees of Nueva Planta was the first step in the creation of the Spanish nation state. Political union came before cultural unity, and the tools for building that unity were largely coercive.

  The process began with secret instructions to the corregidores of the Catalan territory, ordering them to take the utmost care to introduce the Castilian language through the most temperate and disguised measures so that the effect is achieved without the care being noticed. By 1799, a Royal Certificate forbade anyone to represent, sing, or dance pieces that were not in Spanish.

  A survey of language usage in 1807, commissioned by Napoleon, found that except in the royal courts, Spanish was absent from everyday life in Catalonia. Catalan was taught in schools, printed and spoken not only among the lower class but also among people of first quality, in social gatherings and congresses. The language was also spoken across the Kingdom of Valencia, the islands of Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza, Sardinia, Corsica, and much of Sicily.

  In 1835, Antonio Alcalà Galiano defended in the Cortes del Estatuto Real the effort to make the Spanish nation a nation that neither is nor has been until now. In 1906, the Catalanist party Solidaritat Catalana was founded to try to mitigate what it described as economically and culturally oppressive treatment. The military press responded with the position that the Catalan problem was to be solved not by freedom but by restriction; not by palliatives and pacts, but by iron and fire.

  During the Spanish Civil War, historian Paul Preston documented in his book The Spanish Holocaust that republican prisoners identified as Catalans were executed without trial after the occupation of Lleida, and that anyone heard speaking Catalan was very likely to be arrested. Franco himself had to issue an order warning against mistakes that could later be regretted. The prohibition of using the Catalan language in state institutions such as the courts lasted until September 2023 - forty-seven years after Franco's death.

• 7. Irredentism and the Map

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  When a national group extends beyond a state's border, the political response sometimes takes the form of irredentism: demands to annex unredeemed territory and incorporate it into the nation state. Irredentist claims are usually based on the fact that an identifiable part of the national group lives across the border, but they can also reach back to claims over territory where no members of that nation live at present, citing historical habitation, shared language, cultural influence, or geographical unity.

  When a state adopts irredentist demands, the results are typically tensions with neighbours. Actual attempts at annexation are always considered a casus belli - a cause for war. Irredentist movements typically circulate maps of the claimed national territory, a greater nation state substantially larger than the existing state. These maps play a central role in their propaganda.

  Distinguishing irredentism from pan-nationalism is not always straightforward. Pan-nationalism also claims that all members of an ethnic and cultural nation belong in one specific state. But pan-nationalism is less likely to specify the nation ethnically. Variants of Pan-Germanism, for instance, had differing ideas about what constituted Greater Germany, including the term Grossdeutschland, which implied the inclusion of large Slavic minorities from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  Irredentism should not be confused with claims to overseas colonies, which are not generally considered part of the national homeland. A partial exception is French rule in Algeria, which unsuccessfully attempted to treat the colony as a full department of France.

• 8. Futures and Fault Lines

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  Samuel P. Huntington offered a counterweight to any optimism about nation states dissolving into global harmony. His theory of the clash of civilizations, first formulated in a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute and then developed in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled "The Clash of Civilizations?", argued that in the post-Cold War world the primary source of conflict would be cultural and religious identity, not ideology or economics.

  Huntington's article was a direct response to Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, which had argued that the world had reached a Hegelian end of history. Huntington expanded his thesis further in a 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

  His central claim was direct: Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

  Against Huntington stands the observation that non-state actors - international corporations and non-governmental organisations - are widely seen as eroding the economic and political power of nation states. A global political system based on international agreements and supra-national blocs has characterised the post-war era. Scholars Andreas Wimmer and Yuval Feinstein found that nation states tended to emerge when power shifts allowed nationalists to overthrow existing regimes or absorb existing administrative units - a dynamic that continues to operate in the twenty-first century, as the civil wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992-95 demonstrated.