State Formation Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Inheritor of the ancient Greek concept of politeia (polity), the state in Europe emerged gradually, to varying degrees and in response to various dynamics, from around the twelfth century until the end of the eighteenth century. More concretely, the period of 1485 to 1789 saw the building of most modern European nation-states. According to social scientist Stein Rokkan, the second phase of nation-building, the subsequent processes of mass politics, and the construction of the welfare state completed with early state formation the main four-phase process of political development in contemporary Europe.

The development of the modern state as a national state, or nation-state, gave rise to the idea that the territorial boundaries of the polity also represent the boundaries of a nation or a people. The concept of nation is implicit in many of the characteristics of the state, including its territorial boundedness and the status of citizenship conferred on its members. The emotional force of nationhood, and the solidarity and mutual belonging it engenders, also serve political purposes. The idea that the state represents a people sharing a common identity and a set of civic values enhances its legitimacy, fosters citizens’ participation in the democratic process, and underpins much of the discourse used to justify public policy-making and governmental action.

According to Max Weber, the modern state embodies the legal order of a given territory and exercises the monopoly of the legitimate use of force. As a political system (politischer Verband), the state has traditionally been regarded as an organization structured in a hierarchical manner aiming at maintaining civic order in a defined territorial context. Its rational-legal legitimacy is greatly dependent on the effective enforcement of the rule of the law to all inhabitants within a territorially delimited area. This was meant to be achieved by depersonalizing state authority from that of the rulers and by implementing abstract rights and duties not based on historical prerogatives and privileges.

As a result of diverse historical developments of state formation, two broad models can be identified: (1) unitary, in which (a) sovereign political power is undivided and rests on an organic core of governmental responsibilities and (b) executive, legislative, and judiciary operate on a state basis with some delegation of administrative functions to subnational agencies or bodies and (2) plural (or compound), in which (a) territorial power is distributed by consent among the different layers of government and (b) central, meso, and local government can implement policies according to their own jurisdictions. In general terms, the unitary-plural typology finds expression in two corresponding systems of government: centralized, where the loci of decision making are concentrated in one core, and decentralized, with a dispersion of power throughout distinct layers of government.

Among the various influential schools of social thought, functional diffusionism has persistently conveyed the idea that internal territorial differences within states would disappear with the extension of liberal democracy and industrial capitalism. Accordingly, the processes of periphery migrations into the urbanized core areas would eliminate the old local ascribing identities in favor of new associative links of a functional nature. The refutation of these theoretical assumptions by historical events has given way to new approaches, among which neoinstitutionalism underlines the role of state institutions in shaping the preferences and objectives of social actors in their decision-making processes. It is argued also that, as a consequence of state formation, institutions highly condition the outcomes of such political decisions with the establishment of the game rules of power and influence.

At the turn of the millennium, the modern state is challenged from above by the forces of globalization of the world economy, the mobility of people and capital, and the rise of many international institutions. Globalization has meant a transfer of authority and power from the nation-states to the markets. The very patterns of economic competition are to comply with the new rules of global markets and the strategies of transnational corporations. From below, the reassertion of territorial minorities demanding increased autonomy has put further stress on sovereign states, and in some cases they defy the state with the option of “exit” rather than that of “voice.” The state also is challenged internally by the advance of individualized social relations and by a declining confidence in and engagement with the formal political process. All things considered, the state continues to be a central concept in the study of politics and a major actor in the power relations at the international level.

Bibliography:

Flora, Peter, ed. State Formation, Nation-building, and Mass Politics in Europe: The Theory of Stein Rokkan. With Stein Kuhnle and Derek Urwin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Hirschman, Albert O. Exit,Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970.
Poggi, Gianfranco. The Development of the Modern State. London: Hutchinson, 1978.
Tilly, Charles, ed. The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975.
Weber, Max. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947.

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