Nation-State Politics

 

Nation-State Politics

Nation-state, a territorially bounded sovereign   polity i.e., a state   that is ruled in the name of a community.    of citizens who identify themselves as a nation. The legitimacy of a nation-state’s rule over a territory and over the population   inhabiting it stems from the right of a core national group within the state (which may include all or only some of its citizens) to self-determination. Members of the core national group see the state as belonging to them and consider the approximate territory of the state to be their homeland.   Accordingly, they demand that other groups, both within and outside the state, recognize and respect their control over the state. As the American sociologist Rogers Brubaker put it in Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (1996), nation-states are “states of and for particular nations.”

As a political model, the nation-state fuses two principles: the principle of state sovereignty,  first articulated   in the Peace of Westphalia  (1648), which recognizes   the right of states to govern their territories without external interference; and the principle of national sovereignty, which recognizes the right of national communities to govern themselves. National sovereignty in turn is based on the moral-philosophical principle of popular sovereignty, according to which states belong to their peoples. The latter principle implies that legitimate rule of a state requires some sort of consent by the people. That requirement does not mean, however, that all nation-states are democratic. Indeed, many authoritarian rulers have presented themselves—both to the outside world of states and internally to the people under their rule—as ruling in the name of a sovereign nation.