historical-constructivist approach shows that war has been central to the formation of the nation-state. Military activity and the formation of the nation-state have been inextricably linked. Selection by competition, especially in war fighting, gave rise to the modern nation-state, although this should not be taken to mean that the process was determined by some transcendent logic. The organizational and technological innovations in warfare during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries gave a war-making advantage to the form of politico-military rule that had access to large volumes of men (for soldiers) and capital (money to pay, equip, and arm them) from their own subject populations. Competitive advantage also came to those politico-military forms of rule that were able to construct a coherent collective identity (i.e., a sense of nationhood) that overrode regional, class, and tribal loyalties, which in turn allowed entire societies to be mobilized for war. Historical-constructivism shows that the form of politico-military rule that was the most efficient at mobilizing the men, money, and matériel for war was hierarchically organized. As we will show below, from the fifteenth century onward, the hierarchical authority over a sizable demarcated territory exercised by kings gave European monarchies a strong competitive advantage over rival forms of politico-military rule such as city-states and empires, which were eventually eliminated from the system as independent actors. The new focus on society was connected to the extension of U.S. power after World War II. Political scientists in the United States sought to generalize the Western liberal democratic model of state and society, especially the U.S. version, to newly independent states. In this way, new states could be more easily incorporated into a world order Throughout the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century the state received much scholarly attention. It was something that needed to be explained by political scientists who, at that time, were professors of law, history, and philosophy. Their understanding of the state was based on its formal-legal structures, that is, on constitutions, governmental structures, and lawmaking, especially among the European democracies. After World War II, especially among U.S. academics, scholarly attention shifted away from the formal-legal structures of the state to the “informal” politics within “society,” because formal-legal studies were thought to be too legalistic and too narrowly focused on state structures. The new focus, which can be called pluralism, sought out the ways in which the diversity of social interests, organized into political parties and pressure groups, produced public policy. Pluralists assumed that society was separate from and prior to the state. The state did what the groups in society wanted or pressured it to do. In short, politics was to be explained by what happened in society and the state was seen as being little more than one social group among the many that existed. The nationstate is a type of politico-military rule that, first, has a distinct geographically defined territory over which it exercises jurisdiction; second, has sovereignty over its territory, which means that its jurisdiction is theoretically exclusive of outside interference by other nation-states or entities; third, it has a government made up of public offices and roles that control and administer the territory and population subject to the state’s jurisdiction; fourth, it has fixed boundaries marked on the ground by entry and exit points and, in some cases, by fences patrolled by border guards and armies; fifth, its government claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical coercion over its population; sixth, its population manifests, to a greater or lesser degree, a sense of national identity; and, seventh, it can rely, to a greater or lesser degree, on the obedience and loyalty of its inhabitants
Posted on: Thu, 07 Aug 2014 23:19:20 +0000
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