ABSTRACT
After 1960, the UN year of decolonization, the world security order built upon the idea of a universal expansion of the nation-state model. Global relations among nation states rendered the international system more predictable and, for that reason, easier to manage. The nation-state paradigm offered a form of social organization that was rational and better suited to the needs of modern society than any other model known in the past. The nation state offered better prospects for individual and collective development than the multi-ethnic empires, which had been the norm in the Christian-Muslim frontier zone for millennia. Yet the nation state never became a unique building block in international relations. The contemporary world, with its interspersed cultures and communities, consists of a combination of various social and cultural cleavages, where the relations among large, loosely constituted cross-border cultural communities are also ones of power. In this sense, the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 on the symbols of military and financial might in the United States of America merely exposed a dynamic that had been present beneath the surface of the nation-state system for decades. The sudden revelation of the danger of non-state, Islamist organizations showed that the nation state should not be taken as an unquestionable principle that both determines the organization of world society and functions as the only foundation of international security.
