The nation-state as container?

The traditional nation-state of the previous century has been characterized as a “container” where political, economic, and social relationships were geographically confined (Agnew and Corbridge 1995). During the so-called “golden age” of the nation-state in the 1950s and 1960s (Leibfried and Zürn 2005), such national containers were thick-walled and their societies were relatively homogeneous and isolated from each other. Giddens (1990: 14) even makes seclusion a trademark of modern national formations: “Modern societies (nation-states), in some respects at any rate, have a clearly defined boundedness. [. . .] Virtually no pre-modern societies were as clearly bounded as modern nation-states.”