ABSTRACT
State formation and nation building have been political processes in the transformation of the medieval European political landscape of empires, kingdoms, principalities, cities and leagues of cities into a pluriverse of modern national states, meaning that modernity and this pluriverse of national states have become synonymous for our understanding of the structure of today's geopolitical world. However, as seen in our social-constructivist epistemological and interpretative methodological perspective (see Chapter 2, section 2.2), this picture of the world is based on the hegemonic frame of what we call the monist-identitarian nation-cum-state paradigm not only in the social sciences and humanities, but also through the spread of its underlying ideas, normative principles and institutional models all over the world, in the pursuit of colonialism and imperialism by European powers since the sixteenth century.
