ABSTRACT
Most of us in Northern and Western Europe take the democratic form of national government for granted. We believe the nation-state to be some kind of older historical and normative programme of political organisation. The reality is, however, that the nation-state emerges only directly in the second half of the eighteenth century, being fused out of a range of different processes. Habermas (1987) argues that a major factor here was a shift of communicative structures from a bourgeois public sphere of discussion, which laid the foundation of European democracy, to a populist nationalism. In this process ‘the state’ becomes aligned with the ‘nation’. The state is defined as a sovereign or legal form of state power, while the nation (or the people) refers to a community bound by a common heritage language and culture. In the nation-state the form of government is seen as organised for the benefit of the ‘nation’, that is the people. As Habermas (2001: 113) puts it:
It is this vision of national unity that allows the operation of state power since it becomes seen as a natural component of the sovereignty of the nation itself. And so for many years in the United Kingdom (UK) it has been possible to meld the potentially independent cultures of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland (and at one period the whole of the Island of Ireland) around a unified form of identity, Britishness.
