ABSTRACT
Even so, political negotiations for the establishment of legitimate nation-states were difficult because state membership was hard to define. Definitions could include the possession of a particular language or adherence to a particular religion, categories over which individuals had some degree of choice rather than something that was attached to them at birth. It is a useful pedagogic device when conceptualising nation building in this early period to see the process as a homogenisation of categories like religion and language and the elimination (or at least the marginalisation) of exceptions to these larger patterns. Simultaneously state provision was also made uniform across the space to which the state laid claim. In this way the idea of national citizenship was born so that, for example, any French citizen could expect to receive the same treatment from the state, at the hands of the law for instance, as the rest of his compatriots. This would be true wherever in the Republic they ended up, providing that the state’s authority was acknowledged in some categorical way. Alongside the homogenising requirements made by states of its citizens, other systems were also unified. Famously in France, these
The state is one of the key concepts in political science. Different political belief-systems would agree that the state is that set of insti-
tutions that has the authority to make and administer the rules that govern society within a defined territory – underlining the idea’s spatiality. However, there would be violent disagreement about what state functions should be discharged in pursuit of the preferred state form.
