ABSTRACT
There is a familiar map of Europe, containing some fifty states demarcated by national borders. These borders are, perhaps for the first time in history, largely uncontested, especially in the western side of the continent. Yet there seems little logic or reason to the distribution of states, some of which are large and some very small. Some have seemingly natural frontiers, including mountains or seas while others seem arbitrary. Some have their own languages while others share languages and some are home to more than one language. Some are based on solid national identities while others contain more than one nationality. Yet the social sciences have generally taken these as the basic units for analysis, whether in international or domestic affairs. They have used the term ‘nation-state’ in an unreflective way to encompass two quite different ideas. One is the notion that the nation corresponds with the state, so allowing us to distinguish nation-states from multinational ones. The other, common in International Relations, refers merely to the sovereign state without any reference to nationality at all; in this case it might be better to talk about the sovereign state or, if states are sovereign by definition, just to the state. In some European cultures, the identity of the nation with the state is so taken-for-granted that the two words can be used synonymously. 1 When the state was largely unchallenged as the normal form of political unit, these contradictions could pass largely unnoticed, except among the inhabitants of stateless nations. Now that the state’s hegemony is challenged from above, in the form of transnational integration, from below by new territorial movements, and laterally by the advance of the market, it is more apparent that the nation of the nation-state is rather problematic and that rather than being a single ‘thing’ it is represents a complex process of territorial bounding that varies greatly from one place and one era to another.
