ABSTRACT
Until relatively recently, the principal challenges to the United Kingdom or to any nation state came from other nation states acting and reacting in what Hans J. Morgenthau definitively described as ‘an international society of sovereign nations’.1 Of course, there were also internal challenges from secessionist or disaffected movements within the United Kingdom and elsewhere, but for several centuries the nation state existed mainly to protect its subjects or citizens from external threats and to promote social well-being within its borders. What is distinctive about contemporary circumstances at the beginning of the twenty-first century is that there are multiple challenges to nation states around the world.
