ABSTRACT
Generally, within Geographical (and other) scholarship, the spatial limits of the national scale have been taken as coincident with the nation-state’s boundaries, to the point that relationships between nation-states are typically viewed as being inter-national (i.e., between national entities). The national scale, in other words, is seen to enclose the absolute spaces/ territorial expanses of a particular nation-state, even if few so-designated national territorial units really fit the strict definition of nation-states (political units consisting of an autonomous state that is populated by a “nation” fairly homogenous in terms of language, ethnicity, and history). Before considering how the national scale has been con - ceptualized, therefore, it is important to explore what we mean by a state. In this regard, Tilly (1990: 1), noting that they have existed for about 8,000 years, has defined states as “coercion-wielding organizations that are distinct from households and kinship groups and [which] exercise clear priority in some respects over all other organizations within substantial territories.” It is significant, however, that at about the same time that recognizable states were beginning to emerge so, too, were cities. Indeed, for several millennia many of the states as defined above
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focused upon some religious point of importance) which controlled a surrounding hinterland from which tribute was extracted (though see Hansen 1995 on problems of theorizing the city-state, at least in the Greek context). In fact, Tilly has argued (p. 2), “[t]hrough most of history, national states – states governing multiple contiguous regions and their cities by means of centralized, differentiated, and autonomous structures – have appeared only rarely . . . [and m]ost states have been non-national: empires, city-states, or something else.” Only in the past few centuries, he averred (p. 3), “have national states mapped most of the world into their own mutually exclusive territories, including colonies.” Consequently, although the nation-state’s solidification as a political entity is typically seen to have begun with the 1648 signing of the Peace of Westphalia (notwithstanding the fact that entities with many of the characteristics of nation-states identified by Tilly existed prior to 1648, as in the case of the Meso-American Tarascan state (Pollard 1993)), it is really only since the end of World War II that “almost the entire world [has] come to be occupied by nominally independent states whose rulers recognize, more or less, each other’s existence and right to exist.” Nation-states as exclusive controllers of con tiguous territory consisting of multiple cities and extending beyond the immediate hinterland of a capital city appear to be fairly recent inventions. Never - theless, in terms of how the national scale has been conceptualized, it is this vision of the state as nation-state, rather than as city-state or as empire, that has dominated geographical scholarship.
