ABSTRACT

The rise of the modern state involved ‘a revolution in loyalties’ in which an ‘inner circle of loyalty expanded’ and ‘an outer circle of loyalty shrank’. Loyalties to the sovereign state replaced the inner web of loyalties to an ‘immediate feudal superior’ and the outer web of ‘customary religious obedience to the Church under the Pope’ (Wight 1978: 25). As the twentieth century drew to a close, the subnational revolt, the internationalization of decision making and emergent transnational loyalties in Western Europe and its environs suggested that the processes that created and sustained sovereign states in this region were being reversed. The implications for social and political theory are becoming clearer. It is well known that the transformation of political community in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced the modern vocabulary of the sovereign state. The conjunction of forces transforming contemporary Europe suggests that the time is ripe to engineer a further revolution in political thought or to complete the Copernican Revolution in political thinking, which was initiated by Kant more than two centuries ago (Gallie 1978). What is needed are appropriate visions of the post-Westphalian state.