ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how states emerged in Europe and formed an interstate system that came to dominate world affairs. It describes the birth and evolution of the territorial state, and discusses how these leviathans were transformed from the personal property of kings into communities owned by citizens. The chapter describes how nationalism intensified during and after the French Revolution, and how state and nation became linked. The globalization of the interstate system reflected the onset of Europe’s global primacy and remained largely unchanged until the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Europe’s medieval system evolved slowly under the influence of social and economic change. Clashes between Muslims and Western Europeans also resumed, especially during Europe’s crusades to regain the Holy Land for Christianity. Europe’s state system, however, was the scene of two great twentieth-century cataclysmic world wars, and these persuaded many people, especially liberals, that the state system was no longer viable.
