Why is the entire world, despite inhabiting vastly different societies and cultures, divided into conceptually same polities – states, defined by common elements, such as a border and a government that regulates society in a given territory? What are the explanations for this universality?
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neotribalism
Neotribalism, the theory that humans are evolved to live in tribes and do so even in today’s modern world.
This goes on to theorize that humans will form the highest tribal order possible vs. confrontation. So, for example, if aliens invaded, the entire world would unite into a tribe. Being that hasn’t happened, the next level of confrontation is countries. And so on.
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Anywhere that wasn’t organized as a nation state got colonized by somewhere that was, so no alternatives remain.
This is essentially what the book The Dawn of Everything by anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow is about: in prehistory there were a variety of ways that humans were organized and now we can’t even imagine an alternative to totalizing nation states.
The history of Thailand is illustrative: they are the only country in Asia that wasn’t colonized or heavily dominated by colonizers, because King Rama IV and Rama V turned the country into something like a European nation state that was able to negotiate independence in terms the Europeans understood.
That being said, the aboriginal title court cases of Johnson v McIntosh in the US, Calder v British Columbia in Canada, and Mabo v Queensland in Australia show that the organization of First Nations people was at least similar enough to a nation state to be recognized under common law (albeit hundreds of years too late for their independence).
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It actually isn’t. History shows that we went from stateless societies (clans, chiefdoms, city states, etc) to centralized nation-states as we know them today over time, and states emerged in some places but not necessarily others.
Tilly (1985) argued that in Europe, states developed because rulers of pre-state formations (like chiefdoms, feudal lords, city states, religious territories, etc) needed to extract resources to fight wars and get more populations and land under their control. Over time, this required creating better tax systems, stronger bureaucracies, and more institutional control to raise money to fight wars and recruit loyal soldiers, leading to centralized states. So there was a transition from pre-state formations with fuzzy, overlapping borders, fragmented authority, and multiple allegiances among the populace to the idea that each ruler has authority over their territory. The principles of non-interference and territorial sovereignty were formalized after the Thirty Years War in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), leading European rulers to develop more and more methods to see, control, and centralize their power and territory.
There were also other reasons states developed and became institutionalized: they could do things that individuals or simply self-interested private actors couldn’t or wouldn’t do on their own. In exchange for the populace and local elites giving states power and paying taxes to them, states could keep them safe from violence from both individuals and other states (like a mafia or protection racket–Olson 2000). They could also provide and enforce laws to allow trade and property rights, manage disputes, and build infrastructure (Mann 1984; North and Weingast 1989), which would allow both the people and the state itself to become more prosperous.
Other scholars add to this by arguing that modern states are also “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983), made possible by things like standard languages, myths, and technologies of communication. So in addition to the kind of coercion or elite bargains involved in the formation of states (like Tilly, Olson, etc. describe), you need cultural glue for people to emotionally accept and internalize those states and be loyal to people they might never meet in person and to the abstract idea of “nation.” So things like the rise of standardized education, printing press, etc. also played an important historical role in institutionalizing the modern state.
This model of the state was exported globally via colonialism, where European empires drew borders arbitrarily to divide up territory in Asia and Africa and replaced fluid, overlapping local authority structures with centralized colonial administrations (Tilly 1985). After decolonization, these territories were bound by the same principles of territorial integrity and sovereignty that had emerged originally in the Westphalia treaty.
So did states always exist? No. And did they emerge everywhere? Also no. In fact, some researchers have studied places where states didn’t emerge to understand the conditions under which they do and to understand why some modern states are strong but others are weak. Herbst (2000) studied Africa’s failures in state-building and found that, in precolonial times, the leaders of tribes, chiefdoms, etc. in Africa didn’t have the same pressure to fight wars, raise revenue, and centralize power that Europe did. Africa had low population density and difficult terrain, which made land conquests and control over remote regions difficult and not very rewarding, so there was less incentive to centralize power, fight wars, or consolidate control over territories and populations. Then during colonial rule, the European powers had incentives to extract resources, but not to invest in infrastructure or institution-building beyond that, so after independence, many African states inherited weak state institutions, artificial or contentious borders, and fragmented societies. So you can see that the state as we know it today is definitely a product of historical processes and conditions, and this model doesn’t necessarily align well with local realities everywhere in the world.
Although disputed, the widely taught reason is that the system we now live under resulted from the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648.
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