Sovereignty + Nation-State

Question 1

Main points:

Answer 1

• Transnational flows pre - exist the nation-state and have shaped it
• The nation - state is often a violent project aimed at reducing the world into the ‘national’ and the ‘international’ (homogeneity not natural)
• Nation - state formation is also a project aimed at forgetting the transnational nature of world
  politics

Question 2

State def (Michael Mann)

Answer 2

1. A set of institutions and their related personnel
2. A degree of centrality, with political decisions emanating from this centre point
3. A defined boundary that demarcates the territorial limits of the state
4. A monopoly of coercive power and law - making ability

Question 3

Nation Def (Adam smith)

Answer 3

a ‘named human population sharing
an historic territory, common myths and
historical memories, a mass, public
culture, a common economy and
common legal rights and duties for all
members’.

Question 4

Formation of States

Answer 4

1. People and institutions before the nation - state
   a.Political institutions
   b. Communities
2. Why did states appear?
   a. Extracting resources for war (taxes, money: needed to know where the peasant are and who they are)
   b. Bureaucracies and political institutions (made to do the above) Infrastructural power of
   the state.
3. Why did territorial states appear?
   a. City states (like Venice, very powerful and good because in the city you had merchants, artisans, people who produced wealth), you have the money but you don’t have the soldiers
   b. Empires (had a lot of people & soldiers, but didn’t have immense wealth produced by economic activity)
   c. Territorial states (good combination of both)

Question 5

Emergence of Nation-States & Territorial

Answer 5

1. The myth of Westphalia

Westphalia:
- A European developed principle that now defines global standards in international law that each state has exclusive sovereignty over its territory. (myth)

• “Cuius Regio Eius
  Religio” (Whose
  realm, his religion)

2. Permanence of transnational processes:
   
   • Transnational elites were connected to each other.
   • Colonial domination - transnational project of exercising coercion outside of the nation-state
   • Circulation of people: People moved to countrysides from cities & vice versa
3. Violent territorialisation:
   
   • homogenization of nations: fit in 1 nation, cutting transnational ties
   • The invention of the passport
   • The nationalization of the minds: forget/ignore bad history: genocides.

Question 6

Sovereignty def:

Answer 6

1. domestic sovereignty – actual control over a state exercised by an authority organized within this state
2. interdependence sovereignty – actual control of movement across state’s borders, assuming the borders exist
3. international legal sovereignty – formal recognition by other sovereign states
4. Westphalian sovereignty – lack of other authority over state other than the domestic authority (examples of such other authorities could be a non-domestic church, a non- domestic political organization, or any other external agent).

Question 7

Reading - Methodological Nationalism

Answer 7

• Naturalization of the nation-state by social sciences
• Countries are the natural units for comparative studies, equate society with
  the nation state and conflate national interests with the purposes of social
  sciences.
• Methodological nationalism reflects and reinforces the identification that
  many scholars maintain with their own nation-states

Question 8

Reading - 3 variants:

Answer 8

• Ignoring or disregarding importance of
  nationalism
• Naturalization: taking for granted the
  boundaries of the nation-state define the
  units of analysis
• Territorial limitation: confining the study
  of social processes to the territory of the
  nation-state

Question 9

Reading - Why do the social sciences ignore nationalism?

Answer 9

Marx, Durkheim and Weber believed in power of modernization in reducing
nationalism

Question 10

3 phases of nation- building

Answer 10

1. Pre-war era = States engaged in forms of long distance nationalism towards their diasporas
   a. 2 trends: Nation state building & Intensive globalization
   b. Imperialism
   c. Emergence of racial notions of ‘the people’: nationalism and racism
   d. Long distance nationalism
   e. Grounded in scientific theories
2. End of the free movement of labour
   - Closing borders, inability to migrate
   - WW1: created and exacerbated national sentiment
   - More border policing
   - Migrant identities as a security threat
3. The cold war; Welfare capitalism increased the national feeling

     - Decolonization: growth of nationalism
     - Development of welfare capitalism
     - Tighter policing of borders and migration: Refugees/Guest workers

Question 11

Reading - Conclusion

Answer 11

• We should recover the history of transnationalism.
• We should not fall into the opposite idea of thinking that the nation state is dead
• All theories highlight some aspects and hide others