Transnational & Nation-State Entities

Transnational & Nation-State Entities

Transnational & Nation-State Entities

Introduction

The nation-state is a vital component of global society. Every square mile of the globe, except the open oceans and Antarctica, falls within the exclusive domain of one nation-state or another. The nation-state as a form of governance is so ubiquitous that its existence taken for granted, rarely noticed, even by scholars of international relations. The nation-state, or something like it, is generally assumed to have always existed and a universal, immanent part of human nature. What is not recognized is that the present dominance and exclusiveness of the nation-state as a form of governance is a recent, historical development and produced by the peculiar political and military conditions prevailing on the continent of Europe in the first centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire. After its emergence in Europe, Europeans exported the idea of the state to the rest of the globe to the detriment of all other forms of governance.Nation

Definitions of the nation or nationality rely either upon objective or subjective criteria, or on some combination of the two. Most objective definitions of nationality rely on the commonality of some trait among members of a group. Shared language, religion, ethnicity (common descent) and culture have all been used as criteria for defining nations. A casual examination of the history of internal differentiation indicates that these factors generally reinforce each other in the determination of a nationality. Certain nationalities, such as the Croats, are now defined as distinct from Serbs almost exclusively on the basis of religious differences. (Archick, 2003)State

'State', though a very commonly-used word in the political vocabulary, is surprisingly opaque. Even the derivation of the term is obscure, and in many cultures (including prehistoric medieval European society, to take one example) it would be hard to specify what word should be translated as 'state'. It is easier to define it negatively; the state is, for example, not equivalent to the only government. Governments come and go, at least in democracies, without changing the state.Nation-state

The fact that modern democracy is specifically a democracy of the nation-state points to one basis of the conflict between fundamentalism and democracy. Islamic fundamentalists not only reject democracy as an imported system but also dismiss the nation-state as a means employed by the West, the enemy of Islam, to divide the community of all Muslims into numerous entities, allegedly to facilitate Western dominance over the Islamic religion. In the lands of Islam, the nation-state was not an indigenous phenomenon. It imposed from the outside after the caliphate (the ruler ship of Islam) abolished by Kemal Ataturk in 1924 and it was a product of the expansion of the international system of nation-states. For this reason, modern democracy, as associated with the secular nation-state, is not found in Islamic or other non-Western countries. In fact, the Middle Eastern nation-states, like most nation-states in Asia and Africa, are small states (states with formal sovereignty but no real statehood).

Because many of these nominal nation-states, such as Algeria, have failed to cope with urgent developmental tasks, crises have arisen in which ...