Unit 7 Study Notes.docx

Study Notes The modern state, as we understand it, grew out of the rivalry for power and wealth among the ruling dynasties of Europe from the 15th century to the 17th century. The concept of an international system dates from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia (1648) which ended the Thirty Years’ War. The...

Study Notes The modern state, as we understand it, grew out of the rivalry for power and wealth among the ruling dynasties of Europe from the 15th century to the 17th century. The concept of an international system dates from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia (1648) which ended the Thirty Years’ War. The war had decimated large sections of Europe and left no clear victor. Our modern understating of the state – for better or worse – is derived from this European experience. States The modern definition of state is based on the principles set forth in the Peace of Westphalia. Central to the definition are the concepts of: (i) legitimacy; (ii) sovereignty; and (iii) formal obligations. Legitimacy means that all states have a right to exist and that the authority of the government in that state is supreme and accepted as lawful. Sovereignty means that no higher authority than the state exists. In Max Weber’s words, the state has a “monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force.” Lastly, states have formal obligations, or expectations vis-à-vis one another. States agree to rules drawn up according to international law for declaring and fighting war, for implementing treaties, for continuing to recognize the legitimacy of governments of other states, and for exchanging and treating diplomatic representatives. The Rise of the European State A discussion of the state and its characteristics wouldn’t be complete without distinguishing between two kinds of states that will appear frequently in our discussions. The first is the nation state. The basis for dividing the world into states is that each one claims to represent a nation. By having its own state, a nation can be self-governing rather than being controlled by a foreign power. Thus, modern states are often referred to as “nation-states,” that is, sovereign states based on a people living in a country who share a sense of being members of a nation. To understand the nation-state, we need to examine the meaning of the term “nation.” The impact of the French Revolution (1789) is important here because it was based on the idea that the state is an instrument of the people – the nation – rather than the monarch; with the people having the right to overthrow rulers who do not reflect the will of the people. The second kind of state is the multinational state. As the name suggests, the population is composed of two or more ethnic groups or races. Colonialism Europe’s expansion into Asia and Africa began in the 1500s. Almost five hundred years later, it ended with startling suddenness in the decades after the Second World War. Beginning with the independence of the Indian subcontinent and its partitioning into India and Pakistan in 1947, almost all of Asia became formally independent in the late 1950s. Most of sub-Saharan Africa, beginning with the independence of the British colony of the Gold Coast (Ghana) achieved formal independence in a rush between 1957 and the mid 1960s. The remaining holdouts followed in less than two decades: the Portuguese colonies in the mid-1970s; Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1980; and Namibia (transferred to South Africa as a League mandate in 1930) in 1990. Why did a five-hundred-year process end so rapidly? As always when major epochs end suddenly, our perspective leads us to look for a wide range of reinforcing international and domestic incentives that all push in the same direction. Mobilized opposition within the colonies grew at the same time European policy makers found it increasingly difficult to build domestic coalitions that believed colonialism was legitimate and that the costs of holding on to colonies was acceptable. Conclusion The modern state emerged from early modern Europe and spread around the world over the next 500 years to the rest of the world through colonialism. By the end of the 1970s, the entire world was contained in a single system of sovereign states. Today that system is being challenged by the rise of international organizations, other non-state actors, and by the weakness of the state around the world.