Louis XI, creator of the State-nation
With leaving a One hundred year old War devastator, Louis XI (1461-1483) created the first modern State-nation, by defying the feudal lords who controlled the kingdom.
The term of “State” goes back with cité Greek and the Roman Empire, but it is in XVIe century, when the medieval company disappeared, that the term takes its current resonance, with the appearance of centralizing powers, attached to a population, limited by borders, opposed to the ambitions feudal and partisanes, and disengaged from the old Christian dream of universal pontifical sovereignty.
Until the XVIIIe century, the State is however still only the property of the sovereign of divine right and its power is identified with that of the monarch. With the Age of Enlightenment, the French revolution, the consolidation of the borders external and dislocation of the interior barriers, the term of State enters the political vocabulary and is identified with the idea of nation.
The “principle of nationalities”
The phenomenon of nationalism is closely related to the nature of the modern State: unlike the great empires at agrarian base, which were organized like mosaics and which aimed to the domination but not to the homogenization of their constitutive groups, the State-nations of the industrial era rest on the superposition of territorial sovereignty and the cultural homogeneity. Already to the XIX E century, in accordance with the model propagated by the French revolution, the State had been regarded as the only form of legitimate political existence of a community practitioner the same religion and/or the same language; as the “principle of nationalities”, such as it was recommended then, implied as all the individuals of the same nationality were to live in the same State, other than any individual of another nationality. In addition, the fact that neither the concept of “people” nor that of “nation” have universally allowed definitions hardly weakened but rather facilitated the emergence of the national claims, in particular in Latin America, following the decolonization, and within Russia, of Austria-Hungary and Turkey, the three great empires multinational where the national claims of the Poles will continue, of Serb and of the Greeks.
By successive waves - to the XIX E century, the shortly after the Second world war, then at the end of the cold war - the State-nation became the political form most widespread: in testify creation, in 1830, of Belgium, the restoration of the independence of China, in 1949, as well as the unification of Germany, in 1870, and its reunification, in 1990. But this research of the unification involves the multiplication of conflicts and wars started by minorities, such as the Basques in Spain or the Tamils in Sri Lanka, which want to reach the statute of State-nation.
The States are different according to their cohesion. If China or Germany rests on relatively homogeneous thousand-year-old civilizations, the Belgian State seems threatened of bursting, fault of agreement between the Walloons and the Flemings, who have the same religion but different languages. That seems to show that the force or the stability of political constructions is not mechanically related to the economic or social degree of development, but depend rather on cultural factors. Thus, one could observe that the nationalism of an ethnicity involved the nationalist movement of other minorities within the same State (the Moslem Abkhazians within Georgia adopted the same attitude as the Georgians compared to the USSR). The conflicts take a all the more dramatic turn as a minority group can be the branch of a majority group in a Neighboring state, which gives its support to him (for example, Sudètes in Czechoslovakia, close to Germany de Hitler; or, after the bursting of Yugoslavia, the Serb ones become minority within Croatia and wanting to set up in State or wishing to join Serbia). Contrary, the minority groups which do not profit from external supports or do not manage to take a lead in the international scene have few chances to reach an official existence. In Africa, where national cuttings result from the colonial borders, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) adopted the principle of the intangibility of the borders, but that does not discourage the attempts at secession.
Sovereignty and international law
Born in Europe absolutist from the XVI E and XVII E centuries and become a model universally adopted starting from the XIX E century, the State-nation, however powerful it is, is however amputee many prerogatives. In fact, the technical, economic and social changes of the modern world make illusory or impossible an absolute territorial sovereignty: flows - information, raw materials, currencies and people - are increasingly international and the universalization of the exchanges involves the permeability of the borders. Also the concept of border official it became quite relative after the nuclear catastrophe of Tchernobyl and at the time of satellites of télévison.
In the same way, the concept of sovereignty was relativized because of the interdependences which bind the nation's economies in a world system where the course of the currencies depends on the global market. Creation, in 1992, with a treaty of single European market between Mexico, the United States and Canada (Alena) reinforces this tendency, in the manner of the Treaty of Rome, whose signature, in 1957, marked the beginning of the Common Market in Europe. Conversely, the populations, worry to see itself diluting in too vast geopolitical units, tend to fold up itself on more reduced territorial units (provinces, areas), which offer more concrete reference marks in the management of the daily newspaper.
A new concept of the State-nation, narrowly subjected to the international law, seems to be essential since the beginning of the years 1990. Inaugurated the shortly after the Second world war, in particular by the creation of the United Nations, it had been abandoned in the context of the cold war, where the international relations were organized according to a bipolar logic, opposing two camps directed by two super-States, the USSR and the United States. It was necessary to await the end of European Communism to lay down new rules implying a certain limitation of national sovereignty. Thus, the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq (two Member States of UNO) involved the military intervention of a coalition placed under the authority of UNO, and this reinforcement of the international organization resulted in conferring to him a right of humane intervention, in particular in favor of the Kurds of Iraq, the Croats and the Bosnians of ex-Yugoslavia, and the population of Somalia, devastated by the civil war.
The principle of relativization of the sovereignty of the States results in the fact that the international community is decided not to remain inert more if a State would be on the point of depriving its citizens of all their rights. If this principle between really into force, the national official apparatus will have to meet supranational requirements: it is the direction of the provisions provided for in the treaty of European Union in 1992, and which provides the foundations of a foreign politics and a defense communes. Thus, in accordance with the definition that Max Weber gave some, the State remains an institution which holds the monopoly of legitimate violence on a given territory, but henceforth it needs to be legitimated by the international institutions and transetatic.
The traditional visions of the State seem shaken because of evolution of the international relations and the internal organization of the various States. Actually, the right of interference humane as well as the strengthening of the role of the regulating international authorities could announce one period of decline of the State, or at least an inflecting of the traditional design according to which its sovereignty is founded on its power.