Nation state

The presence of a state can encourage ethnogenesis, and a group with a pre-existing ethnic identity can influence the drawing of territorial boundaries or argue for political legitimacy.

Adrian Hastings, for instance, argued that Ancient Israel as depicted in the Hebrew Bible "gave the world the model of nationhood, and even nation-statehood"; however, after the fall of Jerusalem, the Jews lost this status for nearly two millennia, while still preserving their national identity until "the more inevitable rise of Zionism", in modern times, which sought to establish a nation-state.

The balance of power, which characterized that system, depended for its effectiveness upon clearly defined, centrally controlled, independent entities, whether empires or nation states, which recognize each other's sovereignty and territory.

[27] The nation-state received a philosophical underpinning in the era of Romanticism, at first as the "natural" expression of the individual peoples (romantic nationalism: see Johann Gottlieb Fichte's conception of the Volk, later opposed by Ernest Renan).

[30] Xue Li and Alexander Hicks links the frequency of nation-state creation to processes of diffusion that emanate from international organizations.

"Legitimate states that govern effectively and dynamic industrial economies are widely regarded today [2004] as the defining characteristics of a modern nation-state.

In 19th-century Europe, the expansion of the rail transport networks was at first largely a matter for private railway companies but gradually came under the control of the national governments.

After World War II in the Josip Broz Tito era, nationalism was appealed to for uniting South Slav peoples.

Later in the 20th century, after the break-up of the Soviet Union, leaders appealed to ancient ethnic feuds or tensions that ignited conflict between the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, as well as Bosniaks, Montenegrins and Macedonians, eventually breaking up the long collaboration of peoples.

[citation needed] The state was formed by secession from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1830, whose neutrality and integrity was protected by the Treaty of London 1839; thus, it served as a buffer state after the Napoleonic Wars between the European powers France, Prussia (after 1871 the German Empire) and the United Kingdom until World War I, when the Germans breached its neutrality.

China covers a large geographic area and uses the concept of "Zhonghua minzu" or Chinese nationality, in the sense of ethnic groups.

[57][58][59] After the dynastic union of the Catholic Monarchs in the 15th century, the Spanish Monarchy ruled over different kingdoms, each with its own cultural, linguistic and political particularities, and the kings had to swear by the Laws of each territory before the respective Parliaments.

[60][61] In fact, since the political unification of 1714, Spanish assimilation policies towards Catalan-speaking territories (Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, part of Aragon) and other national minorities, as Basques and Galicians, have been a historical constant.

"[67] From there, actions in the service of assimilation, discreet or aggressive, were continued, and reached to the last detail, such as, in 1799, the Royal Certificate forbidding anyone to "represent, sing and dance pieces that were not in Spanish.

He also indicates that Catalan is also spoken "in the Kingdom of Valencia, in the islands of Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza, Sardinia, Corsica and much of Sicily, in the Vall of Aran and Cerdaña".

One of the responses of Spanish nationalism came from the military state with statements such as that of the publication La Correspondencia militar: "The Catalan problem is not solved, well, by freedom, but by restriction; not by palliatives and pacts, but by iron and fire".

Another came from important Spanish intellectuals, such as Pio Baroja and Blasco Ibáñez, calling the Catalans "Jews", considered a serious insult at that time when racism was gaining strength.

For example, the statements of Queipo de Llano can be found in the article entitled "Against Catalonia, the Israel of the Modern World", published in the Diario Palentino on November 26, 1936, where it is dropped that in America Catalans are considered a race of Jews, because they use the same procedures that the Hebrews perform in all the nations of the Globe.

Susceptible to be classified as an ethnic democracy, the Spanish State currently only recognizes the Romani as a national minority, excluding Catalans (and, of course, Valencians and Balearic), Basques and Galicians.

The Sorbs in Germany are an example: for centuries they have lived in German-speaking states, surrounded by a much larger ethnic German population, and they have no other historical territory.

They are now generally considered to be part of the German nation and are accepted as such by the Federal Republic of Germany, which constitutionally guarantees their cultural rights.

Multiculturalism is an official policy in some states, establishing the ideal of coexisting existence among multiple and separate ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups.

Other states prefer the interculturalism (or "melting pot" approach) alternative to multiculturalism, citing problems with latter as promoting self-segregation tendencies among minority groups, challenging national cohesion, polarizing society in groups that can't relate to one another, generating problems in regard to minorities and immigrants' fluency in the national language of use and integration with the rest of society (generating hate and persecution against them from the "otherness" they would generate in such a case according to its adherents), without minorities having to give up certain parts of their culture before being absorbed into a now changed majority culture by their contribution.

For instance, variants of Pan-Germanism have different ideas about what constituted Greater Germany, including the confusing term Grossdeutschland, which, in fact, implied the inclusion of huge Slavic minorities from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

It has been speculated by both proponents of globalization and various science fiction writers that the concept of a nation state may disappear with the ever-increasing interconnectedness of the world.

The theory was originally formulated in a 1992 lecture[117] at the American Enterprise Institute, which was then developed in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled "The Clash of Civilizations?

Some theorists and writers argued that human rights, liberal democracy and capitalist free market economics had become the only remaining ideological alternative for nations in the post–Cold War world.

Huntington believed that while the age of ideology had ended, the world had reverted only to a normal state of affairs characterized by cultural conflict.

Indeed, they often put so much emphasis on the importance of the nation state in modern times, that they distort the history of earlier periods in order to emphasize the question of origins.

Lansing and English argue that much of the medieval history of Europe was structured to follow the historical winners—especially the nation states that emerged around Paris and London.