State

State, political organization exercising authority over a defined territory. The distinctive characteristic of the modern state is sovereignty, the recognition both within the state and by other states that its governing authority is supreme. In federal states, this principle is modified in that certain rights and authority of the composite entities, such as the Länder in Germany and the “states” in the United States, are not delegated by a central federal government but derived from the constitution. The federal government, however, is recognized as sovereign internationally, and constitutions therefore usually confine all rights to act externally to the central authority.

Although the 20th century saw the rise of many international institutions, the sovereign state is still the primary component of the international political system. From the international perspective, a state comes into existence when enough other states recognize it as such. In modern times, admission to the United Nations and other international organizations provides a useful registration of statehood.

The United Nations is one of many institutions arising from the growing interdependence of states. International law has for centuries provided a way of introducing some predictability and order into what is still technically an anarchic system of international relations. Other international linkages are provided by bilateral and multilateral treaties, alliances, customs unions, and other voluntarily accepted obligations undertaken for mutual benefit. States are, however, free to withdraw from these, and only the power of other states can restrain them.

Domestically the role of the state is to provide a framework of law and order within which the people can live safely, and to administer such affairs as the state in question may consider its business. All states thus tend to have certain institutions, such as legislatures, courts, and police, for internal use, and armed forces for external security. These functions require a system to raise revenue. At various times in history some states have intruded much more than others into the affairs of groups and individuals. In the 19th and 20th centuries most states came to accept responsibility for a wide range of social matters, thus giving rise to the concept of the welfare state. Totalitarian states such as the Communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Germany under National Socialism, assumed a right, often shared with a dominant party, to regulate thoughts and opinions.

Such practices raise important questions about the legitimacy of states. Philosophers and political scientists have argued about the proper nature and purposes of the state ever since the appearance of the city-states in ancient Greece. Over the centuries, these small states, thought of by Plato and Aristotle more in terms of a whole community than the limited political aspect of human life, were succeeded, as technology and administrative evolution permitted, by larger and larger territorial entities.

The military requirements of creating and sustaining such entities tended toward developing authoritarian systems, and some writers stressed the necessary sacrifice of individual liberty to the needs of order, preferably exercised in ways respectful of the welfare of all groups in society. From the 16th and 17th centuries onwards, a tendency to identify the state with peoples with some degree of common cultural identity was paralleled by a search for legitimacy deriving from the will and interests of those people. Thus the appearance de facto of a nation state in Great Britain was later followed by the formal articulation of the idea of a nation-state in revolutionary France. The ideological contribution to this of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel led in turn to some glorification of the nation as a moral entity able to confer legitimacy on itself and its actions. Revulsion from some of the excesses of conflict between nation states inspired by this outlook in the 19th and 20th centuries created, in turn, an ideological base for internationalism in the late 20th century and for the concepts of collective security, economic and political international communities, and various forms of transnationalism. This has raised a challenge to the very concept of the state as the preferred form of political organization.

In the late 20th century the globalization of the world economy, the mobility of people and capital, and the worldwide penetration of the media all combined to circumscribe the freedom of action of states. These trends have stimulated a lively debate as to whether the state can retain any of the freedom of action formerly associated with sovereignty. These informal limitations on independence are accompanied in some areas, notably western Europe, with projects for interstate integration such as the European Union, which are seen by some as an alternative to the national state and by others as the evolution of new and larger states. Whatever the outcome, the classic concept of a state as a relatively “hard-shelled” entity, the domestic transactions of which were much more intensive than the interstate cross-border activities, has probably had its day, as new, more flexible groupings emerge.