The Modern Nation-state and Its Discontents

In Europe, between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, feudalism was in crisis and the Renaissance gave rise to a new form of human enlightenment and doctrine of human destiny. The emerging scientific and liberal modes of enquiry were discrediting the claims of the Church on the lives of individuals. Feudal-agrarian relations were giving way to commercial and trade-based relations. Amidst these changes, some of the territorially organized monarchies like those in England, France and Spain were examples of absolutist States.

Absolutism as the basis of the State involved the strengthening of unified territorial rule; the absorption of weaker and smaller territories into stronger and larger ones; the tightening of law, order and security throughout the kingdom; the application of a more unitary, continuous calculable and effective rule, with its power gathered under a single sovereign head’.²⁴ Changes such as replacing feudal military obligations with the growth of standing national armies (recall how Machiavelli discredited the idea of mercenaries as unreliable and advocated standing national armies) and supplanting feudal tax-farming with central taxation by the state were aimed at putting the absolutist monarchy on solid ground. Revenue collection through taxation and defence through a standing army (an army paid for by public money) became significant elements in the absolutist State.

The theory of the divine rights of kings, which implied that the authority of the king was derived directly from God, was a powerful theoretical basis for defending absolutist monarchies. This was based on the concept of the supremacy of kings advocated earlier to put forward a defence against the Church. The absolutist State laid strong foundations for the development of the modern nation-state in terms of sovereignty, territorial consolidation and governance.

The three major revolutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England, the French Revolution of 1789 and the American Revolution of 1776—added the aspects of constitutionalism, popular sovereignty and democracy to the state. They also added the principles of liberty and the rights of individuals, equality, justice and the rule of law to the constitutionalism that has come to be identified with modern nation-states. Constitutionalism stands for an institutional arrangement that ensures the diversification of authority (separation of powers), limitations on the exercise of power (a charter of rights) and responsible government (democratic government).²⁵

While the roots of the nation-state grew in Europe and North America, Africa, Asia and Latin America were unaware of these developments. As borne out by historical developments (and as fate would have it), most of Africa and Asia experienced the nature of the State as surrogates and entities under colonial rule. The umbrella of the colonial State was to prove that the idea of the State in these continents was to be an Aristotelian master-slave relationship. As Aristotle advocated that the slave realizes his self through serving the master, the state in colonized countries were to realize the flavour of the state by serving the imperial states. This also proved that the ‘march of god’ at times could be at the cost of sovereign equality of certain states.