Many believe we have now reached the old age, or decline, of the nation-state. Since 1945 its sovereignty has been outreached by transnational power networks, especially those of global capitalism and postmodern culture. Some postmodern historians take the argument further, asserting that this jeopardizes the certainty and rationality of modern civilization, one of whose main props is a secure, unidimensional notion of absolute political sovereignty lodged in the nation-state. In the historic heartland of modern society, the supranational European Community (EC) seems to lend especial credence to the argument that national-political sovereignty is fragmenting. Here, the actual death of the nation-state has sometimes been announced. The political scientist Philippe Schmitter has argued that, though the European situation is unique, its progress beyond the nation-state has more general relevance, since "the contemporary context systematically favors the transformation of states into either confederatii, condominii or federatii in a variety of settings." It is true that the EC is developing new political forms, somewhat reminiscent of much older political forms, as Schmitter's Latin tags imply. These force us to revise our notions of what contemporary states and their interrelations must be. Despite appearances, across most of the globe, nation-states are still maturing, or they are at least trying to do so. Europe is not the world's future. The states of the world are many and they remain varied, both in their present structures and in terms of their life-cycle trajectories.
The sovereign, territorial nation-state is very young. Most political theorists and international relations specialists date the birth of "unidimensional" territorial state sovereignty to the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. But in sociological terms, territorial state sovereignty was born more recently and matured even more recently. Over the last two cent...