Crisis of the Nation-State and Sovereignty

For most of the twentieth century the nation-state was treated as the natural container of political life — the unit holding a people, a territory, an economy and a legal order together, against which all other authority was measured.

That assumption has been under attack from two directions for forty years. From above, capital, courts, climate treaties and corporations exercise authority no single state authorised. From below, ethnic, linguistic and regional communities dispute the state’s claim to represent one people. Whether this is a crisis, a transformation, or a noisier version of politics as usual is what the topic exists to settle.

Nation and state are two concepts that became one word

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The phrase “nation-state” fuses two ideas with entirely different histories, and every serious argument in this field turns on keeping them apart.

• The state is a political and legal institution. Weber’s definition remains the working one: a state is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.
  • The classical elements are population, territory, government and sovereignty.
  • Population — the state is a human institution before it is anything else.
  • Territory — a defined space within which authority is accepted without dispute.
  • Government — the concrete machinery through which the state’s abstract authority is exercised. Governments rise and fall without disturbing the identity of the state, which is why the two must never be equated.
  • Sovereignty — the supreme and final authority to make law and enforce it. A state persists so long as it retains sovereignty; losing it to internal revolt or external conquest means the disappearance of the state as such.
• The nation is a cultural and psychological community. It rests on a shared sense of identity built from some combination of language, religion, history, myth, memory, ethnicity and territory — and crucially on the belief that this community should govern itself.
• The two are analytically independent. There is no logical reason why the boundaries of a cultural community should coincide with the boundaries of a legal jurisdiction. That they so often do is a historical achievement, not a natural fact.

How the state manufactured the nation

The direction of causation is the point most often reversed, and getting it right dissolves much of the apparent mystery.

• The standard romantic account holds that nations, having discovered themselves, demanded states. The historical record more often shows the opposite: the modern state built the nation it claimed merely to represent.
• The instruments were mundane and enormously effective.
  • Mass schooling in a standardised language, teaching a common history from a single textbook.
  • Conscript armies, mixing populations from different regions and teaching them a shared enemy.
  • The census, which forces every person into named and countable categories, and thereby creates the categories.
  • Maps, which convert a fuzzy frontier zone into a hard line and make the national territory an image citizens can carry in their heads.
  • Language policy, elevating one dialect into the national language and demoting the rest.
  • Symbols and ritual — flags, anthems, national days, monuments, the standardised time zone.
  • Citizenship law, which fixes who is inside and who is outside, and attaches rights to the distinction.
• The consequence is that nations and states have become virtually synonymous in ordinary speech — the United Nations is an organisation of states, “national” income is state income, and international law is law between states.
• The synonymy is nonetheless an illusion sustained by convenience.
  • There are roughly 200 sovereign states and, on any plausible count, thousands of communities that consider themselves nations.
  • Very few states are genuinely mono-national. Iceland, Japan, Portugal and the Koreas are the standard examples, and even they are less homogeneous than the label suggests.
  • The overwhelming majority are multinational states governing several nations, or partitioned nations divided across several states — the Kurds across four, the Punjabis across two, the Somalis across three.
  • Where the fit fails, the state’s claim to be the political expression of one people becomes a contested proposition rather than an obvious fact — and that contestation is what “crisis of the nation-state” names from below.

What kind of thing is a nation? The three answers

The claim that the state built the nation is contested, and the contest is the standing theoretical debate in this field. Three positions divide the literature.

• Primordialism holds that nations are ancient and organic, rooted in kinship, language, religion and attachment to land, and that modern nationalism merely awakened what was already there.
  • Its strength is that it takes seriously the depth of feeling nationalism commands — people do not die for constructs.
  • Its weakness is that it cannot explain why national identity became politically decisive only from the late eighteenth century, when its raw materials had existed for millennia.
• Modernism holds that nations are products of modernity — of industrialisation, print capitalism, mass literacy and the administrative state.
  • Gellner grounds nationalism in the functional needs of industrial society, which requires a mobile, literate workforce sharing a standardised high culture that only a state-run education system can supply. His formula is deliberately provocative: nationalism creates nations, not the other way round.
  • Benedict Anderson describes the nation as an imagined community — imagined because its members will never meet most of their fellow-members, yet each carries an image of their communion. Print capitalism made this imagining possible by fixing vernaculars and creating simultaneous readerships.
  • Hobsbawm emphasises the invention of tradition — flags, ceremonies, anthems and national histories consciously manufactured, often quite recently, and then presented as immemorial.
• Ethno-symbolism occupies the middle ground and is the most useful position for comparative work.
  • Anthony Smith argues that modern nations are indeed modern constructions, but they are built from pre-existing ethnic cores — the ethnie, with its myths, memories, symbols and traditions.
  • Nationalist elites do not invent from nothing; they select, reinterpret and mobilise materials that are already available, which is why some national projects succeed and others fail.
  • This explains the variation that pure modernism cannot: why an identity can be manufactured in one place and refuses to take in another.
• The stakes for this topic are direct.
  • If nations are wholly modern constructions, the nation-state is a contingent arrangement that other arrangements could replace.
  • If they rest on durable ethnic cores, the identity pressures squeezing the state are not a passing phase — and it will keep facing them however much authority it shares upward.

Sovereignty: the concept and its erosion

The monistic theory

• The word derives from the Latin superanus, meaning supreme, and the classical theory holds sovereignty to be absolute, perpetual, universal, inalienable and indivisible.
• Bodin defined it as supreme power over citizens and subjects unrestrained by law — a decisive break with medieval thought, in which the church rather than the state was the source of law.
• Hobbes developed it into a full political theory, deriving an undivided sovereign from the logic of escaping the state of nature.
• Austin perfected its legal form. Law is the command of the sovereign backed by sanction; the sovereign is a determinate person or body habitually obeyed and habitually obeying no one. By establishing a single source of all positive law he produced a monistic view of law, state and sovereignty.
• Garner’s formulation captures the legal claim: sovereignty is that characteristic of the state by virtue of which it cannot be legally bound except by its own will, nor limited by any power other than itself.

The pluralist challenge from within

• The pluralists attacked the monistic theory not on legal grounds but on moral and sociological ones, and their argument has since become the standard critique of state absolutism.
• Laski scrutinised sovereignty from three angles and found it wanting in each.
  • Historically, the record of states repudiates the idea of absolute sovereignty, and its claims are incompatible with the interests of humanity.
  • As a theory of law, it fails because law has multiple sources — custom, professional practice, association rules — not one.
  • As political analysis, it fails because in a federal state the location of the Austinian sovereign simply cannot be found.
  • His conclusion is the cornerstone of the doctrine: authority should become federal instead of absolute and indivisible, and power coordinative instead of hierarchical.
• MacIver grounded the same conclusion sociologically. Men serve their varied interests through many associations, and the state is only one of them.
  • The state may claim superior authority as an instrument of law, but it is not morally superior to other associations.
  • Law exists prior to the state; the state does not create law but grasps it and gives it definite expression in statute.
  • The state does not regulate the internal affairs of other associations or determine their purposes. It enters only when the interests of one group encroach on another, acting as an arbiter rather than a commander.
  • Crucially, the sphere of the state is not coextensive with that of society — a formulation that denies the state’s totalising claim in a single line.
• The other exponents — Duguit, Krabbe, Barker and Lindsay — converge on the same demand: the state must justify its claim to superior authority rather than assert it, and management of society should be shared among associations in proportion to their contribution to the social good.
• The pluralists’ own weakness is worth stating, because it is what keeps the state in the picture.
  • If groups attract deeper loyalty than the state itself, some become unduly powerful and dictate unjust terms, while unorganised interests go unrepresented entirely.
  • The responsibility for determining the requirements of the common interest then falls back on the state — which is the monist’s point restated.

Pressure from above: globalisation and supranational authority

The three positions in the debate

There is no single scholarly answer to what globalisation has done to sovereignty. There are three, and naming them is more useful than choosing between them prematurely.

• The transformationalist position is the most defensible, and the reason is that the other two each have to explain away a large body of evidence the third accommodates comfortably.

The economic dimension

• The central feature of economic globalisation is supraterritoriality — economic activity increasingly taking place in a borderless world where location has decreasing bearing on transaction.
• Economic sovereignty is the hardest to reconcile with a globalised economy. A state can still legislate on anything; it cannot legislate against the price its currency will fetch or the interest rate its debt will bear.
• International migration and cultural globalisation have made state borders increasingly permeable in the other direction — flows of people and meaning that immigration law regulates but does not control.
• The data, however, do not support a straightforward story of collapse.
  • World trade as a share of global GDP stood at around 60% in 2008, peaked at 62% in 2022, and stood at roughly 57% in 2024 — a plateau, not a collapse. The accurate word is slowbalisation, not deglobalisation.
  • Global foreign direct investment fell for two consecutive years before rising 6% to $1.6 trillion in 2025.
  • Measured global connectedness held at its record high in 2025, with goods travelling a record average distance and greenfield investment projects spanning greater distances than before — the opposite of regionalisation.
  • Only 4-6% of global flows shifted away from geopolitical rivals over the past decade, and US-China trade fell to around 2% of global trade — significant fragmentation in specific sectors, not a general split into blocs.
• Fragmentation is sectoral and politically driven rather than general. It is concentrated in semiconductors, critical minerals, energy and advanced technology — precisely the sectors where states have decided that efficiency is subordinate to security. The IMF’s standard estimate puts the cost of severe fragmentation at up to 7% of global GDP.
• The dimensions of globalisation press on sovereignty unevenly, and lumping them together produces bad analysis.

The institutional dimension

• International organisations constrain what states may lawfully do. The WTO on trade, the IMF on macroeconomic conditionality, the EU on almost everything, and a dense web of treaty regimes on environment, aviation, telecommunications and finance.
• The European Union remains the strongest case of pooled sovereignty anywhere.
  • Its accession machinery is itself an instrument of sovereignty transfer: candidate states adopt the entire body of EU law before they gain a vote on it.
  • It continues to expand, with accession clusters opened for Ukraine and Moldova and chapters closing for Montenegro and Albania.
• International courts test sovereignty most directly, and the recent record is instructive in both directions.
  • The International Court of Justice delivered a unanimous advisory opinion on climate obligations in July 2025.
    • Climate-protection duties are erga omnes — owed to all states, which therefore all have a legal interest in their breach.
    • State responsibility can attach to fossil-fuel production, licensing and subsidies.
    • The opinion is advisory, but declaratory of law that already binds.
  • The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants against sitting heads of state and government, and has been met with sustained state retaliation: sanctions on its President, judges and prosecutors, and the description of the court by a major power’s foreign minister as “a corrupt and fatally politicised supranational court.”
  • Hungary announced withdrawal from the Rome Statute and then reversed the withdrawal after a change of government — a clean demonstration that supranational authority over a state is contingent on that state’s domestic politics rather than independent of it.
• Conditionality works only where domestic politics permit it.
  • Roughly €18 billion of European funds were frozen for years over rule-of-law failures without changing the government’s behaviour.
  • €16.4 billion was unlocked in May 2026 only after that government lost an election, against twenty-seven reform milestones the new one accepted.
  • External leverage did not produce the change; it rewarded a change produced domestically.

Transnational corporations

• The scale comparison is genuinely striking. The largest technology firms carry market capitalisations of the order of $4-5 trillion, exceeding the annual GDP of Japan, the United Kingdom or India, and comfortably above Germany’s.
• The comparison must be qualified to be honest.
  • Market capitalisation is a stock of expected future earnings; GDP is an annual flow of production. The two are not like-for-like.
  • The valid claim is narrower and still forceful: a handful of privately governed entities command resources, data and infrastructure comparable to those of major states, without any of the accountability that attaches to states.
• The genuinely important development is that regulation of these firms has been re-nationalised into interstate bargaining.
  • European enforcement against American platforms — running to fines of €890 million, €500 million, €200 million and €120 million in recent decisions — has drawn explicit threats of trade retaliation from the United States.
  • Regulating a transnational corporation has therefore become a dispute between states about jurisdiction, not a straightforward exercise of domestic authority.
• The global minimum tax is the sharpest single illustration of sovereignty’s limits — and of who bears them.
  • The OECD Pillar Two regime was the flagship experiment in pooled fiscal sovereignty: a coordinated 15% floor on effective corporate taxation, designed to end the race to the bottom no state could stop alone.
  • Within eighteen months of taking effect it was renegotiated. A “side-by-side” package agreed in January 2026 excludes United States-headquartered groups from the two enforcement rules where they elect the relevant safe harbour.
  • The lesson is precise: pooled sovereignty holds among states of comparable weight and fails against a hegemon. The Global South’s response has been to move the venue — a UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation is under negotiation on a member-state-led basis, with a final text targeted for 2027.

Sovereignty is not lost to markets and corporations so much as redistributed among states — and the states that lose most are the ones that were weakest to begin with.

Pressure from below: identity, autonomy and secession

• Internal challenges to sovereignty arise from the growing authority of groups and associations that claim allegiance from their members within the state — the pluralist insight, radicalised. Where the group in question is territorially concentrated and defines itself as a nation, the claim becomes secessionist rather than merely pluralist.
• The active cases show that this pressure is chronic rather than acute — and that outcomes vary far more than the theory predicts.

• Two general findings emerge from the set.
  • Secession almost never succeeds against a functioning state that opposes it. The successful cases of the last half-century involve collapse (the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia), consent (Czechoslovakia, Montenegro), or prolonged conflict followed by a negotiated referendum (South Sudan, Timor-Leste).
  • External threat strengthens the state it threatens. The Quebec case is the cleanest: hostility from a much larger neighbour depressed secessionist sentiment to its lowest level in a generation. This is the mechanism nationalism scholarship has always identified, running in reverse.
• State failure is the extreme form of pressure from below, and it belongs in this section rather than being treated as a separate topic.
  • Cooper’s pre-modern world is one of post-colonial chaos in which state structures cannot establish a legitimate monopoly of force, producing warlordism, criminality and social dislocation.
  • The scale is not marginal. Of 177 contexts assessed, 61 are classified as fragile — 43 highly and 18 extremely — and 2.1 billion people, a quarter of humanity, live in them. 72% of the world’s extreme poor live in fragile contexts, projected to reach 92% by 2040.
  • Contemporary cases show the full range: Sudan effectively partitioned between two armed forces with around 11 million internally displaced; Haiti governed by a single acting executive after its transitional council dissolved, with gangs controlling much of the capital; Myanmar’s junta holding perhaps a third of the national territory.
  • The Sahel adds a distinct variant — sovereigntist withdrawal from regional integration.
    • Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger completed their exit from the regional economic community in January 2025 and formed a confederation with a joint 5,000-strong force, a common passport and a common external levy.
    • It is the first exit from a major African regional organisation, driven by governments seeking freedom from democratic-governance conditionality.

Transnationalism and the demise thesis

• The strongest form of the crisis argument holds that the state has been displaced as the principal actor by a proliferation of non-state and transnational actors.
  • Transnational corporations, whose production networks and transfer-pricing arrangements cross the jurisdictions meant to tax them.
  • International non-governmental organisations and advocacy networks, which set agendas, generate norms and hold governments to standards they never legislated.
  • Transnational terrorist and criminal networks, which are territorially unbounded by design and against which conventional deterrence has no purchase.
  • Diasporas, which fund, lobby and legitimate politics in countries whose passports they no longer hold.
  • Digital platforms, which now perform functions — identity verification, speech regulation, dispute resolution, payment infrastructure — that were state monopolies within living memory.
• The demise thesis nonetheless fails, and it fails for a specific reason. Transnationalism is an important force in world politics, but it is premature to speak of the end of the nation-state given the continued attachment to nationalism felt throughout the world — including, conspicuously, among the populations of the most globalised societies.
  • Non-state actors have influence, in most cases considerable. What almost none of them has is legitimate coercive authority over a defined population, and no amount of influence substitutes for it.
  • International organisations typically act as forums through which states coordinate, not as bodies intent on usurping state power. Their agency is real but delegated, and delegation is revocable.

Why the nation-state has not disappeared

The past decade has produced an unusually clear natural experiment. Each of the major shocks has been answered by states, using state instruments, with populations turning to national governments rather than to any of the actors supposedly displacing them.

• The pandemic.
  • Border closures, lockdowns, emergency powers, income support, national procurement and vaccination campaigns were all exercised by states, while international institutions were conspicuously ineffective.
  • Fukuyama’s assessment named the variables that actually mattered: state capacity, social trust and leadership.
  • Countries with a competent apparatus, a trusted government and effective leaders limited the damage; those with dysfunctional states, polarised societies or poor leadership did badly. Regime type predicted much less than capacity did.
• The 2008 crisis and its successors. The state’s role in economic affairs was underlined precisely when it was supposed to be obsolete. The lesson drawn was that the idea that the global economy works best when left alone by the state has been exposed as a myth.
• War.
  • The Russia-Ukraine war has settled nothing about territory and everything about method: two attempted truces in 2026 both collapsed within days, showing that ceasefires without a settlement of territorial title are unsustainable.
  • Military expenditure reached a record $2,887 billion in 2025, with European spending up 14% in a single year and Ukraine devoting some 40% of its GDP to defence.
• Force between states has become more usable, not less.
  • Preventive strikes on a sovereign state’s territory by non-neighbouring powers, in June 2025 and again in 2026, without Security Council authorisation.
  • A military operation that removed and transported a serving head of state for trial abroad, raising both Article 2(4) and head-of-state immunity.
  • Together these indicate that Article 2(4) of the UN Charter is under practical erosion. This is not a world in which sovereignty has ceased to matter; it is one in which it is being violently contested.
• Migration control has become the defining assertion of sovereignty.
  • The European Union’s Pact on Migration and Asylum, in application from June 2026, permits screening of up to seven days and detention for up to twelve weeks during border procedures, with a further twelve pending removal.
  • Mandatory border procedures apply to nationalities with low EU-wide recognition rates.
  • Bilateral returns arrangements, tightened visa regimes and externalised processing all point the same way.
• Economic sovereignty is being reasserted through instruments long thought obsolete.
  • More than half of one major economy’s industrial-policy measures now cite national security explicitly.
  • The clearest single instance is a European government taking control of a foreign-owned semiconductor firm under an emergency economic-security statute, met within days by export controls from the firm’s home state.
  • Sovereignty asserted by seizure and answered by embargo — a form of interstate conflict conducted entirely through corporate assets.
• Globalisation was not imposed on unwilling states. It was devised by states in pursuit of what they identified as their national interests, through treaties they negotiated and ratified. What states made, states can partly unmake — which is precisely what tariff policy, export controls and investment screening now demonstrate.

The state as primary actor: why primacy persists

Despite every trend to the contrary, the state has been and remains the primary actor in the global system. The reasons are structural rather than sentimental.

• What created the state in the first place still favours it.
  • War-making and defence. The European state emerged from the need to extract resources for war, and the capacity for organised violence remains the one function no other actor performs at scale.
  • Territorial control. Only the state combines authority over a defined space with the administrative apparatus to make that authority effective at every point within it.
  • The monopoly of legitimate force, which converts raw coercion into authority that most people obey without being compelled.
  • Legal personality. The state is the entity that makes law, and therefore the entity that grants or withholds standing to everyone else — including corporations, which are creatures of some state’s company law.
• Why primacy survives the challenges.
  • Only states hold territory, and every non-state actor must physically exist somewhere under some state’s jurisdiction.
  • Only states confer nationality and citizenship, and thus the identity documents without which movement, employment and property ownership are impossible.
  • Only states can tax comprehensively, which is why the corporate-taxation problem is a problem of interstate coordination rather than corporate power alone.
  • Only states possess enforceable jurisdiction — courts whose judgments come with the machinery to execute them.
  • International law and institutions are made of states. The UN is an organisation of states; treaties bind states; even norms that constrain state behaviour require states to enact and enforce them.
  • Legitimacy still attaches to national political community. People vote in national elections, fight in national armies, pay national taxes and demand things of national governments. No transnational body commands comparable allegiance, and the attempts to build one have generated backlash rather than loyalty.

The nation-state is squeezed from below by identity and from above by global forces — but it remains the only institution that must answer when either pressure becomes unbearable.

The Indian anchor

India is the most demanding test case for every proposition in this topic, because it was built precisely against the assumption that a state requires a nation.

• India is better described as a state-nation than a nation-state. The distinction, developed by Linz and Stepan, is not cosmetic.
  • A nation-state pursues a single national identity and treats diversity as a problem to be assimilated away.
  • A state-nation accommodates multiple, complementary political identities — one can be Tamil and Indian without contradiction — and builds institutions that make the combination sustainable.
  • India chose the second path deliberately: asymmetric federalism, linguistic reorganisation of states, official multilingualism, personal laws, and constitutionally protected group rights.
• The institutional devices are worth naming individually, because each answers a specific pressure from below.
  • Linguistic reorganisation conceded language as an organising principle of statehood, defusing what had been the most dangerous secessionist energy of the 1950s.
  • The Sixth Schedule and Article 371 provisions create differentiated autonomy arrangements for the North-East and other regions, treating uniformity as a constraint rather than a value.
  • Accords rather than conquest — the Assam, Mizo, Bodo and Naga negotiations — converted armed movements into electoral ones with varying but real success.
  • The Mizoram case is the strongest available evidence anywhere that insurgency can end in genuine political integration, and it is under-used in comparative work.
• India also demonstrates the costs and limits of the model.
  • Article 356 was used repeatedly against opposition state governments until judicial and political constraint reduced it, and S.R. Bommai v. Union of India was the decisive check.
  • The reorganisation of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019 — the reading down of Article 370 and the conversion of a state into two Union Territories — moved sharply toward the nation-state logic and away from the state-nation one.
    • The Supreme Court in In Re: Article 370 upheld the action while directing the restoration of statehood.
  • Citizenship legislation and the national register debate raised the classic nation-state question in its sharpest Indian form: whether membership of the political community is defined by residence and law or by ascriptive identity.
• On sovereignty against external pressure, India’s position has been unusually consistent.
  • India has not ratified the Rome Statute and is not a party to the International Criminal Court, on grounds that include the Security Council’s referral role and the treatment of terrorism.
  • It has defended policy space at the WTO over public stockholding for food security, and pressed the special and differential treatment principle against pressure to abandon developing-country status.
  • Data localisation, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act and the sovereign-AI framing are all assertions that the digital domain is subject to territorial jurisdiction.
  • Strategic autonomy is the doctrinal name for the general position — participation in institutions without acceptance of binding external direction, and alignment on issues rather than with blocs.
• India’s own experience answers the crisis thesis in a specific way.
  • Every pressure the literature describes is present here — regional movements, transnational capital, supranational rulemaking, digital platforms, climate obligations.
  • What India shows is that a state can absorb them by conceding form while retaining substance — devolving authority, accommodating identity and accepting external rules, while keeping the decision about how much to concede in its own hands.

Conclusion

The nation-state faces a genuine crisis of the model, not a crisis of survival. What has broken is the tidy assumption on which the twentieth century operated — that a single sovereign authority, coextensive with a single national community and a single economy, is the natural and sufficient unit of political life. Authority is now layered, shared and contested, upward and downward at once.

But every serious shock of the past decade has been answered by states. Borders closed, budgets expanded, armies mobilised, industries seized, platforms fined and citizens turned to national governments rather than to any of the actors supposedly replacing them. The state is constrained but not irrelevant, transformed but not dead. The question worth asking is no longer whether the nation-state will survive, but what kind of state emerges from the pressure — and whether states that concede authority under crisis conditions can be held accountable for what they do with what they keep.