Nation-States in History

The state—let alone the nation-state—was not at the center of attention of Western social scientists for the quarter century that followed the end of the Second World War. The defeated fascist powers seemed so close to nationalism and to statism that these forces received a bad name. The fact that victorious Western powers championed a postwar order organized around liberal ideas thereby set the intellectual agenda. From the 1970s, however, the state was “brought back in.” One reason for this was that American scholars felt, for the first time, the impact of their own state—through conscription, the civil rights movement, the expanding welfare state, and government management of the economy. The return of Weberian concerns also owed a good deal to structuralist marxism: it is easy to give names of academics who moved from saying that the state was “relatively autonomous” to arguing that it was in fact wholly autonomous. The impact of scholars of this generation is still being felt, in the ongoing works of Theda Skocpol, Michael Mann, and Peter Evans. But just when it seemed that an intellectual battle had been won, putatively new circumstances arose that encouraged a reversion to societal, economistic modes of analysis—held to be superior to statecentered views. The collapse of state socialism, the Maastricht Treaty, and the freeing of financial markets suggested to many that the powers of the nation-state were under attack within a new world. The most sophisticated statements made much of a dual assault on the nationstate, from above in the form of global economic forces and from below in the form of various national or ethnic revivals. Skepticism toward this view is now surfacing. Many hold the European Union to depend, as it always has, on the Franco-German condominium, that is, on the calculations of two major states. Equally, the power of the United States, in both economic and geopolitical terms, may well be best understood in wholly traditional terms. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 put an end to to the talk of dismantling the state. Further, behind the post–Cold War spread of markets is a structure of rules and institutions that is sponsored and maintained— for better or worse—by American state power. At a more general level, © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.