The Modern National State: How It Took Over the World

Feudalism’s slow collapse cleared the ground for the last, and by far the most durable, stage in the state’s long evolution: the modern national state, the form that now covers essentially the entire inhabited world. Its intellectual roots go back further than most people assume, and its spread across the globe took the better part of five centuries to complete.

Machiavelli and the Idea of the Nation

Credit for giving the modern national state its first real conceptual shape generally goes to Niccolò Machiavelli, writing between 1469 and 1527. His political thought placed national identity and love of one’s homeland at the very center of legitimate government – a genuinely new idea at the time, and the seed from which centuries of national statehood eventually grew. England and France were the first countries to turn that idea into settled political reality, emerging as self-governing national administrations in the aftermath of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453). What followed was a slow chain reaction: Spain and the Netherlands built their own national movements in the centuries after, the Nordic countries – Sweden, Denmark, Norway – became national states not long after that, and Italy and Germany completed the pattern for Western Europe in the nineteenth century.

A Form That Took Over the World

The First World War turned most of the rest of Europe into national states in short order, and the same trend carried across the Atlantic, reshaping North America and Latin America along national lines by the close of the nineteenth century. The process accelerated dramatically after the Second World War, as decolonization swept across Asia and Africa between 1939 and 1945 and the years that followed – today roughly thirty-five Asian and African countries alone exist as national states, out of a global total that had reached fifty-two by the time this pattern had fully played out. In barely five centuries, a concept that started with one Florentine writer’s argument about patriotism became the default unit of political organization for virtually the entire planet.

What Actually Makes It Different

The national state isn’t simply the latest entry on a list that includes tribal societies, ancient kingdoms, city-states, empires, and feudal holdings – it represents a genuinely different way of organizing human collective life. Earlier forms of political organization were held together by competing, often incompatible loyalties: tribe, caste, kinship group, religious community, and local affiliation all pulled in different directions at once, which is exactly why none of them produced governments capable of maintaining stable order or meeting a whole society’s needs for very long. Before the national state, the relationship between rulers and ruled was, more often than not, a narrowly political and administrative one rather than a shared one: rulers frequently differed from their subjects in language, culture, and even lineage, and their authority rested chiefly on superior military force rather than on any sense of common identity.

The national state closed that gap. In a genuine national state, the governing class and the nation are, in principle, one and the same, since a nation’s leadership is meant to emerge from the nation’s own representatives and its own expressed will – which is exactly why democratic, accountable government has grown up so closely intertwined with the rise of the national state itself, rather than being a separate later add-on to it. Two principles, in particular, are treated as essential to a national state’s establishment and its recognition by others: the principle of self-determination and sovereignty, and the principle of equal international standing among nations, under which every national state is meant to be free to run its own affairs internally and to deal with the rest of the world externally on its own terms.

The Gap Between the Principle and the Practice

Every state does, in theory, hold sovereignty of its own, and international law formally treats all states as equals regardless of size. In practice, large and powerful national states have rarely extended small and weak ones anything close to genuine equality. Those two founding principles get quietly set aside often enough that the pattern is hard to miss: powerful national states routinely use economic leverage and cultural proximity as pretexts for drawing smaller, weaker states into their own sphere of influence, absorbing them into an orbit of dependence even while formally respecting their sovereignty on paper. That is precisely how a sufficiently powerful national state can end up functioning like an empire in its own right, building something close to a colonial relationship out of supposedly equal partners – a pattern of new imperialism that has recurred throughout modern history and shows few signs of being fully retired even now.