The Historical Dynamic of the Nation state
Has the nation state become some kind of social constant over the period since the seventeenth century and the emergence of modern political institutions? The arguments in this chapter have been critical of the idea of absolute sovereignty and its supposed erosion by globalization. Yet one should not rule out the possibility that nation states, embedded within interstate systems of conditional sovereignty do display certain continuities in political autonomy right up to the present, through the most recent modern phases of globalization. What is unclear, nonetheless, is how far those continuities have extended to the functional areas in which state have become involved.