NATIONS AND STATES
Earlier we took the state to be, in Weber's words, an organisation having 'the monopoly of the legitimate use of force in a given territorial area'. We suggest that the model of government nd the state which this may suggest – of a world dominated by sovereign 'nation states' – is a relatively arguable and new one. Europe did not look much like this until about 1919 after the Treaty of Versailles. Africa only came near fitting the model from the 1960s. Countries like the United Kingdom (as we saw earlier) and the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are (or were) clearly multi- national. The Antarctic remains the subject of (frozen!) conflicting claims to jurisdiction.