The Nation-State

In an effort to continue my education on a subject I've always been keenly interested: The triad relationship between modern war, the modern state, and globalization.

There are, I'm sure, hundreds of books about this topic or one of the three relationships. I've read some of them, but I want to delve deeper into the topic.

The start of this will be twofold: Phillip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles and Machiavelli's The Prince - Machiavelli being one of the first to lay out the building blocks of the paradigm that would be the state. I've read The Prince a few times now, but not with this critical eye.

Only just finished an interesting forward in SoA by Michael Howard, giving a very brief background on the history of the state as Bobbitt sees it, beginning with the breakdown of the feudal order and the creation of the dynastic order; its fall and the creation of the nation-state; and the current period of upheaval within nation-states themselves.

Thoughts so far:

1. The climax of the state was World War I, of the nation-state, World War II, with a long period of waiting out the Soviet Union. If Kant and Bentham guide one path of statehood (the western tradition) and Hagel guided a second, Marx and Lenin were relative latecomers to the game, but did establish a third path. However, after World War II the world begins to see operating forces not controlled by a state, so while the end of the Cold War may have proven the legitimacy of the western-style nation state, the climax was much earlier.

2. States earn their legitimacy by how well they keep the peace, but they keep the peace only as well as they defeat those elements seeking to undermine it. This doesn't always mean war, but in many cases it does.