A Case for the Organization of Nation-States

Political history is one of the richest areas of study because it allows us to examine different political entities and their effectiveness on the global stage. Opello and Rosow’s The Nation-State and Global Order offers us insight into the transformation of government through tribes, city-states, empires, and eventually this “nation-state” that we recognize in the modern world today. After a swift review of our world’s history lessons, we are left with an important question: should the world be organized as a collection of sovereign territorial nation-states? I say yes.In order to sift through why, I broke down the definition given to us. In more or less words, Opello and  Rosow define a nation state as:

1. “A distinct geographically defined territory over which it exercises jurisdiction that:

a. has sovereignty over its territory exclusive of outside interference by other entities;

b. has a government made up of public offices and roles that control and administer the territory and population.”

 In the globalized world we now inhabit, the accepted presence of this nation-state is the logical compromise between local and imperial rule. On the one hand, history shows us that the once prosperous Roman empire could only extend its authority so far until it exhausted its resources and could no longer incorporate all its peoples under one umbrella. On the other hand, small city-states or local entities such as Native American tribes are too small to provide necessary protection and services for the modern individual.  Thus, the nation-state can be seen as the Aristotelian “golden mean” of government structures, a compromise of two quantitative extremes.

            

An issue that truly challenges the sovereignty of the nation-state is this principle of non-intervention. In current affairs, we can see countless contentious “hot issues” where non-intervention does not seem ethically appropriate. This is where the presence of international law and entities like the United Nations play an irreplaceable role. For example, the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan forced other nation-states to use tools like economic sanctions and no fly zones to pressure the Sudanese government to stop their abhorrent acts. Moving into greyer area, Western nation-states, especially the U.S., feel called to intervene with the deprivation of women’s rights in Arab countries like Afghanistan. The principle of non-intervention stops us from forcing our own moral and political values on others unilaterally. Even when the organization of nation-states and the central principle of non-intervention seem to tug on our moral consciences, we know that practically this is the best viable option for our modern political system.  The nation-state, and its relationship with developing international law and entities, is our era’s contribution, as Opello and Rosow remind us, to the perpetual trial and error experiment that is political history.