Society and Space, Nation and State

Abstract

It has been argued that the course of political evolution is to some degree pre-ordained. Such an assumption underlay the former practice in political anthropology of making a fundamental distinction between centralised or ‘state’ societies, loosely regarded as being modern, and uncentralised or ‘stateless’ societies, which appeared to be ‘primitive’. Subsequently, such a distinction came to be regarded as unhelpful to an understanding of the dynamic and varied nature of political life. So during the 1950s, attention was focused more on the operation of power within societies and on the ways in which individuals and groups employed various strategies in order to gain power. While not seeking to enter into the debate, it is plain that distinctions can be made between small-scale traditional societies, such as survive in some of the less accessible and less developed (or exploited) parts of the world, and those modernised societies which occupy the nation-states of the Western world. Whether or not there is an inevitability about political evolution from small-scale society to nation-state society, one can say that while some societies have evolved to nation-statehood and others have consciously striven to achieve it, others still have had statehood thrust upon them as a consequence of colonial intervention and enforced contacts with the wider world.

With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice, that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs …

This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial jealous, and alien sovereignties.

John Jay, appealing for popular support for the union of American states, Federalist Papers, no. 2, 1787

Within five years of achieving its liberty, every oppressed nationality takes to militarism and within two or three generations, and sometimes within a single generation, it becomes — if circumstances are propitious — an imperialist aggressor eager to inflict upon its neighbours the oppression which it was itself so recently a victim.

Aldous Huxley, Themes and Variations, 1950