Bringing the nation-state back in: sovereignty, identity, private property and public service
Comparative analysis of law, state and nation
1989 and its aftermath saw the emergence and swift consolidation of nation-states across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Moreover, secessionist nation-states – such as the Baltic states, Slovakia and Slovenia - were able to maintain territorial integrity, impose a monopoly on violence and establish the rule of law. Further still, despite war in the Balkans and the Caucasus, nation-state consolidation and border security remains the global and local agenda. This continuing primacy of the nation-state stands in contrast to the discourse on Europe as a post-national configuration. We hold that despite a lasting trend towards globalization, the law and legitimacy of the nation-state retains its overwhelming significance for democratization as well as marketization. Moreover, the sovereignty and identity of the nation-state remains pivotal in CEE as it did earlier in Greece, Spain and Portugal and does elsewhere in China and the newly industrialised countries of East Asia. The Soviet empire was a land empire. Hence many of the newly independent nation-states share a border with the former imperial heartland. Historically we distinguish between those nation-states that had a history before the Soviet take-over and those that did not.
The overall ambition of our working group is to bring the nation-state back in as a major object of study as well as the crucial factor for the restructuring of the European and global political, economic and social space. We seek to address a wide range of theoretical and empirical questions.
- We undertake a historical re-examination of state-building and nation-building in Central and Eastern Europe during the 20th century to critically appraise arguments about the ‘hollowing out’ and ‘withering away’ of the nation-state as well as the relativization and complexification of sovereignty and identity. We question the increasingly assumed link between the nation-state and ‘backwardness’ by insisting that even globalization is embedded within nation-states.
- For our argument comparative cases are important and we identify as crucial to its salience Western European transitions from dictatorship to democracy and East Asian economic transformation.
- We seek to re-appraise explanatory understandings of the transition in 1989 and the subsequent transformation, for we hold that indices of marketization and democratization make only sense on the presumption that a centralised state rules over a pacified territory. Hence it is methodologically mistaken to ‘universally’ plot and measure progress where and when historical and legal embeddedness matters most.
- We hold that law and legitimacy and specifically the legal provisions for private property and public service are crucial. Specifically, we take a fresh look at the restitution of property and the privatisation of state assets. We are equally interested in a re-evaluation of public services as a complementary contract between the nation-state and the citizens.
Nation-building and state-building each have a logic of their own. Drawing on history, sociology and law we study their interdependence. We historicize the notion of nation, rather than subscribe to a constructivist or essentialist conception. We offer an in-depth and non-reductive analysis of the co-evolution of the key elements of the nation-state: Sovereignty and identity, law and legitimacy and private property and public service. We do this repeatedly by means of case studies of
- Post-socialist nation-states, including China;
- Post-soviet nation-states;
- Post-soviet republics;
- Western European entrepreneurial regimes, with reference to the newly industrialising countries.
Aim and outcome
Our primary aim is to develop the following series of working papers so that they may become the starting point and focus for an agenda-setting conference. Subsequently we would be interested to develop this agenda further but no decision has been taken yet as to whether the writing of a monograph or the pursuit of a research project is preferable.
Working Group Coordinator
Ivo Vassilev, University of Teeside, Middlesbrough, Research Fellow;
‘Market and state in Bulgaria, Poland and Lithuania’;
PhD Sociology, Lancaster University;
MA Sociology, Central European University with Lancaster University, Warsaw;
Contact: i.vassilev [at] tees.ac.uk
Members
Chris Armbruster, Nagore Calvo, Ewa Gromnicka, Kasia Lach, Damiana Otoiu
last modified: 2006-09-28
