are merely used by the elites to extract resources from the population in support of what they deem to be a lifestyle appropriate to their status (we will discuss later that this analysis is too simple and does not capture the extent to which certain categories of people are excluded from political and economic participation in inclusive communities). Indeed, territory as circumscribed by borders and jurisdictions makes a difference. It even can make a difference within a country, especially when certain (poorer) areas at the local level can be excised from a municipality, as is possible in the United States (Burns, 1994). As far as we know, in other Western countries local governments cannot remove the poorer areas from their jurisdiction.
The concept ofstateis often defined in terms of population or people, territory or land, with a clear monopoly over the use of violence. This includes both the maintenance of public order and safety (internal) and the defense of the territory against foreign aggressors (external). These internal and external elements hark back to understanding the state as a political system whose sovereignty is somewhat protected by international law since the 1648 Peace of Westphalia: Today one can generally neither invade the territory of nor meddle in the internal affairs of a recognized sovereign state. This view or definition of the state is rather top-down by nature, placing government at its center. It is rather different from the Hobbesian philosophy of the seventeenth century highlighting a social contract, which builds a bidirectional relationship between rulers and citizens. This approach allocates enough power in the hands of the people to prevent misuse of government authority. This view to perceiving the state implies that it is the only societal actor left that binds people together, and then specifically in their role as citizens. It is in this role that people are truly equal before and in the eyes of the law. In this view the state and its government are more situated amidst the citizenry it serves.
Traditionally, state making and nation building are topics studied in political science, but there is every reason to believe that understanding the origins, the development, and the current role and position of the state are important to understanding contemporary government (see, for instance, Vigoda-Gadot, 2009). In other words, the study of public administration needs to prepare its (future) career civil servants, military personnel, and political officeholders as well as citizens at large for the political and societal context within which government officials operate. In this chapter we will start with defining state and nation, with special attention paid to different
conceptions of state and how these may influence our perception of government. We then proceed to outline the processes of political and administrative centralization, because these have occurred everywhere even if to varying degrees of centralization (Section 2). In this section we will also discuss such concepts as weak, strong, and failed states that are quite popular but not so useful for describing reality today. One important aspect of state making is that it is a process where state and government slowly, sometimes faster, but always surely differentiate themselves from other societal organizations. Of all society’s overarching institutions, it is state and organized religion (church, synagogue, mosque, temple, and so forth) that have been very much intertwined for most of history. High- ranked state officials often held high positions in organized religion (for instance, Egypt’s pharaohs, the English monarch since Henry VIII). There- fore, separate attention will be given to the relation between organized religion and state, the rationale for its separation over time (Section 3), and why this separation has been important for the emergence of the nation-state.
State making is related to nation building (Section 4), which is the process of forging together a population on the basis of shared history, culture, language, and so forth, even when most people cannot and never will know one another on a personal basis (see Chapter 2). In some cases nation building preceded state making (as in the cases of, for instance, Germany, Israel, and the United States), while in others it followed (as in the cases of, for instance, England, France, and the Netherlands). There is no real pattern other than that state and nation become more closely intertwined at some point in any country’s history. Even in the case that a state was artificially created and the boundaries of which crossed and separated tribal areas, as has been the case in large parts of Africa and Latin America, there may be a sense of being a Nigerian or a Brazilian next to identifying with a specific tribe. Whether preceded or followed by state making, nation building in the past 150 years or so occurs in the context of defining citizenship. Being a citizen, as noted previously, is the only role that all people have in common in modern society. Losing one’s citizenship means detachment from a state and in many cases also from territory and people. The fact that we identify as citizens and, perhaps more important, that the expression of citizenship varies with level of government requires a comparative discussion of the nature of today’s multilayered citizenship (Section 5), and that provides a nice stepping-stone into the discussion of multilevel government in Chapter 5.