The Nation-State Is An Outmoded Concept. Discuss.

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The Nation-State Is An Outmoded Concept. Discuss.

So deeply ingrained is the tendency to funnel society into the mold prepared for it by the nation-state that we cannot conceive of societies except as thoroughly congruent with the state, as if the teleology of all social entities were the state.
(Said 1994: 350)
This truism constitutes a succinct expression of the pre-eminence of the nation-state in global societal organisations. The world is largely divided up into these unitary, enclosed identities whose legitimacy is derived the ‘nation’ or the ‘people’ as the sole source of sovereignty. Obviously, the degree to which the state can claim such legitimacy varies a great deal, but at the very least the state claims to represent the national interest. Yet, the nation-state as the overarching meta-paradigm of how a cohesive society should organise itself political is currently being undermined under several fronts, whilst, as evident in the wilful destruction of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the bloody emergence of newly created nation-states in the region, where it is being revived its worst qualities are revealed.
The modern theory of the state rests upon the nation as source of sovereignty and legitimacy. A political arrangement between society and the government towards the protection of citizens and their rights. Hobbes perceived the state as ‘an artificial life’, a conscious, willed construct.
For by Art is created that great Leviathan called a common-wealth, or State which is but an artificial Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Sovereignty is an Artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body. (Hobbes 1951: 81)
Ronen Palan argues, from a perspective that seeks to place technological innovation at the centre of our understanding of changing international relations, that the Hobbesian use of metaphors of the state as an organic entity or as ‘automata’, ‘engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch’ (ibid.: 81) establishes a model that encourages us to conceive of the globe as being partitioned into highly organised, bounded and self-enclosed societies. Further from this is the tendency to see the geographic area which the state claims sovereignty over as the actualisation of the social body, thus determining that the defence of the national territory as the primary concern of the state (Talalay et al, 1997: 17).
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