As a political model, the nation-state fuses two principles: the principle of state sovereignty, first articulated in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which recognizes the right of states to govern their territories without external interference; and the principle of national sovereignty, which recognizes the right of national communities to govern themselves. National sovereignty in turn is based on the moral-philosophical principle of popular sovereignty, according to which states belong to their peoples. The latter principle implies that legitimate rule of a state requires some sort of consent by the people. That requirement does not mean, however, that all nation-states are democratic. Indeed, many authoritarian rulers have presented themselves—both to the outside world of states and internally to the people under their rule—as ruling in the name of a sovereign nation. Although France after the French Revolution (1787–99) is often cited as the first nation-state, some scholars consider the establishment of the English Commonwealth in 1649 as the earliest instance ofnation-state creation. Since the late 18th century the nation-state has gradually become the dominant vehicle of rule over geographic territories, replacing polities that were governed through other principles of legitimacy. The latter included dynastic monarchies (e.g., the Habsburg and Ethiopian empires), theocratic states (e.g., the Dalai Lama’s rule over Tibet and the rule of the prince-bishops of Montenegro), colonial empires (justified by colonizing powers as a means of spreading a “true” religion or of bringing progress to “backward” peoples), and communist revolutionary governments that purported to act in the name of a transnational working class (see proletariat; social class: Characteristics of the principal classes).Although some nation-states have been formed by polity-seeking national movements, others have formed when existing polities were nationalized—i.e., transformed into nation-states—either because theocrats or monarchs ceded authority to parliaments (as in Britain and France) or because empires retreated or broke apart (as did the British and French colonial empires in the mid-20th century and the Soviet empire in eastern Europe beginning in the late 1980s). As a political ideal, nationalism aspires to a congruence between state borders and the boundaries of the national community, so that the national group is contained in the territory of its state and the state contains only that nation. However, in reality, the borders of states and the boundaries of nations usually only partly overlap: not all residents of the state belong to the core national group (sometimes not even all citizens are part of the nation), and some members of the nation reside in other states.
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