What Was the Modern Nation-State?
（The modern world has been built around the “nation-state.” It has borders, a dominant national group and its language, and sovereignty over its territory. We were taught in school that the seventeenth-century Peace of Westphalia established these principles and that sovereign states stand as equals.
Today, however, this idea of the modern state is being challenged from several directions. In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine and tried to replace its government—an attempt that failed. Donald Trump, who returned to the U.S. presidency in 2025, has openly embraced the imperial thinking of the nineteenth century. He used military force to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and remove him from power.
Has the modern state become an anachronism? Or are Russia and Trump the anachronisms?
To judge, we need to look back at history. So far, we have traced my book The Lost Modern Age as far back as ancient Greece.
Now let us leap forward to seventeenth-century Western Europe and ask how the modern state took shape there.
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The source text is “In Search of Lost Modernity” by Akio KAWATO.
The English edition of this book (originally written in Japanese) is on
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hiRK7kjbX0Hxd2NOxPqtQlVWgjDHgKCr/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MB0Me9P5Lpa2HGceuJUdMqqQ2CRHQSxa/edit)
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(The copyright belongs to the author, Akio Kawato)
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The establishment of the “sovereign state”
In the early 17th century, the Thirty Years’ War marked the decline of transnational players such as the Roman Catholic Church and Venice, as well as the Spanish Empire led by the Habsburg dynasty, and the rise of modern nation-states such as France, England, and the Netherlands as the main players in European international politics. Although representatives of the Roman Catholic Church and Venice were present during the negotiations of the Peace of Westphalia (1648), they did not sign the treaty as signatory states.
Queen Christina of Sweden, who played a major role in ending the Thirty Years’ War, did not seek much territory and instead placed “sovereign states” at the center of the Westphalian system, marking a turning point. Sweden, which had close economic ties with the Netherlands, embodied the Dutch intention to weaken the Holy Roman Empire (this intention was shared by France, though it antagonized the Netherlands). The most important treaty within the Westphalian system, the Treaty of Münster, formalized the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire: the treaty was formally signed by representatives of German city-states such as Mainz and Bavaria.
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As a result, more than 300 “sovereign states” emerged within the territory of the Holy Roman Empire. Among these, about 50 powerful states sent envoys to foreign countries and engaged in “diplomacy.” These included Saxony, Bavaria, Brandenburg-Prussia, Hamburg, Lübeck, and Frankfurt. The writer and poet Goethe was involved in the politics and administration of the Weimar Republic.
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Sovereign states already existed before the Thirty Years’ War. Examples include England, France, and Sweden. Initially, their scale was small, not much different from city-states like Venice. In the 16th century, national budgets were as follows: Castile at nine million ducats, France at five million, Venice at 3.9 million, and the Ottoman Empire at six million.
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France, which emerged victorious from the Thirty Years’ War, and England, which remained neutral during the war, went beyond the framework of sovereign states and strove to create empires by subjugating other countries by force. They made great efforts, and the First World War became a battle between these colonial empires.
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And in the 2020s, multi-ethnic nations such as the United States, China, India, Brazil, and Russia, which stand out in terms of population and territory, behave as single “nation-states” or sovereign states, overshadowing long-established nation-states such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan.
(to be continued)
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