Public Policy and Federalism

(PPS5051)
Nigussie D. (Ass. Prof)
For your reflection
• What do you understand by Nation State?
Concept of Nation State
• The notion of the nation state building:
 integration of the minorities to the dominant groups,
(voluntarily and forcefully).
 coincidence of the nation and state, and uniformity in the
countries of the language and culture, and marginalizing the
national minorities by denying them access to economic and
political power and resources
 This paved the way for conflict.
• The national minorities resisted the forceful integrations
and faced different challenges and forceful assimilations
including ethnic cleansing, genocide or other forms of
extermination.
• This resulted in minority nationalism, high ethnic and
national self-realization; the quest for self-determination,
• The normative assumption of the nation state
holds that the territorial boundaries of a state
must coincide with the perceived cultural
boundaries of a nation
• “every state must contain within itself one and
not more than one culturally homogenous
nation, that every state should be a nation,
and that every nation should be a state.”
• The nation state did not provide political and
cultural space for diversity; instead,
– the pursuit of unity and territorial integrity at the
expense of national minorities was the dominant idea
for many states.
• Nation-building processes
allows initially loosely linked communities to become a
common society with a nation-state
a political objective as well as a strategy for reaching
specific political objectives
• nation-building was closely related to the
modernization theories -the development
process in the Third World in terms of catching
up with Western models.
• The idea of the nation fills in for the fact that,
normatively, the social and territorial boundaries
of the constitutional state are contingent.
• The modern idea of the nation represents, from
the point of view of the state, a powerful tool of
political mobilization and normative justification
for the territorial delineation of the state.
• The definition of sovereignty as an absolute and
indivisible characteristic of the sovereign
independent from the body politics reached a
peak with the advent of the nation state, since in
this model the state claims to be the
embodiment of the nation.
• Nationalism is those political movements and public
policies that attempt to ensure that states are indeed
'nation-states' in which the state and nation coincide
(Will Kymilicka, 2007).
• Nationalist movements have attempted to make
nations and states coincide in two very different and
conflicting ways. On the one hand, states have
adopted various 'nation-building' policies aimed at
giving citizens a common national language, identity
and culture, which can be termed as state
nationalism. On the other hand, ethnocultural
minorities within a larger state have mobilized to
demand a state of their own which is called 'minority
nationalism'.
• Conventionally, a nation state is understood as a state of
and for one nation. So far the nation state has in practice
been exclusively civic or ethnic/cultural both leading to
extreme views: universlism and extreme particularism.
This approach fails to address the controversial issue of
multicultural states. Most such states like India,
Switzerland, Nigeria, and Ethiopia challenge the
conception of nationalism and the notion of nation state.
• If we take the Gellnerian version of the nation that insists
on the congruence between the nation and the state,
the option available to multicultural state seem to be
two: there is a simple choice between nationalist
homogenization through assimilation and nationalist
secession which produces another nationalist
homogenization.
• The nation-state model is not particularly well
suited to govern states with culturally mixed
populations who demand political recognition
to their cultural identity.
• The problem is unfortunately common and
solutions are hard to find, let alone
implement. There are more nations than
states. States require a delimited territorial
space to exercise sovereignty.
• In this regard, the match between nation and
state is often problematic, as it is common to
find that territorial spaces occupied by states
that are home to more than one nation
• The three closely interlinked and central elements
of successful nation-building are a unifying and
persuasive ideology, integration of society and a
functional state apparatus.
• Nation-building will only be successful in the long
term if it stems from an integrative ideology or
produces this from a certain point on.
• Fundamental restructuring of politics and society
requires special legitimation with regard to
justification of policy as well as social mobilization
for its ends. The different variations of ‘nationalism’
clearly have to be regarded as the classic ideology
of nation-building.
• Many theorists of globalization predict the decline of the
nation-state, classically conceived as:
 a sovereign political community,
 territorially bounded,
 culturally homogeneous, and
 economically integrated.
• The autonomy of the nation-state is mitigated by the
growth of transnational institutions that have resulted in
a pooling or loss of sovereignty. The identity of nations
has also been recast. The unlikelihood of large-scale war
between great powers means the loss of the traditional
mechanism of collective differentiation: an appeal to us
versus them
• The nation-state model is not particularly well
suited to govern states with culturally mixed
populations who demand political recognition
to their cultural identity.
• The problem is unfortunately common and
solutions are hard to find, let alone implement.
There are more nations than states.
• States require a delimited territorial space to
exercise sovereignty.
• The match between nation and state is often
problematic, as it is common to find that
territorial spaces occupied by states that are
home to more than one nation
• The three closely interlinked and central
elements of successful nation-building which
were identified by (Hippler, 2005) are:
– a unifying and persuasive ideology,
– integration of society and
– a functional state apparatus
Challenges of Nation States in Diverse Societies
• mono-cultural: stable democracies could not
be maintained in the face of cultural diversity.
• the pain and willful destruction that minorities
and majorities experience as a result of bitter
struggles for secession.
Solutions for the Challenges of Nation State
• diversity management
• cultural recognition, equal rights, good
governance and political participation
• Multi-nationalism, multiculturalism and
multilingualism