The Translocal Epistemic Origins of the Western Nation-State, 1800 to 1913

Daniel Scott Smith, Duke University

This paper explores the emergence of the Western nation-state using panel regression to analyze variation in 24 time series (V-Dem) describing the development, conflict, nationalization, and scientization of 20 states in Western Europe and North America, 1800-1913. My main claims are: the nation-state was an emergent **idea** with immense but diffusive power; it had translocally contemporaneous and interdependent origins; and it shaped the real policies and structures of specific states. I argue it was so widely impactful an idea because it took a normative political theory rooted in the Enlightenment and Revolutionary periods — nationalism — and legitimated it with the epistemic authority of the “social sciences.” I define “social sciences” as those intellectual activities that elaborated state-centric functionalist theory, elevated it above the fray with naturalism and realism, and reified it with empirical data newly gleaned from populations. If we are to understand the Western nation-state, we must account for the reciprocally constitutive character of nationalism and social-scientism that made the nation-state of no particular place at first and, because of this, increasingly made it fit all manner of places in the end. The truthiness of the Western nation-state, so forged by the historic merger of nationalism and social scientism, explain its self-contradictory character. It is an institutional thing — an abstract cosmopolitan cultural category — defined by and perennially open to translocal epistemic flows, then as now. At the same time, it is imagined to be the idiomatic self-expression of a unique people, which all people everywhere come to share in their own right. This contradiction explains its staying power. And it is this contradiction that made the nineteenth-century Western nation-state less a discrete historical event and more a catching cultural frame that ordered states both domestically and internationally.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 204. Emergent States and the Dynamics of State Formation: Ideas, Institutions, and Social Change