# The State, the Nation and the Political System

Political Science I · Political Science I · https://tryals.app/learn/political-science-i/the-state-the-nation-and-the-political-system

## The State

**Max Weber** gave political science its core definition: the state is the human community that successfully claims the **monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory**.

Every clause matters:

- **Monopoly**: only state violence is recognised as rightful.
- **Legitimate**: society accepts the state's claim to rule.
- **Territory**: authority is bounded by clear geographic borders.
- **Successfully claims**: power is an achievement, not a mere label.

In international law, the **Montevideo Convention** (1933) sets four criteria:

- A permanent population
- A defined territory
- A government
- The capacity to enter relations with other states

External recognition is not on this list.

### Sovereignty

**Jean Bodin** defined sovereignty as supreme, perpetual power over citizens. It has two dimensions:

- **Internal**: no competing authority rules within the territory.
- **External**: no superior authority rules from outside.

The **Peace of Westphalia** is traditionally seen as the birth of this sovereign-state system.

### Nation and State

A **state** is a legal and coercive apparatus. A **nation** is a community united by shared history, culture, or language.

These entities rarely overlap perfectly. The world contains roughly **195** states, but several thousand distinct cultural groups.

Three main traditions explain how nations form:

| Tradition | Core Claim |
|---|---|
| **Primordialist** | Nations are ancient and natural. |
| **Modernist** (Gellner, Anderson, Hobsbawm) | Nations are recent products of industrial society. |
| **Ethnosymbolist** (Smith) | Modern nations build on older ethnic ties. |

Anderson described nations as **imagined communities**. Members will never meet most peers, yet they feel a shared bond.

### The Political System

David **Easton** modeled politics as a processing system:

- Demands and support enter as **inputs**.
- The system processes these into **outputs**, such as laws.
- The **feedback loop** returns the results to shape future inputs.

> **Common pitfall:** Confusing state, nation, and country. The Kurds are a nation without a state. Use these terms carefully.

## Practice questions

8 of this lesson's 13 practice questions, with answers. The full set is in the app.

### 1. Sort each entity by whether it is best described as a STATE, a NATION, or both together.

**Answer:**

- A state: Japan, on most accounts, The Vatican City
- A nation: The Kurds, The Catalans
- A state containing several nations: The United Kingdom, Spain, on most accounts

**Why:** The middle column is the normal case rather than the exception. Roughly 195 states hold several thousand ethnic and linguistic groups between them, so a state whose boundaries coincide with a single nation is unusual, which makes the hyphen in "nation-state" a political claim rather than a description.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/political-science-i/the-state-the-nation-and-the-political-system/sort-each-entity-by-whether-it-is-best-described-as-a-state-a

### 2. Recognition by other states is one of the Montevideo criteria for statehood.

**Answer:** False

**Why:** **False**, and the omission is why contested cases stay contested. The convention lists a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter relations with other states. Recognition is a political act by others, and the declarative theory the convention embodies deliberately keeps it out of the definition.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/political-science-i/the-state-the-nation-and-the-political-system/recognition-by-other-states-is-one-of-the-montevideo-criteria-for

### 3. Approximately how many states are there in the world today?

**Answer:** 195 (within ±20)

**Why:** About **195**, and the vagueness is real: the count depends on how you treat contested and partially recognised entities. Against several thousand ethnic and linguistic groups, this is the arithmetic that makes multinational states the normal case.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/political-science-i/the-state-the-nation-and-the-political-system/approximately-how-many-states-are-there-in-the-world-today

### 4. How many criteria for statehood does the Montevideo Convention list?

**Answer:** 4

**Why:** **Four**: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter relations with other states. The absence of a fifth, recognition, is the deliberate content of the declarative theory of statehood.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/political-science-i/the-state-the-nation-and-the-political-system/how-many-criteria-for-statehood-does-the-montevideo-convention-list

### 5. Complete the account of the state and the nation.

**Answer:** Weber defines the state by its monopoly of the legitimate use of **physical force** within a territory. Bodin defined **sovereignty** as supreme and perpetual power subject to no other authority. Anderson calls the nation an **imagined** community, and Gellner argued that **nationalism** engenders nations rather than the reverse.

**Why:** Gellner's reversal in the last blank is the single most useful idea in the lesson. The intuitive story is that nations existed and then demanded states; the modernist claim is that the movement came first and produced the community it claimed to represent.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/political-science-i/the-state-the-nation-and-the-political-system/complete-the-account-of-the-state-and-the-nation

### 6. Max Weber defines the state by its monopoly on legitimate violence, while Jean Bodin defines sovereignty as supreme power over citizens. If a government faces an armed domestic insurgency that controls territory, what follows for its status?

A. Its internal sovereignty and claim to statehood erode
B. Its sovereignty and statehood both remain intact legally
C. It loses external recognition before losing internal authority
D. It maintains its state monopoly but loses legal sovereignty

**Answer:** A. Its internal sovereignty and claim to statehood erode

**Why:** Weber's definition requires physical control to be successfully claimed, not merely declared, whilst Bodin's internal sovereignty requires no rival authority within the realm. Insurgencies directly fracture both de facto enforcement and supreme internal command.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/political-science-i/the-state-the-nation-and-the-political-system/max-weber-defines-the-state-by-its-monopoly-on-legitimate-violence

### 7. Arrange the elements of Easton's political system model in the order they occur.

**Answer:**

1. Demands and supports enter as inputs
2. The system converts them
3. Authoritative decisions emerge as outputs
4. The outputs alter the environment
5. The altered environment generates new inputs

**Why:** The loop is the model's contribution: politics is continuous rather than a series of separate decisions, and today's output is part of tomorrow's input. Its limit is that it describes a flow without explaining why some demands convert and others never do.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/political-science-i/the-state-the-nation-and-the-political-system/arrange-the-elements-of-eastons-political-system-model-in-the-order

### 8. Arrange these developments in the history of the state in chronological order.

**Answer:**

1. Bodin defines sovereignty, 1576
2. The Peace of Westphalia, 1648
3. Weber's Politics as a Vocation, 1919
4. The Montevideo Convention, 1933
5. Anderson's Imagined Communities, 1983

**Why:** The three-century gap between Bodin and Weber is worth noticing: the concept of sovereignty is early modern, and the definition of the state that the discipline now uses is barely a century old. The "Westphalian system" is itself largely a nineteenth-century construction read backwards onto 1648.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/political-science-i/the-state-the-nation-and-the-political-system/arrange-these-developments-in-the-history-of-the-state-in