ISSUES AND PROBLEMS

States are territorial forms of political organization, which raises a number of difficult questions. What are the boundaries of a state's authority? Specifically, why should the jurisdiction of states be territorial? And who are the subjects of states? Are subjects to be understood as members? Who may form a state?

These are some of the most intractable questions that can be raised about states, and little I have said thus far provides any easy answers to them. Most of the time we simply assume that the residents of a territory are the proper subjects or members of the state that is coextensive with that territory, and that the interests of nonsubjects can be ignored. But this assumption, tacit or explicit, requires defense. What is the rationale for the boundaries of that territory? There are many ways of dividing the set of residents into smaller subsets. Why privilege the set of the whole? In this chapter, I address some of the issues that are raised by questions about boundaries. I critically examine some of the influential answers to these questions, particularly the influential view that states are to be “nation-states”.

The first European answer implicitly given to these questions of boundaries and membership was simple. The boundaries of a state are the boundaries of the kingdom – or, in later postcolonial times, the colony – from which it evolved.