Nation-State
Introduction to Nation-State
Nation-State, territory controlled by a single government and inhabited by a distinct population with a common culture that shapes the identity of its citizens.” (1)
Criminal Justice and the Nation-State
The concept of the modern nation-state emerged in Europe roughly in the 16th century, and it was this powerful concept that drove these nations (e.g., England, Spain, France, Portugal, Holland) to expand and impose their national identities on other countries. The colonized countries, while often more advanced in other respects (e.g. China technologically), did not conceive of themselves as “one nation,” and so became vulnerable to attack by a Western power, with a unified and highly charged political concept of its own “sovereignty.”
It is the dominance of both the concept and legal entity of the nation-state that has demanded
the formal structures of the criminal justice system. All the countries mentioned above
developed the various parts of what we call the criminal justice system today–police, courts,
prisons–at roughly the same time that they emerged as nation-states. Social historians and
critics alike are clear on their identification of this period as contiguous with the rise in complex
organizations and bureaucracies (Weber, 1978; Foucault, 1977) in regard to many aspects of
social and economic life.
Crime and its control were clearly a part of this massive change in the way in which States were organized and structured. Thus, while the actual legal systems may form the basis for the particular modes of decision making in the various countries (e.g. the civil law tradition in contrast to the common law tradition), all modern nation-states have formal systems of law, police forces, prisons, and court systems, regardless of the ethnic, cultural, or religious background of the country.
All nation-states, as part of their very definition, seem to require such formal (criminal) justice structures. That both the concept and legal entity of the “nation-state” are distinctly Western, there can be no doubt. One needs merely to look at the basic charter of the United Nations to see that it emerged from the basic concerns of sovereignty of the Western powers (including the USSR) as a result of the conflict among major nation-states of World War II.
If the events of the period 1970-1990 are any indication, the push for the establishment of new nation-states and their demand for the United Nations recognition has never been stronger. The number of new states that have emerged in that period is stunning.
The cultural aspects of nation-states may strongly influence the criminal justice system.
However, (almost) all countries, no matter what their political or cultural history, have police forces, all have courts of law, and all have prisons. This is quite remarkable in itself, especially since the recent emergence of new nation-states has been based on their reaffirmation of separate cultural and ethnic identities. The formal attributes of criminal justice (police, courts and corrections) have continued to exist, sometimes in stark relief.
There are, of course, wide variations in the extent to which these formal attributes of criminal justice exert influence in the overall social control of a particular country. It might be argued that, in some countries (e.g., Japan) the formal aspects of the criminal justice system (police, courts, corrections) play a very small part in he overall social control of its society. Obviously, the comparative weight of other social control institutions or systems–such as education, manners, family discipline and structure–must be determined on their own merits. Any comparisons of criminal justice systems across countries would, of course, need to take such
factors into account.
Resources
Notes and References
- Information about Nation-State in the Encarta Online Encyclopedia
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