The Transnational and the Modern State: Towards an Analytics of Entangled State-Formation and Statehood

The modern state is commonly conceived to constitute a form of socio-political organization which is conditioned on a process of exclusion and inclusion. Conventionally, the modern state is taken to have resulted historically from the exclusion of others from the possibility to rule authoritatively over a community of individuals living on a piece of land. On the downside of this exclusion, the modern state is seen to have unfolded its inclusionary and normative integrational potential in relation to such community and the space it inhabits. Drawing on the concept of the transnational state, this paper elaborates the argument that the modern state must be conceived to be a genuinely transnational historical form of political rule and government, instead of merely a locally bounded one. Following this perspective, the modern state cannot be taken simply to be the historical product of the exclusion of an outside leading to inclusion on an inside. Rather, taking into account that modern statehood is inextricably linked with the rise of the state in the plural and the need for mutual recognition of statehood between states, the modern state appears to be an embedded and networked form of political rule and government right from the start. As a result, a trans-local embeddedness and networked expansiveness of its function must be assumed to be the very structural features of this organizational form. At the same time, the transnational state cannot be regarded as recent phenomenon having taken shape alongside processes of (economic) globalization, located primarily in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In formulating this perspective on the modern state based on the concept of the transnational state, the paper provides an analytics to rethink the modern state in both historical and contemporary hindsight, and so contributes to fresh avenues for research on globalization and changing modes of socio-political organization today. Against the backdrop of its elaboration, the modern state cannot be plausibly conceived to be a victim of globalization, but instead must be accounted for as being entangled with, if not a motor of, this very process, which, somewhat paradoxically, also is the trans-local condition of the single modern state’s local delimitation. The site where a continuously advancing globalization and its effects on the modern state would play out would thus be, first and foremost, the manner in which the state is trans-locally embedded and networked, as well as sustained, as form of socio-political rule and government. For the purpose of developing this perspective, the paper draws on a historical-comparative analysis of the trans-local conditions of modern statehood between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries and, above all, on (re-)articulations of its form in international legal (con-)texts.