Sovereignty

Discussion

Sovereignty and Technology

Josu Jon Imaz:

“The concepts of nation and sovereignty seem to have always existed. However, they were born within a specific context that was determined by two technological advances that took place in the 16th and 17th centuries: the press and the steam engine.

The standardisation of linguistic and cultural spaces generated by the press spread the perception of belonging in broader spaces than those which human beings had previously been used to. In turn, the steam engine and the industrial revolution joined the latter phenomenon to form economic domains that merged with constituted cultural spaces, giving rise to the nation-State, the dominant political structure for two centuries. The response by the cultural and linguistic spaces which were not articulated by that economic and political reality was to promote 19th- and 20th-century European nationalisms, which finally constituted statal entities in some cases (Italy, Germany, Norway, Finland, Czech Republic, etc.), whereas other ones were left as cultural or national spaces lacking a state structure, or in some cases as unstable or unsolved problems.” (http://deugarte.com/gomi/Nations.pdf)

More Information

1. End of the Nation-State