The European State in Comparative Perspective

The sovereign state system did not emerge all at once, and certainly not at Westphalia. State building in Europe has been incremental, unfolding over centuries. While some approximations of modern states emerged in Europe between the 11^th and 13^th centuries, other states are very recent creations. Alternative forms of political organization to the sovereign state have continued to coexist with sovereign states through the centuries, some even up to the present. The norm of sovereignty – both its internal and international dimensions - has been regularly violated (Krasner 2001 ). Even after the Treaty of Versailles when the principle of national self-determination perhaps reached its apogee, minority rights treaties constrained the authority of governments within their borders (ie constrained their ‘domestic sovereignty’).  Even into the 20^th and 21^stcenturies, nominally sovereign states have been subject to varying degrees of foreign domination – from the east European states subject to Soviet control, to Germany which was rendered a “semi-sovereign state” in the post-War years by the victorious Allied powers, to Greece whose finances have repeatedly been subject to control by foreign creditors from its independence in the 1830s to the present.  With the deepening of the process of European integration, twenty-seven European states have in practice voluntarily surrendered much of their sovereignty to a quasi-federation, the European Union (EU).