The nation-state is thus not in any general decline, anywhere. In some ways, it is still maturing. However, even if it were declining in the face of the supranational forces that I will shortly analyse, it is still gaining at the expense of the local, the regional, and especially the private forces. The modern nation-state remains a uniquely intense conception of sovereignty. Militarism, communications infrastructures, economic, social, and familial regulation, and intense feelings of national community attachment have been fused into a single caging institution. There is a reality lying behind the facile assumption made by so many social scientists in the recent past that the ‘society’ that they were studying was the nation-state.
But our ‘society’ has never been merely national. It has also been transnational – involving relations that freely cross national boundaries. And it has also been geopolitical – involving the relations between national units. Transnational relations are not merely ‘postmodern’: they have always undercut the sovereignty of all states. Geopolitical relations restrict the sovereignty of states which are parties to binding agreements, and they more persistently undercut the sovereignty of weaker states.