Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am sitting here in our living room in Jerusalem with my brother.
Herman Poppleberry, at your service. It is good to be here, Corn. We have got a fascinating topic today that our housemate Daniel sent over. He was thinking about how we define the world today, specifically this idea of countries.
Yeah, Daniel was talking about the centimeter level precision of modern borders, like the blue line here in the region, and how that contrasts with the much more fluid, often messy history of human organization. It is easy to look at a map today and assume the world has always been a collection of neatly colored shapes with clear lines, but that is a very modern luxury, or a modern complication, depending on how you look at it.
It really is. Most people do not realize that the concept of a country, as we understand it today, is actually quite young. If you went back even four hundred years, the way people thought about political power and identity would be almost unrecognizable to us. There was no ISO standard for country codes back then.
Right, and that is what I want to dig into. How did we get from city states and sprawling, undefined empires to this very rigid system of sovereign nations? What was the actual turning point where the first modern country emerged?
That is the million dollar question. To answer it, we have to start by distinguishing between three terms that people often use interchangeably but which mean very different things in political science: the nation, the state, and the country.
Okay, let us break those down. Because I think most of us just say country and call it a day.
Exactly. A nation is a group of people who share a common culture, language, or history. You can have a nation without a state, like the Kurds or the Jewish people before nineteen forty eight. A state, on the other hand, is a political entity. It has a government, a territory, and it claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within that territory. This is Max Weber’s classic definition. And a country? That is more of a geographical and social term that encompasses both.
So, when we talk about the first modern country, are we talking about the first time a group of people felt like a nation, or the first time a state functioned like a modern one?
We are usually talking about the emergence of the sovereign state. In the ancient world, you had empires like Rome or the Han Dynasty in China. But they did not have borders in the way we think of them. They had frontiers. There was a center of power, and as you moved further away, that power just kind of faded out until you hit another empire or a group they considered barbarians. There was no line on the ground where Roman law ended and something else began with total precision.
That is an interesting distinction. So, it was more about the reach of the tax collector or the army rather than a legal boundary?
Exactly. And inside those empires, you had all sorts of overlapping authorities. In medieval Europe, for example, a person might owe loyalty to a local lord, who owed loyalty to a king, who might be a vassal to another king, while everyone was also subject to the authority of the Church. It was a messy, hierarchical web of personal loyalties. There was no single, supreme authority over a specific piece of dirt.
This is where it gets interesting. Because if you have overlapping loyalties, you do not really have a sovereign state. So, what changed? When did we decide that one government has total control over one specific area?
Most historians point to a very specific date and a very specific event: sixteen forty eight and the Peace of Westphalia. This is where the modern world really begins to take shape.
I have heard you mention Westphalia before. It was the end of the Thirty Years War, right? But why was a peace treaty the birth of the modern country?
It was revolutionary because it established the principle of Westphalian Sovereignty. Before this, the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy claimed a kind of universal authority over Europe. The Peace of Westphalia changed the game by saying that each prince or ruler had the right to govern their own territory without outside interference, especially regarding religion. This is the famous principle of cuius regio, eius religio—whose realm, his religion. It established the idea of territorial integrity.
So, it was basically a big agreement to mind your own business?
In a way, yes. It said, within these lines, I am the boss. You cannot tell me how to run my church or my laws, and I will not tell you how to run yours. This created the framework for the state as the primary actor in international relations. It moved power away from universal religious or imperial claims and toward the idea of a defined territory with a single sovereign head.
That explains the state part, the political structure. But how did that become a country in the sense of a nation state? When did the people living there start feeling like they were part of that specific unit?
That took another century or two. You see, after Westphalia, you had states, but the people living in them were still mostly subjects of a crown. They did not necessarily feel like Frenchmen or Prussians; they felt like peasants of a certain lord. The transition to the nation state required the rise of nationalism, which really kicked off in the late eighteenth century.
I am guessing the French Revolution played a massive role there.
Oh, absolutely. The French Revolution in seventeen eighty nine was the moment where the idea of the people as the source of sovereignty really took hold. It was no longer the King's France; it was the French people's France. This is where you get the first modern nation state. It combined the political structure of the state with the cultural identity of the nation. They introduced a national flag, a national anthem, a national language, and a national education system. They were consciously building a country.
It is almost like they were branding the territory.
That is a great way to put it. They were creating a shared identity that could hold millions of people together, even if they never met each other. This is what Benedict Anderson famously called an imagined community. You will never meet every other person in your country, but you feel a connection to them because you share this brand, this national identity.
But wait, if France was the first modern nation state in the late seventeen hundreds, what about England? Or even ancient city states like Athens? Could you not argue they were countries?
You could argue it, but they were missing key pieces of the modern puzzle. Athens was a city state, but it did not have the broad territorial scale or the international recognition system we have now. England is an interesting case. It had a very strong sense of identity and a centralized government quite early, but until the Acts of Union in seventeen oh seven, and even after, the concept of sovereignty was still very tied to the person of the monarch. The modern country requires an abstract state that exists independently of who is currently wearing the crown.
Okay, so we have the political structure from Westphalia in sixteen forty eight, and the national identity from the French Revolution in seventeen eighty nine. How did this model spread to the rest of the world? Because today, almost every square inch of land is claimed by a country.
It spread through a combination of imitation and, frankly, colonial imposition. In the nineteenth century, as European powers colonized the globe, they brought their concept of borders and states with them. They drew lines on maps in places like Africa and the Middle East, often ignoring the existing tribal or ethnic boundaries.
This seems like a major point of friction. Daniel mentioned the precision of modern borders, but if those borders were drawn by Europeans in a boardroom in Berlin, they are going to be fundamentally artificial, right?
Exactly. This is one of the biggest legacies of the nineteenth century. When these colonies gained independence in the mid twentieth century, they mostly kept the borders the colonizers had drawn. Why? Because the international system, through the League of Nations and then the United Nations, was built on the idea of recognizing existing states. If you started redrawing borders based on ethnicity or history, the whole system might have collapsed into endless war.
So, the modern system is less about natural groups of people and more about maintaining a stable grid of administrative units?
That is exactly what it is. And this brings us to the Montevideo Convention of nineteen thirty three. This is a very nerdy bit of international law, but it is crucial because it defines the legal personhood of a state.
I am ready. What are the four criteria?
First, a permanent population. Second, a defined territory. Third, a government. And fourth, the capacity to enter into relations with other states.
That last one seems like the most important. It is not enough to say you are a country; other countries have to agree with you.
Precisely. This is the difference between the declaratory theory—where you are a state just because you meet the criteria—and the constitutive theory, where you are only a state if other states recognize you. This is why places like Somaliland or Transnistria are in such a weird limbo. They have a population, a territory, and a government, but they lack widespread international recognition. In the modern world, being a country is as much about being part of the club as it is about what is happening on the ground.
It is like a social network for governments. If you are not on the list, you do not exist in the eyes of the bank, the postal service, or the Olympics.
Exactly. And speaking of lists, that is where things like the ISO three one six six standard come in. These are the two letter codes like U S for the United States or F R for France. These standards are what allow the modern world to function. When you buy something online or send a letter, the systems that move that data or that package rely on these standardized definitions of what a country is.
It is fascinating how much of our reality is built on these invisible layers of standardization. But here is what I am wondering: is this system of sovereign nation states actually the best way to organize humanity? We have only been doing it this way for a few hundred years. Is it an improvement over empires, or just a different set of problems?
That is a deep question, Corn. The nation state has been incredibly effective at a few things. It allows for massive scale mobilization, which is why we saw such devastating wars in the twentieth century, but also why we were able to build huge infrastructure projects and welfare states. It provides a clear legal framework for trade and human rights, at least in theory.
But it also creates these hard barriers. If you are born on one side of a line, your life prospects might be ten times better than if you were born five miles away on the other side. That seems incredibly arbitrary in a globalized world.
It is completely arbitrary. And that is the tension we are living in right now. We have a global economy and global challenges like climate change that do not care about borders. Yet, our political power is still strictly bounded by these Westphalian lines. We are trying to solve twenty first century problems with a seventeenth century organizational model.
Do you think we are seeing the beginning of the end for the nation state? With things like the European Union, or even the rise of massive multinational corporations that have more wealth than many countries, are the lines starting to blur again?
It is possible. We might be moving toward a new kind of overlapping authority, almost like a high tech version of the medieval system. You might be a citizen of a country, a resident of a powerful city state, and a member of a digital community, all of which claim some part of your loyalty and provide different services.
That sounds both exciting and slightly terrifying. But let us go back to the transition for a moment. How did we move from ancient empires to this? Was there a specific moment where the idea of a border changed from a fuzzy frontier to a specific line?
A lot of that comes down to technology. Before the invention of accurate surveying tools and cartography, it was physically impossible to define a border with centimeter precision. In the eighteenth century, the Cassini family in France spent decades creating the first truly accurate map of a whole country using triangulation. When King Louis the Fifteenth saw the results, he famously joked that his surveyors had cost him more territory than his enemies, because the accurate map showed France was smaller than he thought.
That is hilarious. So, the king's power was literally redefined by a better ruler and a compass.
Yes. And as we got better at measuring the earth, we got more obsessed with defining exactly where one power ended and another began. This led to the creation of border commissions. In the nineteenth century, these commissions would go out into the wilderness with telescopes and chains to mark exactly where the line was. They would build stone pillars every few miles.
I imagine that led to some pretty intense arguments.
Oh, you have no idea. There are stories of border commissions spending months arguing over which side of a specific stream or a specific hill the line should fall on. Because now, that line meant everything. It meant whose laws applied, whose taxes were collected, and whose army would defend the land.
It is a huge shift in mindset. From I control this general area to I control every blade of grass up to this exact point.
And that brings us back to what Daniel was saying about G P S. Today, we do not need stone pillars. We have satellites that can tell us exactly where we are relative to a digital line. But that precision can actually create more conflict. If you know exactly where the line is, you can argue over every inch. In the past, if the border was just somewhere in that forest, there was a buffer zone where people could just exist without much trouble.
The buffer zones are gone. Now everything is a hard edge.
Exactly. And this has led to some very strange situations. Have you ever heard of the Baarle-Hertog enclaves?
No, what are those?
It is a town on the border of Belgium and the Netherlands. The border there is so complex that it literally cuts through houses and restaurants. There is a famous story where the border went right through the middle of a restaurant. When Dutch law said restaurants had to close early, the customers would just move their tables to the Belgian side of the room and keep eating.
That is the perfect example of how artificial these lines are. The people are the same, the food is the same, but the line on the floor changes everything.
It really highlights that a country is not a physical thing. It is a legal and social construct that we all agree to believe in. The land is just land. We are the ones who turn it into France or Germany or Israel.
So, if we look back at the original question about when the first modern country emerged, it sounds like there is not one single birthday. It was a slow evolution.
Right. You have the seeds in the late Middle Ages as kings started centralizing power. You have the legal framework in sixteen forty eight with Westphalia. You have the emotional and cultural soul added in the late seventeen hundreds with the French Revolution. And then you have the global standardization in the twentieth century with the United Nations and the I S O.
It is like a recipe that took four hundred years to cook.
And we are still tweaking the seasonings. Think about how much the map has changed just in our lifetimes. The Soviet Union dissolved into fifteen different countries. Yugoslavia broke apart. South Sudan became a country in twenty eleven. Even as recently as twenty twenty four and twenty twenty five, we have seen intense debates over maritime borders and the recognition of states like Palestine or the status of Somaliland. The process of defining and redefining countries is ongoing.
It makes me wonder what the map will look like in another hundred years. Will we still have two hundred odd sovereign states? Or will we have moved on to something else?
I think we might see a divergence. On one hand, you have these massive regional blocs like the European Union trying to transcend the nation state. On the other hand, you have hundreds of separatist movements around the world where people want to create even smaller, more specific countries based on their unique identities.
It is like we are moving in two opposite directions at once. Global integration and local fragmentation.
Precisely. And the technology that Daniel mentioned, like G P S and the internet, is fueling both. It makes global trade and communication effortless, but it also allows small groups of people to organize and demand their own space on the map.
This really changes how I look at a map. It is not just a picture of the world; it is a snapshot of a very specific, very complex human agreement that is constantly being negotiated.
That is a beautiful way to put it. The map is a contract. And like any contract, it can be amended, challenged, or completely rewritten.
Before we wrap up this part of the discussion, I want to touch on one more thing. We have talked about the state and the nation, but what about the role of internal governance? How did that change as we moved toward the modern country?
That is a crucial piece. In an empire, the government was often very distant. As long as you paid your taxes and did not rebel, the emperor did not really care how you lived your daily life. But the modern country is much more intrusive. It wants to count you, it wants to educate you, it wants to provide you with a passport and a social security number.
The state became much more present in the lives of ordinary people.
Exactly. This is what James C. Scott calls seeing like a state. To govern a modern country, the government has to make society legible. They need maps, they need censuses, they need standardized weights and measures. They need to turn a messy reality into a set of data points they can manage.
So, the standardization Daniel likes so much, like I S O codes, is actually a tool of government control?
In a sense, yes. It is a tool of administration. You cannot have a modern welfare state or a modern tax system without that level of detail. The precision of the border is just the outermost layer of a system that is precise all the way down to your individual identity.
It is fascinating. We traded the messy, overlapping freedoms of the ancient and medieval world for the clarity and services of the modern nation state.
And the security. One of the main reasons the state model won out is that it was simply better at winning wars. A centralized state can raise a bigger army and fund it more efficiently than a decentralized feudal system. For a few centuries, if you were not a state, you were likely to be conquered by one.
So, it was a survival of the fittest for political organizations.
Exactly. The sovereign state was the apex predator of political structures for a long time.
Well, this has been a deep dive. I feel like I have a much better handle on why the world looks the way it does. It is not just random; it is the result of centuries of legal, technological, and social engineering.
It really is. And it is something we take for granted every time we cross a border or look at a map.
Before we finish up, I want to remind everyone that if you are enjoying these deep dives into the weird prompts Daniel sends us, we would really appreciate it if you could leave a review on your podcast app or on Spotify. It genuinely helps other people find the show.
It really does. We love seeing the feedback and knowing that people are out there thinking about this stuff with us.
So, what are the practical takeaways here? If someone is looking at the world today and feeling overwhelmed by the news and the borders and the conflicts, what should they keep in mind?
I think the biggest takeaway is that the current system is not permanent. It is a relatively new experiment in human history. Understanding that these borders and these national identities are constructed can help us be more flexible in how we think about solving global problems.
That is a good point. If we made these systems, we can change them. They are not laws of nature like gravity; they are more like the rules of a game we are all playing.
Exactly. And the more we understand the rules and where they came from, the better we can play the game, or even propose a new set of rules when the old ones stop working.
I also think it is worth reflecting on the sheer level of cooperation that the modern system requires. The fact that you can send a letter from Jerusalem to a tiny town in rural Canada and it will actually get there is a miracle of international standardization and recognition.
It really is. Underneath all the political conflict, there is this massive, quiet infrastructure of cooperation that keeps the world running. Every time an I S O code is used, or a G P S coordinate is verified, that is a moment of global consensus.
That is a surprisingly hopeful note to end on. Despite all the lines we draw to separate ourselves, we have built these incredible systems to keep us connected.
We really have. The lines on the map are just one part of the story.
Well, I think that is a wrap for today's episode. Thanks for diving into this with me, Herman. I always learn something new when we get into these historical transitions.
My pleasure, Corn. It is always a blast to nerd out on the Peace of Westphalia.
I know you have been waiting all week to say Westphalian Sovereignty.
Guilty as charged.
Alright everyone, thanks for listening to My Weird Prompts. You can find us on Spotify and at our website, myweirdprompts dot com, where we have our full archive and an R S S feed if you want to subscribe.
And if you have a weird prompt of your own, there is a contact form on the site. We would love to hear what is on your mind.
Until next time, I am Corn.
And I am Herman Poppleberry.
Goodbye.
