Globalisation and the European Union are not leading to the demise of the nation state as is commonly stated, a weekend summer school in Dublin has been told.
The "end of the nation-state" thesis is based on a faulty analysis of 20th-century European history, European integration and the process of state formation itself, a sociology professor, Prof Liam O'Dowd, from Queen's University Belfast, told the Desmond Greaves Summer School in the Labour History Museum.
Mr Desmond Greaves, who died in 1988, was a Marxist labour historian, biographer of James Connolly and general secretary of the London-based Connolly Association.
Prof O'Dowd said that far from marking the demise of the national state, 20th-century Europe "has been a factory of national states in the wake of the successive collapse of the great multinational empires, culminating in the break-up of the USSR in 1991".
Fifteen new states were created in Europe between 1989 and 1999. Of the 48 sovereign states in Europe in 1993, 36 came into being in this century, compared to 12 in the three previous centuries.
In its most radical form, the "end of the nation-state" thesis "disables analysis and obscures our understanding of how national states and borders are being re shaped and reconfigured", he said.
"The thesis also is politically suspect in that it fuels a sense of fatalism and inertia, that is, the belief that there are few real choices left for national politics and national governments other than to adapt to the all-embracing influences of globalisation and Europeanisation."
Prof O'Dowd said national states and governments had been active agents of globalisation and European integration rather than passive entities shaped by external changes.
Members-states of the EU were being reconfigured and reconstituted in ways which deserved close scrutiny, and it was misleading to represent these changes simply as "a progressive loss of some mythical exclusivistic sovereignty which can or should be reclaimed", he said.
"Indeed, the substantive sovereignty of small states such as the Republic of Ireland may have been enhanced by a European regulatory regime which constrains more powerful member-states."
Prof O'Dowd said this enhancement had been accompanied by material benefits, but had come at a price - the power of largely non-accountable technocratic, bureaucratic and business elites had increased at the expense of elected representatives.
He believed there was a "pressing need to develop new forms of national and trans-national democracy in the emerging European and global order ".