1. Legitimacy and stability

According to the classic definition advanced by the legal theory of the state, there are three concepts that define the state: territory, people, and power.¹ However, functionalist historical analyses of the kind developed from Hobbes down to the present ground the concept of the state on the latter's capacity to conduct war, a function to which others, including in particular welfare and industry/commerce, education and technology, have been added in the course of time.² The concept of state power is inextricably linked to the concept of sovereignty; that is, to have supreme, independent authority over a territory (external sovereignty) and a monopoly on the use of force at home (internal sovereignty). However, de facto power alone is not sufficient to ground state sovereignty - at least in the long run. The state, Hegel notes in his Philosophy of Right (1821), is the "reality of the moral idea," that is to say that the state is in need of moral legitimation and that the moral idea must shape the state in its reality, to lend it a certain stability. If today we conceive the state less as an abstract entity than - empirically - as a political system, and if we embed morality and ethics in the overall context of culture, we will be likely to conclude that if they are to be stable, political systems are in need of cultural legitimation.

The concept of a people may be conceived in purely ethnic terms and understood to refer to people of the same race. When we use the term people in connection with the theory of the state, however, what we mean is that body of people that constitutes and sustains a state. We then refer to this body as a nation. However, since the early 19^th century, when the idea that the people that constitutes a nation-state should be a unified ethnic group first arose, leaving countless wars in its wake, it has been difficult to distinguish clearly between the terms people and nation. Still, we can refer to those states as nation-states whose sovereignty is based on the political unity of a people held together by ethnic and/or cultural bonds.³ And what we find is that, in this regard as well, the legitimacy and stability of political rule has cultural roots and premises. It may at first seem trivial to note that a state needs to be in possession of a territory of its own. Or are there states that have no territory? Even the Vatican, small though it may be, has a territory of its own, although its power of course extends far beyond its boundaries. What territory, or space, means for the state is a matter that has been conceived, time and again, in military, economy, and cultural terms. The German term Lebensraum, which came to play an ignominious role under the National Socialists, reflects this function quite well. The people who make up a state live together in one space, a space may be disputed again and again. Divided societies are divided not only in the minds of their members but in their territories themselves. Borders mark the history of peoples that have founded and preserved states in particular spaces. What this implies is that spatial boundaries are among the factors defining the cultural preconditions of the legitimacy and stability of political systems.

1 Jellinek, G. (1921), Allgemeine Staatslehre, 3^rd ed., Kiel, p. 394.

2 Van Creveld, M. (1999), The Rise and Decline of the State, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 189, 336 .

3 Gellner, E. (1983), Nations and Nationalism, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, p. 53.