Political Patterns and Processes

A state is an independent country with territory, people, a government and sovereignty, while a nation is a group of people who share a culture and identity. A nation-state is a state made up mostly of one nation; Japan and Iceland are often given as examples. A stateless nation, like the Kurds, has no state of its own. A multinational state, like the United Kingdom, holds several nations, and a multistate nation, like the Koreans, spreads across more than one state. Some areas, like Native American reservations or Greenland, have partial self-rule.

Sovereignty is a state's right to govern itself without outside control, and self-determination is the idea that a people should choose their own government. Colonialism and imperialism drew many of today's borders, independence movements created dozens of new states in Africa and Asia after World War II, and the Soviet Union broke apart into 15 countries, largely along national lines, in 1991.

Geographers see political power in who controls territory, the people living there and what's in the ground or the water. Neocolonialism is when powerful countries or companies steer weaker states through money, debt and trade instead of direct rule. A shatterbelt is a region split by internal divisions and pulled between outside powers. A choke point is a narrow passage, like the Strait of Hormuz or the Suez Canal, that gives leverage to whoever controls it, and territoriality is people's attachment to their land and their effort to control it.

Boundaries are classified by how and when they were drawn. Antecedent boundaries came before most people settled there, and subsequent ones were drawn after settlement. Consequent boundaries follow cultural lines like language or religion, while superimposed ones were forced on an area by outside powers, as with many African borders. Geometric boundaries follow straight lines, such as the 49th parallel between the U.S. and Canada, and relict boundaries no longer work but still leave traces, like pieces of the Berlin Wall.

A boundary is defined in a legal document, delimited on a map, demarcated on the ground with fences or markers, and administered by officials who enforce it. Even so, many boundaries are still disputed. Some lines come from war, like the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, or from outside decisions, like the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, where European powers set rules for claiming Africa without any African leaders present. At sea, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea gives countries a 12-nautical-mile territorial sea and a 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone for fishing, oil and gas.

In the U.S., House seats are reapportioned (shared out) among the states after each 10-year census, and states then redraw their voting districts, which is called redistricting. Gerrymandering is drawing district lines to help one party or group, using packing (crowding the other side's voters into a few districts) and cracking (splitting them across many); it can change election results at local, state and national scales.

A unitary state concentrates power in the national government, which makes decisions from the top down, as in France or Japan. A federal state shares power between the national government and states or provinces with their own powers, as in the United States, Germany, India and Nigeria, which often suits large or culturally diverse countries.

Devolution is when power moves from the central government to regions, and it can be driven by physical barriers that separate people, ethnic separatism (like independence movements in Catalonia and Quebec), ethnic cleansing, terrorism, and economic or social gaps between regions. Irredentism, a state claiming land in another country where people of its own ethnicity live, can also pull states apart, as when Nazi Germany claimed the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Sometimes a central government hands power to regions with their own governments, like Catalonia in Spain, Flanders and Wallonia in Belgium, or Quebec in Canada. Sometimes a state breaks apart completely: the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and South Sudan split from Sudan in 2011. Phones, the internet and social media help people organize, whether they want independence, democracy or closer ties between countries. Supranational organizations like the UN, NATO, the EU, ASEAN, the Arctic Council and the African Union help countries handle shared problems, trade and defense, but members give up some freedom to act alone.

Centrifugal forces divide a state and can lead to uneven development, separatist movements and even failed states, where the government can no longer provide basic security or services, as in Somalia after its central government collapsed in 1991. Centripetal forces unite a state through shared identity, fair investment in roads and services across regions, and national symbols. Ethnonationalism, strong loyalty to one's own ethnic nation, can unite a state where most people share that identity, but it can also push minority groups away.