Lecture 2 . We live today in the world's first universal, multicultural, and multiregional system of sovereign states. · Five centuries ago, emergent sovereign states were confined to Europe and contained within the bounds of Latin Christendom. Through five great waves of expansion this nascent European system globalized . But this transition to a system of nation states has often been violent and as we saw in the last lecture, the root cause of most of the wars since 1945. · Why is this? . To answer these this questions we look at the nation-state its characteristics and its development. . To begin this lecture I want to start with considering nationalism, then the role of ideas and identity in founding the Westphalian state, then how war led to strong states capable of more war. We'll then look at decolonization and the Indonesia's struggle to become a cohesive and strong nation- state. Nationalism · The French Revolution remains of enduring fascination for social scientists for many reasons. · Firstly, it was clearly an epochal event - peasants rising up and overthrowing an entire ruling class. Karl Marx was fascinated in why, in the short term, it appeared that after such momentous beginnings, the revolution appeared to fail. In his lifetime France had reverted to rule by an emperor. . The second reason the French Revolution is important is that it set in train the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon, and the revolutionaries, embarked on a crusade to spread their enlightenment Republican values across Europe in the early nineteenth century, resulting in the most bloddy wars then experienced. Napoleon raised mass armies of conscripts, changing warfare. The end of the Napoleonic Wars also resulted in one of the first efforts at multilateralism and Great Power management, the so-called Concert of Europe. The Concert of Europe is believed by many to have maintained a Long Peace in Europe, only shattered by the advent of World War I. . Thirdly, the French Revolution was one of the first times in history that a large groups of people began to be bound together by a set of shared values, "liberty, equality, fraternity" rather than loyalty to a monarch. · Only two rulers previously, in the reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King, things had been quite different. Louis had brought France to its peak of absolute power, but all revolved around him. As he stated at the time, 'L'etat c'est moi' ('I am the state') express the spirit of a rule in which the king held all political authority. . Ultimately all states began to try to define a secular nationalism, that was more than simply loyaty to the monarch. Britain's formula was "god, King and Country". . These efforts to define nationalism ultimately spread to our own region, including Southeast Asia, and one of the first states to try to define a nationalism was the only uncolonized country, Thailand. . In 1893 France and Thailand, then called Siam, were in a dispute over territyory and