State/Statehood

ENRIQUE PERUZZOTTI

The International Encyclopedia of Political Communication

Wiley-Blackwell

Año: 2015;

The modern state is the product of a specific developmental process that unfolded over several centuries in Western European societies which resulted in the establishment of a centralized and unitary structure of power that claim sovereign authority over a delimited territory and population. Such a unique process of political institutionalization was possible due to the distinctive traits that such region of the world developed during the feudal period. The patrimonial system of authority of the late European feudal society consisted on an extensive, dispersed and uniform political structure that distributed power among a plurality of patrimonial lords (Weber, 1978). The concept of the Staendestaat or ?polity of the Estates? is frequently used to describe such political form of domination: it consisted on a decentralized structure of political authority of scattered autonomous local powers that established multiple alliances and mutual constrains among one another without establishing an overarching instance of political authority (Poggi 1978). The latter is the scenario in which the Western process of state-building will unfold.