Superstate
Part of the Politics series |
Basic forms of government |
---|
List of countries by system of government |
Politics portal |
A superstate is defined as "a large and powerful state formed when several smaller countries unite",[1] or "A large and powerful state formed from a federation or union of nations",[2] or "a hybrid form of polity that combines features of ancient empires and modern states."[3] This is distinct from the concept of superpower, although these are sometimes seen together.[4]
History
In the early 20th century, "superstate" had a similar definition as today's
In
In the 1970s, academic literature used the term "superstate" to indicate a particularly rich and powerful state, in a similar fashion to the term
In contemporary political debate, especially the one centred on the
The term was famously used by Margaret Thatcher in her 1988 Bruges speech, when she decried the perspective of "a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels",[11] and has since entered the eurosceptic lexicon. Tony Blair argued in 2000 that he welcomed an EU as a "superpower, not a superstate".[12]
In a 2022 study, Alasdair Roberts argues that superstates should be construed as hybrid forms of political organization: "Every superstate carries the burdens of statehood, that is, the duties of intensive governance and respect for human rights that are carried by all modern states. But superstates also carry the burdens of empire, principally the burden of holding together a large and diverse population spread across a vast territory. Superstates are distinguished from ordinary states by problems of governance that are intensified by scale, diversity, and complexity".[13]: 18 In this view, a superstate need not be highly centralized, just as some empires were not highly centralized. Thus is it possible to describe the European Union as a superstate without conceding that is a "centralized, unitary leviathan".[13] : 121
Fictional superstates
- Atlantic Federation (Gundam anime metaseries)
- The Alliance for Democracy in The Domination, which originated as a military alliance before being unified into a single nation.
- Earth Alliance in:
- Babylon 5
- The History of Galaxy novel series
- Eastasia, Eurasia and Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-Four
- Federation of the Americas from Call of Duty: Ghosts
- Gundam in the Cosmic Era timeline of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED
- Interstellar Alliance (Babylon 5)
- Fleet of Worlds
- Galactic Empire (Star Wars)
- Galactic Empire (Isaac Asimov universe)
- Galactic Republic
- Imperium of Mankind
- Mega-City One
- Meccania
- United Federation of Planets
- The Dominion (Star Trek)
- The World State
- Unified Earth Government from Halo
- United States of Africa
- United States of Europe
- United Nations (Of Earth) from The Expanse
- The Outer Planets Alliance (OPA) from The Expanse
- Tamrielic Empire (Septim Dynasty) from The Elder Scrolls
See also
- China
- Imperial Federation
- India
- List of countries and dependencies by area
- Organization of American States
- Soviet Union
- United States
Notes
- ^ "Superstate", Cambridge dictionaries online
- ^ "superstate - Definition of superstate in English by Oxford Dictionaries". Oxford Dictionaries - English. Archived from the original on July 12, 2012.
- ^ Roberts, Alasdair. Superstates: Empires of the Twenty-First Century. (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2022), 122.
- ^ Roberts, Alasdair. Superstates: Empires of the Twenty-First Century. (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2022), 17.
- ^ Edward A. Harriman, The League of Nations a Rudimentary Superstate, American Political Science Review / Volume 21 / Issue 01 / February 1927, pp 137-140
- ISBN 978-0-87743-231-9– via Bahá’í Reference Library.
- ^ WICKRAMASINGHE, V. K. (June 1973). "JAPAN — THE EMERGING SUPERSTATE ? Some Thoughts on Herman Kahn". The Developing Economies. 11 (2): 196–210.
- ISBN 978-92-9079-493-6.
- ^ ISBN 9781400828050
- ^ Erkut, Burak (24 December 2015). "A Super Indebted European Superstate". Review of Applied Socio-Economic Research. 10: 4–10 – via ResearchGate.
- ^ Margaret Thatcher, Speech to the College of Europe ("The Bruges Speech"), 20 September 1988
- ^ Stephen Haseler, Super-State: The New Europe and Its Challenge to America, p. 85
- ^ ISBN 9781509544479.