How in Hades is Mississippi a Nation State?

Pat Young

Brev. Brig. Gen'l
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Joined
Jan 7, 2013
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Long Island, NY
Some claim that the United States was nothing more than a confederation of nation states created for apparently temporary purposes and unilaterally severable. Eleven of these nation states supposedly got together to create a new confederation, called The Confederacy in 1860 and 1861.

Exactly how can someplace like Mississippi be defined as a nation state?

The Constitution does not use the term nation state, so either that term is meaningless under Constitutional law or it is somehow magically incorporated into it by some leprechaunal magic.

The nation state was only a developing concept in the 18th Century. The French state was trying, against the will of many of the King's subjects to create a nation out of what had merely been a set of contiguous gymnastically controlled territories. The United Kingdom explicitly was not a nation state, merely a unification of four crowns.

Much of the definitional work connected with the concept of nation state occurred after the Constitution was ratified. Nationalist movements in the German lands and Italy sought to unify a constructed "people" within one country under one national government. Older empires like the Austro Hungarian and Ottoman successfully resisted the advent of the nation state until the 20th Century. I won't try to detail the history of the rise of the nation state, but I do insist that if we are going to argue about whether the United States was a confederation of nation states, that we at least define the term nation state.
Edited.
 
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