10 - Tax Jurisdiction

Summary

The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 divided up the territory of Europe into nations, generating ‘a political imaginary that mapped the world as a system of mutually recognizing, sovereign territorial states’.¹ The successful assertion of tax jurisdiction was a critical element of the ‘organizing logics’ of the nation state.² In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith considered taxation to be essential to make Britain a ‘great nation’ in an international order of other nations. By the twentieth century, the nation state operated in what Nancy Fraser termed the ‘Keynesian-Westphalian’ frame,³ built on a market economy and a ‘tax and welfare state’ that was actively interventionist in the economy and had a core role of redistribution. Taxation was territorially and economically bounded, and claims for intervention in the market and for distribution were mostly internal, or domestic, claims on the state.