The influence of the state on the trajectory of human lives is more comprehensive and sustained than that of any other organizational construct. We provide a definition of the modern nation-state in four intersecting dimensions – resources, law, legitimacy, and welfare – and review the history and status of each dimension, focusing on the fusion of nation and state in the 19th century, and the development of the ‘national constellation’ of institutions in the 20th. We then assess the fate of the nation-state after the Second World War and, with western OECD countries as our sample, track the rise and decline of its Golden Age through its prime in the 1960s and early 1970s. Finally, we identify the challenges confronting the nation-state of the 21st century, and use the analyses in the following eight essays to produce some working hypotheses about its current and future trajectory – namely, that the changes over the past 40 years are not merely creases in the fabric of the nation-state, but rather an unravelling of the finely woven national constellation of its Golden Age. Nor does there appear to be any standard, interwoven development of its four dimensions on the horizon. However, although an era of structural uncertainty awaits us, it is not uniformly chaotic. Rather, we see structured, but asymmetric change in the make-up of the state, with divergent transformations in each of its four dimensions. In general, nation-states are clinging to tax revenues and monopolies on the use of force, such that the resource dimension may change slowly if at all; the rule of law appears to be moving consistently into the international arena; the welfare dimension is headed in every direction, with privatization, internationalization, supra-nationalization, and defence of the national status quo, occurring at various rates for healthcare, pensions, public utilities, consumer protection, etc. in different countries. How, and whether, the democratic legitimacy of political processes will be ensured in such an incongruent, if not incoherent and paradoxical state is still unclear.

As Max Weber and many others in his tradition have argued, the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force is the core of the modern state. What counts here is not the frequency of the actual use of force but the fact that only the state has the legitimate right to use such force. The military and the police are the most concrete expressions of this monopoly. In recent decades, the use of the military and the police has been subject to external challenges – ‘globalization’ – and new ideas about police and military intervention. Although at an operational level the state retains full control over the actions of the police and military, the conditions for their use are increasingly shaped by institutionalized legitimating ideas.

How does globalization affect taxation? The academic wisdom is split on this question. Some argue that globalization spells the beginning of the end of the national tax state, while others maintain that it hardly constrains tax policy choices at all. This paper comes down in the middle. It finds no indication that globalization will fatally undermine the national tax state, but still maintains that national tax policy is affected in a major way. The effect is not so much to force change upon the tax state as to reduce its freedom for change. Comparing the first three decades of the 20th century to the last three decades, it is remarkable how much change and innovation there was then and how much incrementalism and stasis there is today.

An international rule of law complementing modern states' domestic rule of law seems to be emerging. At least in the four issue areas of international law considered here – international trade, security, labour, and environmental law – empirical evidence suggests that relevant dispute settlement procedures have been judicialized and their use by complainants as well as their acceptance by defendants have increased in practice. Albeit still far from what we are used to from the domestic rule of law, the emergence of an international rule of law can be regarded as indicative of a fundamental transformation of modern states.

Free Trade has always been highly contested, but both the arguments about it and the treaties that regulate it have changed dramatically since the Second World War. Under the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) regime, objections to free trade were essentially economic, and tariffs were a nation state's primary means of protecting its interests. However, by the early 1970s, tariffs had been substantially reduced, and the imposition and removal of non-tariff barriers that reflected a wide range of domestic concerns about the protection of health, safety, and the environment have since come to dominate trade agreements and their implementation. The expanding scope of these international treaties, and their effect on domestic regulatory objectives, has created new challenges for the nation-state, and for the international trade system as a whole. Domestic regulatory objectives that are generally embedded in a nation state's legal system or even in its constitution, are now negotiable and are susceptible to adjudication at the international level where they may, or may not, be used to camouflage unrelated economic interests. The international trade system adapted to this situation in 1994 by transforming the GATT into the World Trade Organization (WTO), which has more effective means for dispute resolution and includes a number of special agreements – such as the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) and the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) – with rules for balancing the economic concerns of free trade with the social concerns of regulatory objectives. These developments have generated legal queries about the general legitimacy of transnational governance arrangements and their ‘constitutionalization’, i.e. the quest for transnational governance that is mediated by law and not only accepted de facto but considered deserving of acceptance.

It is widely accepted that internationalization and the increasing loss of parliamentary control over political power challenge the legitimacy of national democratic systems and their core institutions. We first present results from a study of public communication, which, when examined in the context of theories of legitimation, indicate that these processes do not necessarily lead to the erosion or breakdown of popular support for the nation state. The idea that there is a linear cause-and-effect relationship is overly simple, and a more detailed analysis is called for. Legitimation of a political system through public communication is a back-and-forth process which is determined by the system's specific institutional arrangements and by the fortuitous twists and turns of public debate. Nation states have more extensive, diverse and deeply rooted sources of legitimation than is often assumed.

While many important social processes cut across national borders and have transnational institutions to regulate them, democratic participation still occurs almost exclusively within individual nation states. Public information and debate are essential ingredients of democracy, and their confinement to the individual national public sphere threatens the democratic aspirations and legitimacy of transnational institutions. Therefore, it is often argued that the European Union can only achieve greater legitimacy if there is a Europeanization of national public spheres. Has public discourse in fact Europeanized in the last decades? Here we present results from a study of major national newspapers from five European countries. Europeanization is defined in three dimensions: Europeanization of contents, Europeanization of public identities, and Europeanization of communication flows. Our results show that national public spheres are, in fact, quite resilient and that change is slow or halting. We discuss several possible explanations for this resilience, and go on to question the assumption that the legitimacy of European institutions depends on Europeanization of public discourse.

We examine whether a fundamental change in the core dimension of modern 20th century statehood, the welfare state, has become evident in response to changed exogenous and endogenous challenges. By combining quantitative and qualitative approaches we take stock of social policy development in four advanced welfare states – Austria, Denmark, New Zealand and Switzerland – over the last 30 years. Neither spending patterns nor structural changes support a ‘race to the bottom thesis’, according to which the changed environment of welfare state policies has led to a downward spiral in benefit provision. On the contrary, we show that social spending levels have risen, mainly due to a catch-up of former welfare state laggards. In structural terms, a blurring of welfare regimes can be observed. This twofold process can be described as dual convergence.

This article focuses on two major questions concerning the changing role of the state in the healthcare systems of OECD countries. First, we ask whether major changes in the level of state involvement (in healthcare systems) have occurred in the past 30 years. Given the fact that three types of healthcare system, each of which is characterized by a distinct role of the state, evolved during the ‘Golden Age’, we discuss how this distinctiveness – or more technically, variance – has changed in the period under scrutiny. While many authors analysing health policy changes exclusively concentrate on finance and expenditure data, we simultaneously consider financing, service provision and regulation. As far as financing is concerned, we observe a small shift from the public to the private sphere, with a tendency towards convergence in this dimension. The few data available on service provision, in contrast, show neither signs of retreat of the state nor of convergence. In the regulatory dimension – which we analyse by focusing on major health system reforms in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States – we see the introduction or strengthening of those coordination mechanisms (hierarchy, markets and self-regulation) which were traditionally weak in the respective type of healthcare system. Putting these findings together we find a tendency of convergence from distinct types towards mixed types of healthcare systems.

What is the state of the state? The members of the national Research Centre Transformations of the State (TranState) at the University of Bremen use the contrast with the OECD nation-state during its ‘Golden Age’ in the 1960s and early '70s to study the rapidly changing interface between international and domestic politics, and between public and private governance. Studies currently underway at TranState confront the changes in the tightly woven fabric of the twentieth-century western, multi-functional state, which emerged after World War II with the functional amalgamation at the national level of the Territorial State, the state that assures the Rule of Law, the Democratic State, and the Intervention State. This functional definition is expressed in the acronym TRUDI.

Both TranState research and the contributions to this volume are aligned along TRUDI's four dimensions of statehood: resources (financial, means of force), rule of law, (democratic) legitimacy, and welfare. These dimensions developed over four centuries and merged, during the ‘Golden Age’, in one institution, the nation-state. Since then, however, processes of globalization, denationalization, privatization as well as individualization have initiated a new dynamic. The finely woven national constellation of the Golden Age state is coming apart – it is unravelling. Yet though an era of structural uncertainty is ahead, not everything is in flux. We may see structured asymmetric change in the make-up of the state, with divergent transformations in each of its four dimensions. TranState aims at accounting empirically for these transformations since the mid-1970s; explaining them and their dynamics; and, finally, determining how these transformations affect the provision of public goods such as security, the rule of law, democratic legitimacy, or welfare provision.