National Governments

Nation-states are the full-stack governance organisms—entities that combine legislative, executive, and judicial functions with territorial control and a monopoly on legitimate violence. They're the only institutions that can compel taxation, conscription, and compliance. Everything else in governance either derives authority from states or exists in spaces states haven't claimed. The biological parallel is the multicellular organism. Individual cells (citizens) surrender autonomy in exchange for specialization benefits. A neuron can't digest food; a liver cell can't think—but the organism that contains both outcompetes any single-celled alternative. Nation-states achieve similar efficiencies through division of labor, but the 'cells' retain more autonomy than biological cells do. Nation-states vary enormously in structure: presidential vs. parliamentary, federal vs. unitary, democratic vs. authoritarian. But they share core functions: defining membership (citizenship), controlling territory (borders), making rules (legislation), enforcing rules (police and courts), and representing the collective externally (diplomacy). No other institution performs all these functions. The entities in this category are the sovereign states that form the international system's basic units. Their internal structures differ, but their external status is similar: recognized sovereignty, UN membership, diplomatic capacity. The Westphalian system treats them as formal equals even when power differs radically. When exploring nation-states, look for: state capacity (can the government actually implement policy?), legitimacy sources (why do citizens accept state authority?), and sovereignty trade-offs (what do states gain and lose from international commitments?).

Full-stack governance organisms with territorial control, enforcement capacity, and a monopoly on legitimate violence—the basic units of the international system.