Empires, Nation States and Democracies. The International Order in Historical Perspective.

Gerard Roland

Keywords: empires, nation states, democracies, international relations. Constrained Liberalism.

TL;DR: How do empires, nation states and democracies coexist in the 21st century.

Abstract: We analyze different political regimes (empires, nation states and democracies) in a number of institutional and economic dimensions: tendency towards geographical expansionism or fragmentation, cultural heterogeneity, focus of public spending and a number of other variables. We use this setup to analyze the coexistence and interactions between empires, nation states and democracies. While these interactions are source of instability, we argue that modern economic development tends to doom empires that were once the dominant form of political regime in history.