State populations are homogenized through territorialized power that fashions them.

Evidence

For as suggested above, the state may be thought of as the phantom of governance and authority, a territorial placeholder for sets of often competing and more or less local institutional interests and powers. In this sense, the state provides media and a measure of scope for the assertion and authorization, legislation and legitimation of institutional power(s). The latter two institutional practices offer to the former two a semblance of coherence, a singularity of style and voice, a common language and mode, the shadow of an institutional sphere in the face of prolific heterogeneous messiness. They offer, that is, the artifice of national, cultural, and expressive unity - community - in the face of fractured disunity and anarchy, the artifice of homogeneity in the face of proliferating heterogeneities. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1720 (#complicates, via linked claim)

By the twentieth century, the growth of territorially extensive highcapacity states with their own programs of cultural homogenization through education, the media, and ritual representation of their histories had produced a paradoxical situation. On one side, every regime above a very small scale actually contained a wide variety of populations, cultures, and territories; international migration and the expansion of states from core areas into new territories limited the effects of top-down homogenization. On the other side, state-led efforts fortified two nationalistic claims that often contradicted each other: … We control the state, and therefore we have the right to define the nation. … We are a separate nation, and therefore we have the right to our own state. … When well-connected, culturally distinct minorities occupied contiguous territories, the second claim often justified demands for autonomy or secession. The Soviet Union’s breakup featured a sensational series of nationalist demands, based largely on the titular nationalities around which Communist leaders had built their Moscow-centered rule (Beissinger 1993, Box 7. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1021 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: States develop a character that disposes them toward populations defined by group belonging. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 256; States homogenize populations mainly through territorial boundaries that regulate cultural formation. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1885; The state’s apparent unity masks radically heterogeneous local power struggles — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1720 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• The state’s apparent unity masks radically heterogeneous local power struggles #complicates (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1720
• High-capacity states’ homogenization efforts paradoxically breed rival nationalist claims to self-determination #complicates (0.79) — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1021