Watch any newsflash or open any newspaper and you will see headlines such as ‘France and Britain agree on migration’, ‘Reforms in Costa Rica problematic’, ‘US presents new plan for the Middle East’, or ‘Germany objects to Dutch tomatoes’. These phrases are shorthand. They refer to an agreement among French and British diplomats to check all passports of passengers from Paris to London, or to an initiative of the German minister for agricultural affairs to reduce the import of watery vegetables. Messages such as these are the alpha and omega of politics and current affairs. And states are always at the centre.

Indeed, the study of states and the similarities and differences in their political institutions and forms of government are at the centre of the study of comparative government. Even fashionable debates about the ‘withering away’ of the state in an era of globalisation are possible only if we are clear about the concept of the state to start with. Nor can we understand the politics of the European Union, a form of political organisation that is above and beyond individual states, unless we understand what states are and what they do. This does not mean that states are the only things that matter, nor does it mean that ‘the state’ is a perfectly clear and straightforward concept.