On the Ontological Status of the State

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Abstract
In which sense can we say that a state `exists'? According to the realist school, the state is an a priori given; according to the pluralist school, it is nothing but a collection of various sub-state actors. As I argue, however, neither solution is satisfactory. If we give the state a transcendental status, it disappears from the world; if we see it merely as a set of empirical attributes, it disappears in the world. The way out of this dilemma is to stop talking about what states really are, and start instead to talk about what things they resemble. We make sense of our collective selves in the same way as we make sense of our individual selves — with the help of metaphors that are expanded into narratives. A question of `being' is consequently always a question of `being as', and states are constructed through the stories told about them.

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