Political system – Supranational Relationships, Multiethnic Empires, and Leagues of Nations

The most important type of political system in the modern world is the nation-state. The world today is divided territorially into more than 190 countries, in each of which a national government claims to exercise sovereignty—or the power of final authority—and seeks to compel obedience to its will by its citizens. This fact of the world’s political organization suggests the distinction employed in the following section among supranational, national, and subnational political systems. The formation of supranational relationships is a principal result of the division of the world into a number of separate national entities, or states, that have contact