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While other states looked to tradition or charismatic leadership to ground this claim, the modern state appeals to legal rational authority or the de focto legality of rules and the right of those who enact those rules to do so. 68 However, in a disenchanted world modern states faced a "legitimacy deficit" for the procedural criteria of legal and political legitimacy could not secure political commitment to the state. " 69 For Weber nationalism was simultaneously subjective-a nation exists where a people have a sense of belonging to a "community of sentiment"-and objective--' the subjective sense of solidarity is based in objective factors such as common race, language, religion, customs and political experience.

92 Ashley and Walker stress that the sign of sovereignty does not just condition modern political and international relations theory and practice but regulates the epistemological and ontological possibilities of modern Western thought per se. 93 Representations of the sovereign state mirror the desired ideal of Western man as a rational, sovereign, self-identical presence. At the heart of the paradigm of sovereignty is a set of preconceptions and assumptions about space. Modern philosophical epistemology is predicated on an a priori spatial separation between the autonomous knowing subject and the known object.

47 Further, the social contract is forged in a bond that unites individual private property with state territory. In order to establish a political community each individual must give himself, "his force and possession," to it. "Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction ofthe general will; and in a body we receive each member as an indivisible part ofthe whole. »4B Under such an arrangement it is understandable how the combined and contiguous lands of private individuals become public territory, and how the right of sovereignty, extending from the subjects to the ground they occupy, comes to include both property and persons, which places those who possess land in a greater dependency and turns even their force into a guarantee of their loyalty.