The state is a concept that is often used, which almost everyone knows, starting from a very young age. From that age, when the king-priest rules in fairy tales his kingdom-state. But far from everyone can tell about what it is.
There are many ways to answer the question of what a state is. Here is some of them:
- the state is an organization of political power, designed to ensure the livelihoods of people in its specific territory, has a coercive body and collects taxes and fees to ensure its internal and external functions;
- the state is a force, power, organization, forcing a person to something, and therefore in its beginning is unjust and wrong.
And there is a huge number of variations, meanwhile giving a definite and completely different interpretation of the question of what a state is. In jurisprudence, there are several signs that a state should have:
1. Territory - clearly fixed and at least partially permanent, should be in any state.
This condition is sometimes artfully circumvented by owners of organizations such as unrecognized states.
For example, they register their own apartment or a website in general as the territory of their state (no one said that the territory should be real, not virtual).
2. The right. What is a state - is an organization, something streamlined, and like any organized group of people, the state should have rules, i.e. law, laws, judicial system, etc.
3. Coercive apparatus - that is, the police, riot police, the FBI, a system of fines and the like.
4. Public power is an important feature of the state. These are people who are professionally involved in managing, drafting laws, collecting taxes and nothing more.
5. Taxes and fees on this public authority, social services, as well as public needs such as war, famine, crop failure or, say, restoration of monuments, preparation for the Olympics or repair of roads.
6. Ideology - optional item. Ideology in the state - religion, philosophy or lifestyle. In the absence of ideology, the state is called secular.
7. Social services - ie school, universities, hospitals, etc.
8. Sovereignty - the relationship of the state with other administrative units.
The main answer to the question of what a state is, whether this or that object is a state or not, is recognized or not recognized as such. Recognize, of course, other countries and their plenipotentiaries.
Scientists disagree not only in the definition of the state, but also in its origin. There are several theories regarding the form of the emergence of the state : theological (everything was created by God, the authors are Thomas Aquinas and Blessed Augustine), the social contract (people cannot live without society, that's why they concluded the contract, the authors are Jean - Jacques Rousseau, D. Lork, G. Hobbes and some others), Marxist, racial (the state is the result of the racial superiority of some peoples over others, the authors are Gubino, Nietzsche) and several others.