The sovereign nation-state is far from being an obsolete institution. In fact, the concept of the nation-state has been evolving from being a sovereign people to being a sovereign nation since its conception. This evolution will continue because sovereign entities have continued to grow, and with each growth, the idea of the sovereign nation-state must also be adapted. This can be understood through the current meaning what a nation-state is and the process the term went through to reach its current meaning.

A nation is not, as its Latin origin implies, a community that one enters because of heritage or birth: that would be a people, individuals connected because of common descent, lineage, language, or culture. A person is born as a part of a people, but can never become part of it. A nation, on the other hand, is quite different. Granted that the easiest way to become part of a nation is to be born in the right place to the right family, but that is often times not the case. A nation is a group of individuals, or entities that could be peoples of different cultures, who are bound together by an idea; that idea is the idea of the nation. It combines a common past, a present, and a future that they all share and see as something that they must collectively live through and fight for. The individuals no longer only see themselves as a part of a people, but as a part of the greater nation first and foremost. Examples of far from obsolete nations are the United States, Germany, China, and most other nations in the world for that matter. This is because most nations in the world have a collection of peoples connected to each other by their belief in the idea of their nation.

A state, according to Halleck, is "defined to be any nation or people organized into a body politic and exercising the rights of self-government." It is, put simply, a nation that has sovereignty over its people and territories. Therefore, when the concept of a nation - a grouping of individuals by a common idea, past, present, or future - holds sovereignty, it becomes a nation- state. This means that any amalgamation of individuals, from a single people, to different peoples, to different nations, could coalesce into a single nation state that has sovereignty over all.

The nation-state was originally seen as a people-state, in which everyone had a common background, a culture, language, heritage, and so forth. Yet throughout history, as states began to polarize into increasingly more powerful states, one would find different people (vastly different people) living within the same states. At this stage, the nation became a collection of peoples. Finally, during the age of colonialism, the nation state became a collection of territories and small states, bound together by the idea of a nation. Despite the break up of many of the great colonial powers into their component territories, the natural evolution of nation states has continued to grow larger and larger. This is in part due to the need to grow to offset the power of other growing nation-states as well as the manifestation of the inherent benefits of being larger nations. It is because of this natural tendency to grow on the part of nation-states that the expanding definition of a sovereign nation-state is not an obsolete concept.

The sovereign nation-state is the collection of different entities, bound together by a common idea, which has sovereignty over those entities that are its components. With the progression of human history, humanity has tended to form larger and larger nation-states, combining larger and larger subgroups to make up a greater whole. In fact, even if the world were united under a single sovereign power, it would still be a nation-state. The nations that would constitute this giant nation would all be held together by that single idea to which they surrendered their individual sovereignty: a united world.