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Evidence of the earliest known city-states has been found in ancient Mesopotamia around 3700 BCE, suggesting that the history of the state is less than 6,000 years old; thus, for most of the human prehistory the state did not exist. For 99.8 percent of human history people lived exclusively in autonomous bands and villages.
A city-state is an independent sovereign city which serves as the center of political, economic, and cultural life over its contiguous territory. [1] They have existed in many parts of the world throughout history, including cities such as Rome, Carthage, Athens and Sparta and the Italian city-states during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, such as Florence, Venice, Genoa and Milan.
A state should not be confused with a government; a government is an organization that has been granted the authority to act on the behalf of a state. [22] Nor should a state be confused with a society; a society refers to all organized groups, movements, and individuals who are independent of the state and seek to remain out of its influence. [22]
People with a common origin, history, language, culture, customs, or religion can turn into a nation through the awakening of national consciousness. [19] A nation can exist without a state, as is exemplified by the stateless nations. Citizenship is not always the nationality of a person. [20]
Unlike primary state formation, early state formation does not require the creation of the first state in that cultural context or autonomous development, independently from state development nearby. Early state formation causation can thus include borrowing, imposition, and other forms of interaction with already existing states.
The city-states are most distinctive due to the names of their state organs: their governments are called Senate, the prime ministers 'mayor' (Governing Mayor in Berlin and First Mayor in Hamburg) or President of the Senate (in Bremen) and also the expressions for their state parliaments differ from the other states.
A popular model of the State proposed by minarchists is known as the night-watchman state, in which the only governmental functions are to protect citizens from aggression, theft, breach of contract, and fraud as defined by property laws, limiting it to three institutions: the military, the police, and courts.
Fully autonomous cities, or city-states, are the objective of urban secession. A modern instance of a city-state is the Republic of Singapore, which was expelled from Malaysia for a variety of political and social reasons. [1] Currently, Singapore is the sole city which has total independence, an indigenous currency, and a substantial military.