The category of nation state in the light of requirements regarding contemporary processes of shaping public policies

During the 2019 campaign to the European Parliament, it was often argued that the situation in which EU institutions can make decisions that de facto legally affect public authorities of a given state in shaping policies on its territory violates this state’s sovereignty. Another argument was that such a situation would seriously limit the possibility of satisfying the needs of citizens of the state in question. The above logic assumes that maintaining the principles of nation state with regard to a state’s political system would guarantee the citizens greater control over public decisions and ensure that their needs are met. This type of argumentation has been present for a long time in the discourse on Poland’s membership in the European Union.The objective of the presented research is to elucidate what exactly it would mean for an average citizen (considering their potential influence on shaping public policies) to introduce a political system based on the so often evoked concept of a nation state in its original, literal sense. To meet the above objective, the text presents the original meaning of the category of a nation state and its constituent parts, followed by an analysis whether and possibly why the understanding of these elements has evolved. Finally, the entire cognitive process leads to a firm conclusion that a return to political relations based on the classical approach to the category of a nation state would lead to contemporarily unacceptable effects on the position of individuals in democratic political systems. This also means that the categories of a nation state and sovereignty can evolve and a discussion on the changing scope of their meaning is fully acceptable.