most democracies were built on top of preexisting nations, societies that already had a well-developed sense of national identity that defined the sovereign people. But those nations were not created democratically: Germany, France, Britain, and the Netherlands were all the historical by-products of long and often violent political struggles over territory and culture under nondemocratic regimes. When these societies democratized, their territorial extent and their existing populations were simply taken for granted as the basis for popular sovereignty.
