The first widespread use of the nation-state concept came in

WESTERN EUROPE. The concept of Nation that acquires is characterized by having a clearly delimited territory, a constant population, although not fixed, and a government. It is created, through the Treaty of Westphalia, at the end of the 30-year war. By means of this treaty, the old feudal order is finished and it is given way to territorial and population organizations defined by a government that recognizes its spatial limits, and therefore, of power. The decolonization characterized the second half of the twentieth century and meant a questioning of the usefulness of the national or imperial-colonial scale that had characterized the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.