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v \- t \- e

“”It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag, a few speeches, and a national anthem.

—Nicholas Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

A nation (often interchanged with country) is a group of people composed mostly of strangers who live under a common political structure; emphasizing certain shared characteristics, such as language, religion, ethnicity, and history that give rise to a collective identity. As a sociological and political term, it is a fluid concept — what Benedict Anderson has termed an "imagined community."[note 1] It has been common in history for different nations to fuse together[note 2] or for a single nation to break apart.[note 3] Sometimes, a single person may feel they belong to more than one "nationality", depending on circumstances.[note 4]

Most of the states of Western Europe were built along national lines - Denmark, Malta, and Iceland, for example; but compare Austria, Ulster, Switzerland, Catalonia, San Marino, Belgium, Luxembourg, Cyprus, the Vatican City, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. However, nation-building also came about due to European monarchs fostering a sense of nationhood amongst their peoples through nationalism, adopting the "vulgar" languages and concentrated myth-making.[note 5] Since World War I, nationality as the primary prerequisite for statehood has declined. Today, most states are rather multi-national[note 6] though there was a brief resurgence of "ethnic group gets a country" in the 1990s with the break up of the communist system in Eurasia.

The population of the nation of Canada includes over 600 recognized First Nations.

## See also[edit]

* Micronation

## Notes[edit]

1. ↑ Other scholars like Anthony D. Smith have similarly emphasized how persistent and fluid the notion of nation was even before the modern conception of the nation-state.
2. ↑ For example, as the different Jurchen and other tribes in Northeast China became the Manchu, or how the Cornish, etc., all became English.
3. ↑ A modern example of this seems to be the Chinese and the Taiwanese, and possibly the North and South Koreans.
4. ↑ This sums up the feelings of many Yugoslavs at the beginning of the 1990s.
5. ↑ Examples of such myth-making include King Arthur, Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, and El Cid.
6. ↑ Either because they have national minorities or were never nation-states, to begin with.

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