Nation

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“”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 who share certain characteristics, most commonly language, religion, ethnicity, and history. 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.

Notes[edit]

↑ 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.
↑ For example, as the different Jurchen and other tribes in Northeast China became the Manchu, or how the Cornish, etc., all became English.
↑ A modern example of this seems to be the Chinese and the Taiwanese, and possibly the North and South Koreans.
↑ This sums up the feelings of many Yugoslavs at the beginning of the 1990s.
↑ Examples of such myth-making include King Arthur, Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, and El Cid.
↑ Either because they have national minorities or were never nation-states, to begin with.

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[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.

[note 1]

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[note 3]

[note 4]

[note 5]

[note 6]

Nation

See also[edit]

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