Nation
“”A nation is a society united by a delusion about its
ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbours.
|
| —William Ralph Inge[1] |
A nation (often interchanged with country) is a group of people who share certain characteristics in common, 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."[2] It has been common in history for different nations to fuse together[3] or for a single nation to break apart.[4] Sometimes, a single person may feel they belong to more than one "nationality," depending on circumstances.[5]
Most of the states of Western Europe were built along national lines. However, this was also due to European monarchs fostering a sense of nationhood in their people, through nationalism, the adoption of the "vulgar" languages, and concentrated myth-making.[6] Since the end of World War I, nationality as the primary pre-requisite for statehood has declined. Today, most states are rather multi-national[7] though there was a brief resurgence of "ethnic group gets a country" in the 90's with the break up of the communist system in Eurasia.
[edit] See also
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ End Of An Age and Other Essays, Archive.org.
- ↑ 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 90s.
- ↑ Examples of such myth-making include King Arthur, Charlemagne, and El Cid.
- ↑ Either because they have national minorities or were never nation-states to begin with.