Nation
A nation 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." It has been common in history for different nations to fuse together [1] or for a single nation to break apart[2]. Sometimes, a single person may feel they belong to more than one "nationality", depending on circumstances[3].
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.[4] Since the end of World War I, nationality as the primary pre-requisite for statehood has declined. Today, most states are rather multi-national 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.
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[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ 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.