Nation

It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag, a few speeches, and a national anthem. 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." It has been common in history for different nations to fuse together or for a single nation to break apart. Sometimes, a single person may feel they belong to more than one "nationality", depending on circumstances.

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, Alsace-Lorraine, 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. Since World War I, nationality as the primary prerequisite 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 1990s with the break up of the communist system in Eurasia.

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