1. Nation: a large group of people linked by a similar culture,
language, and history
2.
State: a political unit that has sovereignty over a particular piece of
land
3.
Nation-state: a state that rules over a single nation.
Nations
- A nation is
a large group of people who are linked by a similar culture, language, and
history.
- Members
of some nations share an ethnicity (almost everyone in South Korea is
Korean, for example), whereas other nations consist of ethnically diverse
groups of people (the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and
Singapore, for instance).
- However,
the members of a nation see themselves as connected.
- Fellow
members are often regarded as part of an extended family.
- Many
members of a nation take pride in being a part of something bigger than
themselves as individuals, and they celebrate their nation.
People disagree about what counts as a nation. Nationhood
sometimes transcends geographical boundaries. Some groups consider themselves
to be nations, even though much of the world does not consider them that way.
Kurds, for example, live in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, but many Kurds believe they
belong to a Kurdish nation. Also, members of a nation frequently differ in a
variety of ways, including speaking different languages and participating in
different cultural practices.
Example: Native American tribes in
the United States are often referred to as nations because members of a
particular tribe share a common set of language, history, and culture that
differs from that of other Native American tribes.
In the end, determining what constitutes a nation is somewhat
subjective. People may identify
themselves as members of myriad nations, but even those identifications may
change over time. And the strength of the identification also varies. The
division between an ethnic group and a nation is a tricky one to make. To put
it crudely, the moment that an ethnic group starts to view itself as a nation,
it becomes a nation. The Kurdish people, for example, became a nation when they
started thinking of themselves as an ethnic group with a common language,
history, and culture that set them apart from the neighboring Turks, Arabs, and
Persians.
Example: Nations and their attendant
nationalism in many ways caused World War I. In the decades leading up to the
war, several European nations struggled to assert themselves on the global
stage. These conflicts ratcheted up the tension. The event that directly
precipitated the war—the assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand in
1914—was also the result of nationalism: The assassin was a Serbian nationalist
trying to free his nation from Austrian control.
Changing Identities
A good example of how membership in a nation changes over time
comes from the history of the United States. In the early decades of the
Republic, many Americans valued their connection to their home states over an
attachment to the federal government. People identified with and felt loyal
toward Virginia or Massachusetts rather than with the young United States. This
reluctance to identify with other Americans contributed to the Civil War. After
World War II, Americans closely identified with the United States as a single
nation of one people. But in recent years, the “red-state/blue-state” divide
has caused some people to increasingly identify with “their America,” as
opposed to the nation as a whole.
States
- A state is
a political unit that has sovereignty over a particular piece of
land. Sovereignty is the ultimate power within a
territory.
- So
the state has the power to make laws, defend its borders, and enact
policies.
- The
state also exercises a monopoly on the legitimate use of force:
- No
group within its borders can use force legally without the permission of
the state.
Who is Sovereign
- A
state is the ultimate authority within a territory.
- Smaller
political units—such as city governments—exist within a state, but
ultimately the supreme power rests with the state.
Nation-States
- Political
scientists use the term nation-state to refer to modern
countries and their political apparatuses.
- A
nation-state is a state that rules over a single nation.
- France,
for example, is a nation-state, as is Japan.
- The
people in both countries overwhelmingly share a common language, history,
and culture.
- The
term nation-state reflects the situation in which the
boundaries of a state coincide with the geographical area occupied by a
nation.
- There
are also states that are not nations—such as Switzerland, whose citizens
speak four different languages and have varied cultures.
- And
there are nations that are not states, such as Kurdistan, a region in the
Middle East lacking firm borders that is occupied by Kurds, but it is not
considered to be an independent state by its neighboring nations of Syria
and Turkey.
One sign of the nation-state’s prevalence in
global politics is that nearly all states refer to themselves as nation-states,
regardless of their national makeup. Every government works to build a sense of
national identity among its citizens, and sometimes governments even carefully
create or craft that identity. For this reason, some scholars argue that the
concepts of “nation” and “nation-state” are more about perception and feelings
of identity than concrete facts. Most nation-states have citizens of more than
one nationality. For example, the small groups of Catalonians in Spain, Bretons
in France, and Ainu in Japan differ in nationality from the majority of people
in those nation-states. Usually, the minority groups are very small.
Nation-State Minorities
- Often,
people in the dominant nationality within a nation-state will mistreat
those in the minority. For many years, the government of Australia,
dominated by the ancestors of European settlers, enacted many harsh
policies against the indigenous Australians, known as the
Aborigines.
- These
policies included taking over Aboriginal land and removing indigenous
children from their families and placing them in special schools for
socialization.
Nation-Building
- In
many nation-states, the government actively promotes the idea of common
nationality. Children learn the same language and history in
state-sponsored schools, and public events frequently invoke cultural
heroes and icons.
- Citizens
are often encouraged to work for the betterment of the nation. These
practices, among others, are known collectively as nation-building.
Foreign governments also participate in nation-building. Sometimes
a government will give money and advice to another country to help
nation-building. At other times, a country will engage in nation-building after
it militarily occupies another country. Before leaving, the occupying power
seeks to build a nation that can govern itself. In the early years of the
twenty-first century, the United States intervened militarily and participated
in nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Nefarious Nation-Building
At times, nation-building has been undertaken using nefarious
means. Nazi Germany, for example, sought to unite its people through a shared
hatred of common enemies, most notably the Jews. The government of the former
Soviet Union promoted national identity by forcing very different ethnic groups
to learn the same language, going so far as to outlaw the use of some local
languages.
Nation-States
Around the World
Today, most of Europe consists of nation-states. But in Africa and
the Middle East, states frequently do not coincide with nations, largely as a
result of European colonialism. In the nineteenth century, during what is now
known as “the Scramble for Africa,” the Europeans divided up the continent
without regard to indigenous national boundaries. When the Europeans left and
the former colonies became independent states, they mostly kept the borders
established by the Europeans.
Example: In 1947, the British
government withdrew from what was then known as Palestine. Shortly thereafter,
the United Nations established the state of Israel, unevenly splitting the land
between the Jews and the Arabs and giving the state of Israel sovereign domain
over such Palestinian areas as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The resulting
tensions and violence among Jews, Arabs, and Palestinians continue to this day.
Colonial Boundaries
According to legend, the English set the boundaries of the Gambia,
a small country in West Africa, by firing a cannon from a ship on the Gambia
River and then marking that nation’s boundary according to where the
cannonballs fell.
The
Struggle for the Nation-State
Throughout modern history, many groups have worked very hard to
create nation-states. Sometimes, these efforts succeed, as with the unification
of Italy in the late nineteenth century; the dissolution of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I into the discrete nation-states of
Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia; and the independence
of Eritrea from Ethiopia in the late twentieth century. In some cases, however,
people have failed thus far in their attempts to create a distinct
nation-state. Groups that continue to agitate for a nation-state include the
Basques in Spain, as well as the Palestinians and the Kurds in the Middle East.
Empire
- An empire is
a state that governs more than one national group, usually as a result of
conquest.
- One
national group frequently dominates, giving members of that group a
special place in the regime.
- Empires
have existed in every era of human history, from the ancient empires of
Egypt, China, Ghana, and Rome to the modern British Empire.
