A nation state, or nation-state, is a political entity in which the state (a centralized political organization ruling over a population within a territory) and the nation (a community based on a common identity) are congruent.
A nation, sometimes used in the sense of a common ethnicity, may include a diaspora or refugees who live outside the nation-state; some dispersed nations (such as the Roma nation, for example) do not have a state where that ethnicity predominates. In a more general sense, a nation-state is simply a large, politically sovereign country or administrative territory.
Historians and scholars of nationalism studies are divided over whether nations long predated modern nation-states and the ideology of nationalism, or whether modern states and nationalism largely produced the nations we recognize today. However, they generally agree that the nineteenth century, following the age of revolutions, was a decisive period for the rise and consolidation of nation-states.
Complexity The relationship between a nation (in the ethnic sense) and a state can be complex. The presence of a state can encourage ethnogenesis, and a group with a pre-existing ethnic identity can influence the drawing of territorial boundaries or argue for political legitimacy. This definition of a "nation-state" is not universally accepted. "All attempts to develop terminological consensus around 'nation' failed", concludes academic Valery Tishkov. Walker Connor discusses the impressions surrounding the characters of "nation", "(sovereign) state", "nation-state", and "nationalism". Connor, who gave the term "ethnonationalism" wide currency, also discusses the tendency to confuse nation and state and the treatment of all states as if nation states.
A nation-state may or may not be contrasted with: An empire, a political unit made up of several territories and peoples, typically established through conquest and marked by a dominant center and subordinate peripheries. A multinational state, where no one ethnic or cultural group dominates (such a state may also be considered a multicultural state - depending on the degree of cultural assimilation of its various groups). A city-state, which is both smaller than a "nation" in the sense of a "large sovereign country" and which may or may not be dominated by all or part of a single "nation" in the sense of a common ethnicity or culture. A confederation, a league of sovereign states, which might or might not include nation-states. A federated state, which may or may not be a nation-state, and which is only partially self-governing within a larger federation (for example, the state boundaries of Bosnia and Herzegovina are drawn along ethnic lines, but those of the United States are not).
History
Origins
The origins and early history of nation-states are disputed. A major theoretical question is: "Which came first, the nation or the nation-state?" Scholars such as Steven Weber, David Woodward, Michel Foucault and Jeremy BlackMichel Foucault Lectures at the Collège de France Security, Territory, Population 2007 have advanced the hypothesis that the nation-state did not arise out of political ingenuity or an unknown undetermined source, nor was it a political invention; rather, it is an inadvertent by-product of 15th-century intellectual discoveries in political economy, capitalism, mercantilism, political geography, and geographyInternational Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences. Direct Georeferencing : A New Standard in Photogrammetry for High Accuracy Mapping Volume XXXIX, pp. 5–9, 2012 combined with cartographyInternational Archives of the Photogrammetry Borderlines: Maps and the spread of the Westphalian state from Europe to Asia Part One – The European Context Volume 40 pp. 111–116 2013International Archives of the Photogrammetry Appearance and Appliance of the Twin-Cities Concept on the Russian-Chinese Border Volume 40 pp. 105–110 2013 and advances in map-making technologies. It was with these intellectual discoveries and technological advances that the nation-state arose.
For others (often known as "primordialists"), the nation existed first. Then nationalist movements arose for sovereignty, and the nation-state was created to meet that demand. Some "modernization theories" of nationalism see it as a product of government policies to unify and modernize an already existing state. Most theories see the nation-state as a 19th-century European phenomenon facilitated by developments such as state-mandated education, mass literacy, and mass media. However, historians also note the early emergence of a relatively unified state and identity in Portugal and the Dutch Republic, and some date the emergence of nations even earlier. Adrian Hastings, for instance, argued that Ancient Israel as depicted in the Hebrew Bible "gave the world the model of nationhood, and even nation-statehood"; however, after the fall of Jerusalem, the Jews lost this status for nearly two millennia, while still preserving their national identity until "the more inevitable rise of Zionism", in modern times, which sought to establish a nation-state.
Eric Hobsbawm argues that the establishment of a French nation was not the result of French nationalism, which would not emerge until the end of the 19th century, but rather the policies implemented by pre-existing French states. Many of these reforms were implemented since the French Revolution, at which time only half of the French people spoke some Frenchwith only a quarter of those speaking the version of it found in literature and places of learning. As the number of Italian speakers in Italy was even lower at the time of Italian unification, similar arguments have been made regarding the modern Italian nation, with both the French and the Italian states promoting the replacement of various regional dialects and languages with standardized dialects. The introduction of conscription and the Third Republic's 1880s laws on public instruction facilitated the creation of a national identity under this theory.
Some nation-states, such as Germany and Italy, came into existence at least partly as a result of political campaigns by nationalists during the 19th century. In both cases the territory was previously divided among other states, some very small. At first, the sense of common identity was a cultural movement, such as in the Völkisch movement in German-speaking states, which rapidly acquired a political significance. In these cases the nationalist sentiment and the nationalist movement precede the unification of the German and Italian nation-states.
Historians Hans Kohn, Liah Greenfeld, Philip White, and others have classified nations such as Germany or Italy, where they believe cultural unification preceded state unification, as ethnic nations or ethnic nationalities. However, "state-driven" national unifications, such as in France, England, or China, are more likely to flourish in multiethnic societies, producing a traditional national heritage of civic nations or territory-based nationalities.
The idea of a nation-state was and is associated with the rise of the modern system of states, often called the "Westphalian system", following the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). The balance of power, which characterized that system, depended for its effectiveness upon clearly defined, centrally controlled, independent entities, whether empires or nation states, which recognize each other's sovereignty and territory. The Westphalian system did not create the nation-state, but the nation-state meets the criteria for its component states (by assuming that there is no disputed territory). Before the Westphalian system, the closest geopolitical system was the "Chanyuan system" established in East Asia in 1005 through the Treaty of Chanyuan, which, like the Westphalian peace treaties, designated national borders between the independent regimes of China's Song dynasty and the semi-nomadic Liao dynasty. This system was copied and developed in East Asia in the following centuries until the establishment of the pan-Eurasian Mongol Empire in the 13th century.
The nation-state received a philosophical underpinning in the era of Romanticism, at first as the "natural" expression of the individual peoples (romantic nationalism: see Johann Gottlieb Fichte's conception of the Volk, later opposed by Ernest Renan). The increasing emphasis during the 19th century on the ethnic and racial origins of the nation led to a redefinition of the nation-state in these terms. Racism, which in Boulainvilliers's theories was inherently antipatriotic and antinationalist, joined itself with colonialist imperialism and "continental imperialism", most notably in pan-Germanic and pan-Slavic movements.
The relationship between racism and ethnic nationalism reached its height in the 20th century through fascism and Nazism. The specific combination of "nation" ("people") and "state" expressed in such terms as the völkischer Staat and implemented in laws such as the 1935 Nuremberg laws made fascist states such as early Nazi Germany qualitatively different from non-fascist nation-states. Minorities were not considered part of the people (Volk) and were consequently denied to have an authentic or legitimate role in such a state. In Germany, neither Jews nor the Roma were considered part of the people, and both were specifically targeted for persecution. German nationality law defined "German" based on German ancestry, excluding all non-Germans from the people.
In recent years, a nation-state's claim to absolute sovereignty within its borders has been criticized. A global political system based on international agreements and supra-national blocs characterized the post-war era. Non-state actors, such as international corporations and non-governmental organizations, are widely seen as eroding the economic and political power of nation-states.
According to Andreas Wimmer and Yuval Feinstein, nation-states tended to emerge when power shifts allowed nationalists to overthrow existing regimes or absorb existing administrative units. Xue Li and Alexander Hicks link the frequency of nation-state creation to processes of diffusion that emanate from international organizations.
Before the nation-state