We explain what a nation is, the elements that make it up, its characteristics and examples. Also, the relationship between nation and state.
What is a nation?
In a broad sense, a nation is any human historical and cultural community capable of providing individuals with a sense of identity that differentiates them from individuals belonging to other cultures. It usually has a territory that it considers its own.
In that sense, one can speak of a nation to mean a State, a country, a territory, an ethnic group, a people or a race, depending on the considerations of the case.
What we understand today as a nation (nation-states) emerged in the second half of the 18th century, along with the homeland and nationalism. The French Revolution of 1789 is considered its birthplace. when the absolutism of the Old Regime that gave monarchs absolute power fell.
In contrast, the sovereignty of the citizens (the “people” or the “nation” of the French) emerged, according to the philosophical guidelines of the Enlightenment: if before the King was the State, now it is “the nation”, and therefore we speak of the birth of the nation-state.
With the birth of the nation, the love for it was also born, which is nationalism. This is how the concept of the national was formed, as opposed to the foreign.
Elements of a nation
Every nation, roughly speaking, is made up of the following elements:
- Territory. All nations on the planet have, in one way or another, a territory in which they consider their home and in whose land their dead ancestors rest. This is much more complicated to define for certain nomadic nations, such as the Saharan tribes, but this is because they maintain a non-agricultural based model of life, and in that sense they do not require a fixed territory, but rather a series of intermittent territories.
- Language. Every nation has an official language, in which its bureaucracy, its legal code and its historical documents are written, and with which its population identifies. In some cases the official languages may be several, given that in the same country there may be more than one culture, but one is always considered predominant, above the others.
- Government. Every nation governs itself or joins a common government together with others (in the case of plurinational States). Said government makes the State function, imposes the legal code and organizes the population, in addition to exercising sovereignty in the national territory on behalf of the people.
- Population. There is no nation without inhabitants who make it up, that is, without a people who speak its language, who inhabit its territory and who obey its laws. That is, there are no nations without people.
Characteristics of a nation
According to Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson (1936-2015), nations are imagined political communities, which in the modern era They guarantee citizens a feeling of belonging to a larger group and therefore of immortality, a role that religions once played in its place.
From this it follows that nations did not always exist, or not in the same way, nor with the same name, nor around the same identity. Even ancient nations, organized around an idea of common ethnicity, that is, race and blood, were social and cultural constructions that served human beings to differentiate themselves from each other and assimilate with their own.
Currently the nation is understood based on two different forms:
- The political nation. That it is the holder of the sovereignty of the people, in charge of implementing the norms contemplated in the legal framework by which they decide to be governed, and that they will be the guarantors of the functioning of the State.
- The cultural nation. Which is a difficult concept of the social sciences, by which is understood the ethical-political body of characteristics shared by the inhabitants of a nation, in terms of language, religion, tradition or common history, within the framework of the construction of a “national identity”.
Nation and State
The nation and the State are not synonymous. While the first is an imagined community, that is, a form of sociocultural organization around the idea of shared identity, The State is the political organization of the nation the exercise of its sovereignty within a specific territory, according to an established framework of legal rules.
In this way, States can be created and destroyed, remodeled and extinguished, but nations cannot. The latter are the result of a historical, gradual and cultural process.
That's why, There can be states without a nation, like the Vatican which lacks its own cultural base and exists only for the purposes of administering the Catholic religious faith, while every nation aspires to some form of State, otherwise it will not be able to exercise its own sovereignty.
Examples of nation
Some examples of nation are the following:
- The Kurdish nation. The Kurds are an Indo-European people who inhabit the border region between Syria, Türkiye, Iraq and Iran, known as the Kurdistan Mountains. Although they exist as a nation and as an ethnic group, they do not have a State and therefore cannot self-determine, but rather ascribe to the laws of the four States already mentioned, despite not sharing their “national identities.”
- The Jewish nation. The Jewish people were a stateless people, that is, lacking their own territory for thousands of years, thus having to exist in nation-states as foreigners. However, they retained a strong roots in their identity, built on the practice of the Jewish religion. That is why there can be Jews of different nationalities, even today when the State of Israel exists, home to all those who consider themselves Jews, although they may or may not be Israelis.
- The Bolivian nations. The plurinational State of Bolivia exists as a South American country, located in the heart of the subcontinent, but at the same time it recognizes itself as a State composed of multiple indigenous nations, such as the Aymaras, Quechuas, Yuracares, Cachicanas, Ayoreos, Guaraníes, Afro-Bolivians and many more.
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References
- “Nation” on Wikipedia.
- “The concept of nation” in Educ.ar.
- “Nation” in Banrepcultural.
- “What is a nation?” in Facing History.
- “Nation” in The Cambridge Dictionary.
- “Nation-state” in The Encyclopaedia Britannica.
