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Multinational state
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Multinational state
A multinational state or a multinational union is a sovereign entity that comprises two or more nations or states. This contrasts with a nation state, where a single nation accounts for the bulk of the population.[citation needed] Depending on the definition of "nation" (which touches on ethnicity, language, and political identity), a multinational state is usually multicultural or multilingual, and is geographically composed of more than one country, such as the countries of the United Kingdom.
Historical multinational states that have since split into multiple states include the Ottoman Empire, British India, Qing Empire, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, the United Arab Republic and Austria-Hungary (a dual monarchy of two multinational states). Some analysts have described the European Union as a multinational state or a potential one.
Many attempts have been made to define multinational states. One complicating factor is that it is possible for members of a group that could be considered a nation to identify with more than one nation-state. As Katiambo (2024) explains in Consumer nationalism in Kenya: tracing the rhetorical construction of the nation through anti-brand activism on Facebook, many countries are multination states and there are only "few nation-states with a perfect match between the nation and the state." Ilan Peleg wrote in Democratizing the Hegemonic State:
One can be a Scot and a Brit in the United Kingdom, a Jew and an American in the United States, an Igbo and a Nigerian in Nigeria ... One might find it hard to be a Slovak and a Hungarian, an Arab and an Israeli, a Breton and a Frenchman.
A state may also be a society, and a multiethnic society has people belonging to more than one ethnic group, in contrast to societies that are ethnically homogeneous. By some definitions of "society" and "homogeneous", virtually all contemporary national societies are multiethnic. The scholar David Welsh argued in 1993 that fewer than 20 of the 180 sovereign states then in existence were ethnically and nationally homogeneous, if a homogeneous state was defined as one in which minorities made up less than 5 percent of the population. Sujit Choudhry therefore argues that "[t]he age of the agriculturally homogeneous state, if ever there was one, is over".
Most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are former colonies and, as such, are not drawn along national lines, making them truly multinational states.
There is no ethnic majority in Ghana. The plurality group, the Akan people, are a meta-ethnicity (that is, a collection of similar but distinct ethnicities). While Akan is the most-widely spoken language in Ghana, English is the official language of government.
Kenya is home to more than 70 ethnic groups; the most populous of which are the Kikuyu, at about 20 percent of the population. Together, the five largest groups—the Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya, Kamba, and Kalenjin—account for 70 percent of Kenyans. The major impediment to nation-building in Kenya is the schism caused by the failure to align the mystically bonded ethnic groups to the state so that the state territory can simultaneously be the national territory and vice versa (Katiambo, 2024, p.6). According to Katiambo (2024) although the hegemony of the nation-state should ideally lead to each state having one nation, regardless of Kenya’s deliberate nation-building efforts aimed at reversing the fragmented ethnic nations of the colonial epoch, the nation-state is still in competition with ethnic sub-nationalism.
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Multinational state
A multinational state or a multinational union is a sovereign entity that comprises two or more nations or states. This contrasts with a nation state, where a single nation accounts for the bulk of the population.[citation needed] Depending on the definition of "nation" (which touches on ethnicity, language, and political identity), a multinational state is usually multicultural or multilingual, and is geographically composed of more than one country, such as the countries of the United Kingdom.
Historical multinational states that have since split into multiple states include the Ottoman Empire, British India, Qing Empire, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, the United Arab Republic and Austria-Hungary (a dual monarchy of two multinational states). Some analysts have described the European Union as a multinational state or a potential one.
Many attempts have been made to define multinational states. One complicating factor is that it is possible for members of a group that could be considered a nation to identify with more than one nation-state. As Katiambo (2024) explains in Consumer nationalism in Kenya: tracing the rhetorical construction of the nation through anti-brand activism on Facebook, many countries are multination states and there are only "few nation-states with a perfect match between the nation and the state." Ilan Peleg wrote in Democratizing the Hegemonic State:
One can be a Scot and a Brit in the United Kingdom, a Jew and an American in the United States, an Igbo and a Nigerian in Nigeria ... One might find it hard to be a Slovak and a Hungarian, an Arab and an Israeli, a Breton and a Frenchman.
A state may also be a society, and a multiethnic society has people belonging to more than one ethnic group, in contrast to societies that are ethnically homogeneous. By some definitions of "society" and "homogeneous", virtually all contemporary national societies are multiethnic. The scholar David Welsh argued in 1993 that fewer than 20 of the 180 sovereign states then in existence were ethnically and nationally homogeneous, if a homogeneous state was defined as one in which minorities made up less than 5 percent of the population. Sujit Choudhry therefore argues that "[t]he age of the agriculturally homogeneous state, if ever there was one, is over".
Most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are former colonies and, as such, are not drawn along national lines, making them truly multinational states.
There is no ethnic majority in Ghana. The plurality group, the Akan people, are a meta-ethnicity (that is, a collection of similar but distinct ethnicities). While Akan is the most-widely spoken language in Ghana, English is the official language of government.
Kenya is home to more than 70 ethnic groups; the most populous of which are the Kikuyu, at about 20 percent of the population. Together, the five largest groups—the Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya, Kamba, and Kalenjin—account for 70 percent of Kenyans. The major impediment to nation-building in Kenya is the schism caused by the failure to align the mystically bonded ethnic groups to the state so that the state territory can simultaneously be the national territory and vice versa (Katiambo, 2024, p.6). According to Katiambo (2024) although the hegemony of the nation-state should ideally lead to each state having one nation, regardless of Kenya’s deliberate nation-building efforts aimed at reversing the fragmented ethnic nations of the colonial epoch, the nation-state is still in competition with ethnic sub-nationalism.