Nation state

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 broadly or ideally congruent. "Nation state" is a more precise concept than "country" or "state", since a country or a state does not need to have a predominant national or ethnic group.

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. A nation-state may or may not be contrasted with:

This article mainly discusses the more specific definition of a nation-state as a typically sovereign country dominated by a particular ethnicity.

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.

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 Black 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 geography combined with cartography and advances in map-making technologies. It was with these intellectual discoveries and technological advances that the nation-state arose.

For others, 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^[who?] 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 French – with 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.^{[citation needed]}