We explain what a nation is, the elements that compose it, its characteristics and examples. Also, the relationship between nation and state.
What is a nation?
In a broad sense, a nation is any community historical and cultural human, capable of giving individuals a sense of identity that differentiates them from individuals belonging to other cultures. It usually has a territory that you consider your own.
In that sense, a nation can be spoken of to mean a Condition, a country, a territory, an ethnic group, a people or a race, depending on the considerations of the case.
What today we understand as a nation (nation-states), arose in the second half of the 18th century, together with the homeland and the nationalism. Its point of birth is considered French Revolution of 1789, when the absolutism of the Old Regime fell, which gave the monarchs absolute power.
In contrast, the sovereignty of the citizens (the "people" or the "nation" of the French), according to the philosophical guidelines of the Illustration: 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, love for it was also born, which is nationalism. Thus was formed the concept of the national, in opposition to the foreign.
Elements of a nation
Every nation, roughly, is made up of the following elements:
- Territory. All the nations of the planet possess, in one way or another, a territory which they consider their home and on 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 support a non-agricultural based life model, and in that sense they do not require a fixed territory, but rather a series of intermittent territories.
- Tongue. Every nation has an official language, in which its bureaucracy, its legal code and its historical documents, and with which its population is identified. In some cases, the official languages may be several, since in the same country there may be more than one culture, but one always has one as predominant, above the others.
- government. Every nation governs itself or is attached to a common government together with others (in the case of plurinational States). This government makes the State work, 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 settlers that make it up, that is, without a people who speak their language, inhabit their territory and obey their laws. That is, there are no nations without people.
Characteristics of a nation
Members of a nation share traditions that shape their identity.
According to Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson (1936-2015), nations are imagined political communities, which in the modern era guarantee citizens a sense of belonging to a greater whole and therefore of immortality, a role that they once played in their place. the religions.
From there it follows that nations did not always exist, or not in the same way, or with the same name, or around the same identity. Even ancient nations, organized around an idea of common ethnicity, that is, of race and blood, were social and cultural constructions that served the Humans to differentiate themselves and assimilate with their own.
At present the nation is understood based on two different ways:
- The political nation. That he is the holder of the sovereignty of the peoples, in charge of implementing the rules contemplated in the legal framework by which they decide to be governed, and which will be the guarantors of the operation of the State.
- The cultural nation. What is a difficult concept of social Sciences, by which the ethical-political body of characteristics shared by the inhabitants of a nation, in terms of language, religion, tradition or history common, within the framework of the construction of a “national identity”.
Nation and state
Are not synonyms the nation and the state. 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 not nations. The latter are the result of a process historical, gradual and cultural.
For this reason, there may be States without a nation, such as the Vatican, which lacks a cultural base of its own and exists only for the purpose of administering the Catholic religious faith, while every nation aspires to some form of State, otherwise it will not be able to exercise their 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, Turkey, Iraq and Iran, known as the moutains from Kurdistan. Although they exist as a nation and as an ethnic group, they do not have a State and therefore cannot self-determine, but rather adhere 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, and thus must exist in nation-states as foreigners. However, they kept a strong hold on their identity, built on the practice of the Jewish religion. That is why there may be Jews of different nationalities, even today when there is the State of Israel, home to all those who consider themselves Jews, although these 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 Aymara, Quechuas, Yuracares, Cachicanas, Ayoreos, Guaraníes, Afro-Bolivians and many more.