When I taught first year International Relations one of the early lectures covered the difference between state, country, and nation. Although used interchangeably by politicians, in IR the state is a political structure of which there are only about 200 in the world, mostly recognized by other states as being such, and with the legitimate recourse to the use of force (plus a couple of other factors). A country was a geographic reference - think Wales or the Basque Country, or Switzerland because a country and a state can share the same geography (and often do). A nation was not about political organisation or geography but a shared identity - sometimes ethnic, sometimes religious, sometimes nationalist - between a group of people.
Hence the US could be a single state and country, while being inhabited by many nations (American, Sioux, Apache etc). The UK could be a single state made up of multiple countries and inhabited by people identifying as members of many nations.
And occasionally you'll have a case where you have a distinct nation that has a well defined country (say Tibet) but is not recognized as a state.
> the state is a political structure (...) mostly recognized by other states as being such, and with the legitimate recourse to the use of force
What makes it legitimate, except that other states will recognize it? The status quo.
This is why China can crack down on HK, or Spain on Catalonia.
In a sense, it is not much different from organized crime: gangs recognize each other, sometimes fight but most of the time stay within their borders, and exert violence to punish their members that deviated from the rules. The gang members recognize that the use of violence to punish fellow members is legitimate.
In practice, most states recognize all other states. There are exceptions (Israel lacking recognition from some states, a few edge cases owing to long-ago treaties etc) even if they don't have good relations. The US and Iran, for example, might not have diplomatic relations but they both recognize the other as existing.
In some ways it is a little arbitrary. A new state like East Timor or South Sudan can be declared and immediately recognized by most everyone, and then admitted to the UN. Kosovo can déclaré itself a state, be recognized by a lot of other states, but lack a seat at the UN and 'real' statehood. And then there's a case like Taiwan which does more or less everything a state would or could do...but is recognized by almost nobody.
While it's not perfect, a good rule of thumb as to whether a state is really a state is if they are full members of the UN. It's not perfect - the Holy See and Switzerland were non-member states for a long time - but it's close.
In reality, it seems that those rules are bound for a change. UN at large needs to recognize that the current nationalistic movements are not going to die out, and go back to the core goal of preventing violent conflicts, which current arrangement is anything but helping.
I am not sure what the solution is, but providing a predetermined cost for separation of a part of the country is a simplistic framework that might work.
Eg. Catalonia gets their independence, owes Spain ~20 billion euros over the next 20 years, and they each guarantee to each other that it will not raise taxes to opposing products in the next 30 years[1]. For Kosovo it's a bit late to avoid violence. But as state separation becomes common and accepted as "normal", there will be less of "this is terrible" storylines that politicans thrive on, so harder to pull people into violent wars.
Oh well, one can only hope. FWIW, I am sure that will lead back to unification efforts (you know, to share costs and optimise development: eg. it's hard to design a good railroad if you are governing only your tiny county), but as long as we define clear uniting and separating guidelines, I hope we can reach acceptable terms for all parties.
[1] Not saying this is a fair arrangement, but I am sure there could be a way to define something that is fair and probably written onto thousands of pages :)
So you'd say West Virginia is a country but not a state, and every Chinatown is a nation? I don't think your definitions match the accepted reality in the American English language.
A tract of land; a region; the territory of an independent nation; (as distinguished from any other region, and with a personal pronoun) the region of one's birth, permanent residence, or citizenship.
What is a nation? I argue that it is a group label that is invented and sustained in so far as it serves to further the goals of elites. Within an individual’s lifetime they appear unchanging, but from a historical perspective they are fluid and are frequently created, killed, or reborn as needed. When conversing about geopolitics we cannot ignore national identity, but we must keep in mind that in the long run nationality can be, and is, molded to suit political goals.
Nations are a political entity. What else would you expect. The same thing can be said about laws or morals or religion or ...
The argument is that states are a political entity, nations are a cultural entity. I'm more attached to the English language than I am to any particular state.
Edit: Apart from language, I can't think of any other cultural attribute which is strong enough to define a nation.
Yet you have nations with members speaking different languages (Switzerland, Belgium) as well as people speaking a common language split into multiple nation state (Germany/Austria, Romania/Moldova).
Switzerland and Belgium are both states. I don't think it would be much of a stretch to consider the Flemish and Walloons to be different nations, although then I'd wonder if they'd merge with the Dutch and French instead.
If you'd consider the Dutch and Flemish to have enough difference to define nations, then what about other regions of the Netherlands, or the different counties of the UK?
Uhm, I read tasogare's response as an argument contradicting your original summary how language is a good criteria to define nations.
You now seem to be diving into their examples to, in essence, agree with them: language itself is not a good common property to define a nation.
Coming from Serbia and speaking Serbian (but not Croatian or Bosnian, though we'd understand each other as if we are speaking the same language ;)), even language is a term used for political purposes, but what you make of it in relation to defining a "nation" is up to you.
I think basically, we know what states are, and often use "nation" as a synonym for state. But some people try to use "nation" to mean something else, such as Wikipedia would have it: "A nation is a stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, history, ethnicity, or psychological make-up manifested in a common culture."
Although, personally, I'd find language to be the only thing there that I'd care about
I don't think that's right. I think, for the most part, we're familiar with nation states, so we've changed the meaning of nation to mean "the people of a nation state". But in other parts of the world, for instance in Eastern Europe, you have people who are clearly Russians but citizens of other post Soviet states. There, you have a question about a nation and a state that do not correspond.
States speak of administration; nations speak of common bonds. States seek to turn their diverse populations into a common nation because it will create stability. But when some of the people who are subject to your administration feel a common bond with hundreds of millions of people on the other side of a somewhat arbitrary line, this may be an impossible or undesireable task.
Yes, we also have situations where a group of people have decided that they are a nation and really want an independent state: such as in Scotland, Catalonia, the Kurds, or Tibet: supporters of the existing state may even accuse them of wanting to "split the nation".
The idea of nationalism, that states and nations should coincide, was only partly implemented. There are numerous groups, including indigenous peoples of the Americas and Pacific or the numerous groups of India which never obtained their own states.
> ormed on the basis of a common language, territory, history, ethnicity, or psychological make-up
Some of these elements are indeed needed but not all them at once. There is the flagrant example of Alsatians who chose in 17th century to integrate the kingdom of France despite speaking a Germanic dialect over a religious matter (they were Catholics and German speaking people Protestants).
I could ask, back when Yugoslavia existed, was it a nation? If not, how many nations did it contain? Perhaps there's no single answer, since it depends on which arbitrary method you are going to use to divide people into nations.
Officially, even then it consisted of people of deveral nations: constituting nations of the original Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes were, unsurprisingly, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, but plenty of other nations lived in it. Towards the latter stages, there was an attempt to make everybody a member of a "Yugoslav nation", but we all know how that turned out driven by many conflicting interests. Official polls had a large number of "Yugoslavs" (obviously a product of the state, but large here meaning probably 15-25%), but you had minority nations like Hungarians and Slovaks that lived in the area for centuries.
While I agree nation is a made up concept, for many a nation it goes back a long time, and it did usually start by differentiating by language (and religion was quickly added into the mix esp in the area). Still, the fact that we can track movement of "nations" between states (eg. large number of Serbs moved to Hapsburg monarchy as Ottomans invaded "Serbia", basically becoming a majority there, thus leading to seccesion movements that led to WW1), means that it can and has been defined for quite a while.
While German nation was practically defined as Prussia led unification efforts, there was a concept of Germanic tribes a long time ago.
And yes, language was the main denominator, but as civilizations developed, more was added into the mix. After all, language was certainly territorial to begin with, so it is a derived attribute by itself.
But what's a language? Swedes and Norwegians and Danes can, basically, understand each other. Hindi and Urdu or Indonesian and Malaysian are the same day-to-day language but they have different technical and formal terms. Is there a language boundary between Scots and English, or is Scots a dialect?
Language is just as fraught politically as anything else.
I'm only attached to language for practical communication reasons, and mutual intelligibility is good enough. I don't care about accents or minor spelling variations.
Perhaps for you and me language is the only major attribute, but for many people there's also religion, and sometimes religion is even more important than language.
Perhaps you could speak of a Jewish nation, which is defined mostly by religion? But I don't think it's done in general: Catholics in Canada and the Netherlands aren't considered members of the same nation, they just happen to share a religion.
Thinking of nationality, I would guess it's easier to find cases in which religion divides people with a common language than cases in which religion unites people with different languages.
Yes, in theory it should be like this. But in real-life "Nation" is 99% used to describe a group of people who have the same passports. Which kind of ruins the concept of a nation to me. I feel more connection to people in the same industry, or the same hobbies then based on citizenship
This is an interesting article depending, among others, on how your (personal? "national"?) language defines nations and states. I find it hard to map my concepts into English words "ethnicity", which seems related to race, and "nationality", which seems related to states, while nations are ultimately neither.
If your nation used to make you a second-class citizen in foreign states, which is somewhat typical in Eastern Europe, you do have a sharp distinction between nations and states. I.e. nations can live under yoke of different states. In this states, your nation can/could make you an "invader" (funny how it's hard in English to find a word emotional enough to call someone who formerly conquered you!) or a "traitor" (Poles in Russian Empire), or a primitive "barbarian" unworthy of fully participating in our, you know, higher civilization (Poles in German Empire).
Intuitively, your nation is defined partly by your name (see Lithuanian actions to lithuanize Slavic names of citizens) and received language and culture. Funny how the OP seriously considers a "blood and race" understanding of nation, which I think in Europe is a fast road to Godwin law. Aside from being nonsensical, it just feels morally repulsive.
For the record, I do think that the European concept of nation does more harm not good, and in an ideal world we should replace it with civic identification with your free republic. But it does serve as an instrument to organize people for political action. This can be sometimes legitimately good.
Especially I find the OP's critique of American Revolution trite. For a long time now it's fashionable ot thrash both American and French Revolutions, while without them there would be no strong examples for people throughout the world to question power. (They were themselves based on ancient examples, but for them you need classical education.) Our world would be much more horrible without that.
> What is a nation? I argue that it is a group label that is invented and sustained in so far as it serves to further the goals of elites.
I’m pretty tired of hearing thoughts on nations and nationalism from a generation of westerners who are privileged enough not to remember why we have nations and nationalism. Ask the Uyghurs or Tibetans or Kurds what is a nation. Ask Israelis or Bangladeshis. You’ll get a sensible answer.
"A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture."
Not really. Laws come from what that group of people thinks.
See Arab countries having the death penalty for gay people, for instance. It's not the State that does that, but the group of people that want it done that way and the State passes laws.
> Could you tell me why elites want to destroy nations?
Elites mess with the nations all the time in their own benefit but aren't a monolithic group
They could want to distroy nations by money and/or power displacement and control, and decens of cases are registered in history. They do it all the time.
Financed Coups d'etat in Latinoamerica or Borgias killing popes in the ancien Italy are just two examples
Some elites ( globalists ) want to destroy nations today for the same reason elites in the past destroyed tribes to form nations. They create a bigger "slave and land base" on which to enrich themselves.
Think about what nations limit. It sections off resources (human,mineral,energy,etc) from the elites who want access to them. Under globalism, nation-states would exist in name only as they are superceded by a globalist political structure. Then these elites would have access to and control over all the world's human and natural resources.
Under a global political structure, an "american" CEO doesn't need to negotiate with Chinese government to gain access to and exploit its resources. And a "chinese" CEO wouldn't need to negotiate with an american government to gain access to and exploit its resources. Under globalism, the entire world and its people are freely available to the elites to exploit.
In a perverse way, globalism is communism for the elites. Whilest communists wanted to destroy nations to unite the workers, globalists want to destroy the nations to unite the elites. To a communist, a factory worker in china or germany or brazil has more commonality with each other than a chinese factory worker does to a chinese factory owner. To a globalist, an elite in china or germany or brazil has more commonality with each other than they do to their national commoners.
Of course some of the elites stand lose a lot while others will gain under globalism. That's why we are having a nationalist vs globalist struggle right now.
I think that those are separate issues: nations/states as currently instituted might stop some of the bad effects you are referring to, but if we really cared about those, we should work on solving them independently.
Eg. movement of people is not a negative for the people. While it does benefit wealthy corporations and their operators (cheap labour is easier to come by), we should look into ensuring that it does not play into their hands like that instead. However, that pretty much happens organically, just over a longer period (eg. 20-30 years for salaries to catch up in a poorer state).
I am also not a fan of the term "elites". While I dislike any sort of elitism, I would hope that the term is at least used for intellectual or cultural "elites," those able to define and deploy smart and empowering agendas.
I believe you two have different definitions of "elite". I am guessing that you define "elite" as the powerful (and therefore rich) and he defines it as the cosmopolitan-intellectual, the anti-nationalist and liberal minded (but not necessarily the top level of power or wealth).
I'm also guessing there's a difference of opinion as to whether nation-hood is a transitory social construct or an intrinsic unalterable eternal reality.
Hence the US could be a single state and country, while being inhabited by many nations (American, Sioux, Apache etc). The UK could be a single state made up of multiple countries and inhabited by people identifying as members of many nations.
And occasionally you'll have a case where you have a distinct nation that has a well defined country (say Tibet) but is not recognized as a state.