Nations and Nationalism

A nation is not simply any casual collection of people, and it is also different from the other kinds of groups and communities human beings form. It is not like a family, which rests on face-to-face relationships in which each member has direct personal knowledge of the others. It is not like a tribe or a clan either, where ties of marriage and descent link every member to every other, even if some members have never personally met — because such ties can always be traced. Members of a nation, by contrast, will mostly never meet most of their fellow nationals face to face, and need not share any provable tie of common descent. Yet nations exist, are lived in, and are deeply valued by their members. …