Communities, Nations and Nation-States

A nation, at its simplest, is a large-scale community — a community of communities. What makes a collection of communities into a nation is a shared desire to belong to the same political collectivity. This desire for political unity usually expresses itself as the aspiration to form a state.

The state, in its most general sense, is an abstract entity made up of political-legal institutions that claim control over a specific geographical territory and the people living in it. Max Weber’s well-known definition sharpens this: a state is a “body that successfully claims a monopoly of legitimate force in a particular territory.”

A nation is a peculiar sort of community — easy to describe but hard to define. We can describe many specific nations founded on common cultural, historical and political institutions: a shared religion, language, ethnicity, history or regional culture. But it is difficult to come up with any defining features that a nation must possess. For every possible criterion, there are exceptions and counter-examples.

Many nations do not share a single common language, religion or ethnicity. Conversely, many languages, religions or ethnicities are shared across nations — yet this does not produce a single unified nation of all English speakers or all Buddhists. So how do we distinguish a nation from other kinds of communities, such as an ethnic group (based on common descent plus other commonalities), a religious community, or a regionally-defined community? Conceptually, there is no hard distinction. Any of these other types of community can one day form a nation. Conversely, no particular kind of community is guaranteed to form a nation.

The criterion that comes closest to distinguishing a nation is the state. Unlike other communities, nations are communities that have a state of their own. That is why the two are joined with a hyphen to form the term nation-state.

For example, the Soviet Union explicitly recognised that the peoples it governed were of different ‘nations’ — more than one hundred such internal nationalities were recognised. Similarly, people constituting a nation may actually be citizens or residents of different states. There are more Jamaicans living outside Jamaica than in Jamaica — the population of ‘non-resident’ Jamaicans exceeds that of ‘resident’ Jamaicans. Another example is ‘dual citizenship’ laws, which allow citizens of one state to simultaneously be citizens of another. Jewish Americans, for instance, may be citizens of both Israel and the USA, and can serve in the armed forces of one country without losing citizenship in the other.

In short, today it is hard to define a nation in any way other than to say that it is a community that has succeeded in acquiring a state of its own.

Interestingly, the opposite has also become increasingly true. Just as aspiring nationalities work towards forming a state, existing states find it more and more necessary to claim that they represent a nation. One characteristic feature of the modern era is the establishment of democracy and nationalism as dominant sources of political legitimacy. This means that today, ‘the nation’ is the most accepted justification for a state, while ‘the people’ are the ultimate source of legitimacy of the nation. In other words, states ‘need’ the nation as much or even more than nations need states.

But there is no historically fixed or logically necessary relationship between a nation-state and the varied forms of community it could be based on. This means there is no pre-determined answer to the question: How should the ‘state’ part of the nation-state treat the different kinds of community that make up the ‘nation’ part?

Historically, most states have been suspicious of cultural diversity and have tried to reduce or eliminate it. They have sought to establish and enhance their political legitimacy through nation-building strategies, securing the loyalty and obedience of their citizens through policies of assimilation or integration.

Policies of assimilation — often involving outright suppression of the identities of ethnic, religious or linguistic groups — try to erode the cultural differences between groups. They aim to persuade, encourage or force all citizens to adopt a uniform set of cultural values and norms, usually those of the dominant social group. Other, non-dominant groups are expected or required to give up their own cultural values.

Policies of integration seek to assert a single national identity by attempting to eliminate ethno-national and cultural differences from the public and political arena, while allowing them in the private domain. They insist that the public culture be restricted to a common national pattern, while all ‘non-national’ cultures are relegated to the private sphere. Here too, there is the danger of the dominant group’s culture being treated as ‘national’ culture.

Both sets of policies assume a singular national identity. Assimilationist and integrationist strategies try to establish this through various interventions:

• Centralising all power to forums where the dominant group constitutes a majority, and eliminating the autonomy of local or minority groups
• Imposing a unified legal and judicial system based on the dominant group’s traditions and abolishing alternative systems used by other groups
• Adopting the dominant group’s language as the only official ‘national’ language and making its use mandatory in all public institutions
• Promotion of the dominant group’s language and culture through national institutions including state-controlled media and educational institutions
• Adoption of state symbols celebrating the dominant group’s history, heroes and culture — reflected in choices of national holidays or naming of streets …