The term nation connotes a broad community of individuals, whose members consider themselves linked on the basis of shared long-standing cultural practices, ethnicity, history, memories, or traditions, who are typically associated with a specific geographical homeland, and who are predisposed to make political claims of autonomy, sovereignty, or other assertions of rights on the basis of their membership. Though nations are abstractions, in practice they are quite real to those who believe they belong to one. The idea that nations are real and legitimate forms of social organization is a fundamental assumption in ideologies of nationalism and national self-determination.
While in vernacular and economic use nation is often synonymous with country or state, the historical and sociological understanding of the term does not demand the existence of government or recognized statehood. Despite this difference, nation and state are often used interchangeably. For example, the United Nations is in fact an assembly of states, not nations, much as international relations actually refers to relations between states. To further confuse matters, citizens of states are often described as having that state’s nationality. However, states grant citizenship to recognize rights in the political community of the state, whereas nationality solely describes one’s membership in the nation. Nation is also commonly used as a synonym for an ethnic group, which may in some cases overlap in practice, though the term is analytically distinct.
Core disputes in theories of the nation include the very nature of nations’ existence: Are they real? Is it natural for humans to organize themselves into nations? Are these organizations based on natural differences, or are these differences social constructions? How long have people felt themselves part of nations? Is membership voluntary or ascribed?
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theorists believed that all people were born as members of a nation, with an inherent national character endemic to their group. Philosophers such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) argued that nations were naturally occurring linguistic and cultural communities, real and hereditary expressions of an eternal essence, generally unchanging over time, which deserved self-determination due to their differences from other groups. This school of thought has come to be known as primordialism. While contemporary scholarship has generally rejected this view, it lives on in the rhetoric of nationalist leaders, and in some representations of nations in popular media, particularly during times of war, when conflicts may be portrayed as ancient hatreds with no identifiable beginning and no possibility for resolution.
Refining the primordialists’ belief that nations are natural and real, perennialist scholars emerged in the mid-twentieth century to describe the robustness of nations without reliance on nature. Authors such as Anthony D. Smith suggested that nations may have a birth moment in the past, rooted in unique cultural practices and traditions that could be described as ethnic. However, once established, these characteristics of the nation become entrenched to the point of permanence, perennially reiterated in subsequent generations. Tales of "golden ages" or ancient battles with other national groups are passed down to younger generations, told and retold to cement the new generation’s links with its past.
Against this view of nations as ancient or eternal, so-called modernist theorists such as Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson examined the process of nation formation and argued that nations resulted from economic advances and industrialization. These authors grow out of a social constructivist tradition, which argues that no human enterprise can be understood as innately natural or "real." From this perspective, nations are invented or imagined, and only gain legitimacy through broad public acceptance, not a priori existence. Anderson, perhaps the most famous representative of the modernist or constructivist school, argued that nations were "imagined political communities," in which individuals came to believe that they were connected through cultural and political bonds to others whom they had never met, even the dead or not-yet-born. According to Anderson, these beliefs were disseminated as a byproduct of modern inventions such as the printing press, which, in combination with the capitalist desire to sell books and newspapers, helped standardize language and information dissemination across wide territories. "Print-capitalism" increased the scope of communities, but also defined their boundaries. As information spread, images of both the in-group and the out-group were constructed.
Modernists also highlight the role of the state in constructing the nation, through common symbols such as flags and holidays, common institutions such as public education and national museums, and through activities that cemented the community’s boundaries and limits, such as maps and censuses. The modernist paradigm has created a vast research program into the history of nations, asking how particular nations developed and how belief in these nations was manifested. Furthermore, it has opened up new perspectives: Once a nation is seen as imagined or constructed, it becomes possible to conceive of alternatives. This raises the questions of whether membership in the nation is a choice, either at the individual or the group level, and whether nations can be based on civic values, such as political principles, rather than ethnic traditions. In turn, postmodernists, writing since the mid-1990s, have argued that nations can never be fully constructed, that their content is subject to "discursive" redefinition and change, and that nations continually undergo reconstruction and reproduction.
As their name suggests, modernists also argue that the nation is a recent phenomenon. Many authors point to the French Revolution as a critical historical moment in the spread of the idea. When revolutionaries called for government to represent the people, they referred to the nation, instead of a particular class, religion, or region. This arguably had the effect of making illegitimate those forms of government that did not claim to represent the nation. Simultaneously, the ideology that states should represent nations, and that nations should have their own states, potentially hides other divisions that might exist within a society, for example, gender or class disparities. Postmodern and Marxist scholars have critiqued the "hegemony" of the nation as an organizing principle of political life.
A country whose borders coincide with a perceived national homeland is called a nation-state. However, this is an ideal type, and with the growth of immigration and globalization the idea of a homogeneous nation-state is arguably losing relevance. On the other hand, political leaders may nonetheless rule as if their state were an uncontested nation-state, and accordingly may enact policies on behalf of "their" nation, thereby keeping the nation a part of political life. As Rogers Brubaker suggests, the nation cannot be written off; even if its meaning cannot be pinned down, the idea of a nation remains useful as a "category of practice."
