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Nation-State

A unit of political organization of space, enclosed by legally establishedboundaries,
and representing, at least in theory, a territory linked to thecultural identityof an
ethnic group in the form of national identity or nationalism.Territorialityprovides
the link between a defined space and identity in most instances. Key to the notion
of the nation-state is the concept of thenation, which in this sense is not a synonym
for “country,” but rather identifies a group of people who share common attributes
of language, religion, historical development, or a combination of these. Nations
may exist without states—the Kurds, Sikhs, and Basque are all examples of nations
who do not possess their own state, but rather live within the confines of one or more
nation-states based on some other national identity. However, there is considerable
debate among scholars on exactly what constitutes a nation-state, when the first
nation-states arose, and how a nation-state comes into being. Benedict Anderson,
for example, suggests that nations and therefore nation-states are in essence “imag-
ined communities” (the title of his famous book on the subject) brought about by
the advent of “print capitalism,” and did not really exist in their modern form until
the end of the 1700s. Ernest Gellner argued that nation-states were the product
of the industrial age and emerged first in Europe in the 19th century. Other theories
abound, but what seems clear is that the collective identity of some ethnic groups,
bound to a given territory, had initiated the basic concept of the nation-state by the
early modern era, if not before.
What distinguishes a nation-state from an empire is the character of the polity; in
an imperial system, many diverse peoples are absorbed and controlled who hold
little in common with the culture of the ruling classes. In the Roman Empire, for
example, only a small elite group of Egyptians, Jews, Celts, and others spoke Latin,
the imperial language, and all of these peoples for the most part retained their own
religious identity—they were never made into Romans, nor was there any serious
effort to make them so. In the nation-state, institutions are created that cultivate
and promote the concept of a shared national identity, a sense of kinship that binds
the citizenry together, using themes of shared culture, historical antecedents, and
common destiny. The institutions that create this kinship are public schools, the
military, various types of media, and the government itself in many cases. Symbols
of the nation-state take on an elevated importance and respect—these include the

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