136 CHAPTER FivE ■ The STaTe
piece of real estate carved out of South Africa— was recognized by just one state,
South Africa; that proved insufficient to give Transkei status as a state, and the terri-
tory was soon reincorporated into South Africa.
Some states are currently contested. In early 2008, Kosovo, once a semi- autonomous
part of Yugo slavia and later a province of Serbia, declared in de pen dence from Serbia.
It accepted a constitution and established a ministry of foreign affairs. In 2013, Face-
book gave users the option to identify themselves as citizens of Kosovo, rather than
Serbia, an act that Kosovar leaders hailed as raising the country’s profile and reinforc-
ing its in de pen dence. By the end of 2015, more than 100 states had recognized Kosovo’s
in de pen dence, but these states did not include Serbia, Rus sia, or five EU members,
each battling their own insurgency, which they feared might seek in de pen dence.
Other de facto but unrecognized states include Abkhaza, Nagorno- Karabakh, and
South Ossetia, among others. They are variously described as “quasi- countries teetering
on the brink of statehood,” which are in “the international community’s prenatal ward”
or, more simply, states in limbo land.^2 So although the legal conditions for statehood
provide a yardstick, that mea sur ing stick is not absolute.
The definition of a state differs from that of a nation. A nation is a group of people
who share a set of characteristics. Do a people share a common history and heritage,
a common language and set of customs, or similar lifestyles? If so, then the people
make up a nation. At the core of the concept of a nation is the notion that people with
commonalities owe their allegiance to the nation and to its legal representative, the
state. This feeling of commonality, of people uniting together for a cause, provided
the foundation for the French Revolution and spread to Central and South Amer i ca
and central Eu rope. Nationalism— the belief that nations should form their own
states— propelled the formation of a unified Italy and Germany in the nineteenth
century. The recognition of commonalities among people (and hence of differences
from other groups) spread with new technologies and education. When the printing
press became widely used, the masses could read in their national languages; with
improved methods of transportation, people could travel, witnessing firsthand simi-
larities and differences among other groups. With better communications, elites could
use the media to promote unity or sometimes to exploit differences.
Some nations, like the Danes and Italians, formed their own states. That coinci-
dence between state and nation, the nation- state, is the foundation for national self-
determination, the idea that peoples sharing nationhood have a right to determine how
and under what conditions they should live. Other nations are spread among several
states. One of the largest groups of people without their own state is the Kurds. Thirty
million people strong, scattered in the mountainous areas of Turkey (14.7 million), Syria
(1.7 million), Iran (8.1 million), and Iraq (5.5 million), their language, Kurdish, is
unrelated to either Arabic or Turkish, and most Kurds are Sunni Muslims. After World
War I, the Kurds sought self- rule and an in de pen dent Kurdistan, but in de pen dence did