# Nation
A nation is a community whose members view each other as belonging to a shared culture, history, and institutional framework, with some definitions additionally including a shared language, ethnicity, or religion.[1](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118474396.wbept0695) The term is distinct from the state, the institution exercising centralized rule over a territory, and from the nation-state, a political entity with sovereignty over a defined territory in which the state and the nation roughly coincide.[1](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118474396.wbept0695) • [2](https://openstax.org/books/introduction-anthropology/pages/8-4-modern-nation-states) In everyday speech nation is often used loosely for a country, but in political science the three ideas are kept apart: not all nations have their own state, and not all states contain a single nation.[1](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118474396.wbept0695)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Definition | A nation is a group of people who recognize one another as sharing a common culture, history, and institutions, and sometimes language, ethnicity, or religion[1](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118474396.wbept0695) |
| Nation vs. state | The state is an institution of centralized rule over a territory; a nation is a community of shared identity, and the two need not coincide[2](https://openstax.org/books/introduction-anthropology/pages/8-4-modern-nation-states) |
| Nation-state | A political entity with sovereignty over a defined territory in which the state and a common national culture largely coincide[1](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118474396.wbept0695) |
| Dating | Scholars generally agree the nation-state was invented toward the end of the eighteenth century, while disagreeing on whether nations existed earlier[3](https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.14527540) |
| Civic/ethnic divide | The Kohn dichotomy, contrasting civic and ethnic conceptions of the nation, gained prominence after the Soviet disintegration and the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s[4](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nana.12991) |
| State-nation model | Where significant multiple but complementary identities exist, state-nation building and democracy-building can reinforce each other[5](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/government-and-opposition/article/comparative-theory-and-political-practice-do-we-need-a-statenation-model-as-well-as-a-nationstate-model1/987676B3508546069FEE44667A16D77F) |
| Legal usage | Nationality as citizenship of a state is legally distinct from nationality as membership of a nation in the sense of race[6](https://icj-web.leman.un-icc.cloud/sites/default/files/case-related/172/172-20190425-WRI-01-03-EN.pdf) |
## Nation, state, and nation-state
The state, in [Anthony Giddens](https://www.edgepedia.org/anthony-giddens)'s definition cited in the political science literature, is "a set of institutional forms of governance maintaining an administrative monopoly over a territory with demarcated boundaries (borders), its rule being sanctioned by law and direct control of the means of internal and external violence," existing among other such states.[7](https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.70011) [International law](https://www.edgepedia.org/international-law) offers a parallel formulation: Article 1 of the [Montevideo Convention](https://www.edgepedia.org/montevideo-convention) on Rights and Duties of States of 1933 gives the classic and generally accepted definition of a state as a person of international law.[8](https://www.unhcr.org/sites/default/files/legacy-pdf/3dc7ca2e4.pdf)
A nation, by contrast, is defined by shared identity rather than by institutions of rule. A nation-state is the case where the two align: a state whose population forms, or is made to form, a common national community.[1](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118474396.wbept0695) The alignment is a matter of degree. Nation-states include, to varying degrees, citizens who "stand out" from the core population by place of birth, ethnicity, language, or religion, and research on national attachment asks under what conditions a sense of belonging to the nation is extended to these distinctive groups.[9](https://escholarship.org/uc/item/20f203bx) Governments actively promote national identity through elections, censuses, taxes, schools, and the public dramas of lawmaking and enforcement.[2](https://openstax.org/books/introduction-anthropology/pages/8-4-modern-nation-states)
The order of formation differs across cases. France is described as the preeminent example of an *état-nation*, a state whose creation preceded the formation of the [French people](https://www.edgepedia.org/french-people); in ethnic nations such as Germany and Italy, cultural unification preceded statehood.[10](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-international-studies/article/nation-has-conquered-the-state-arendtian-insights-on-the-internal-contradictions-of-the-nationstate/7DBB5AFB4E56B7950C2D97B55A66E22E)
## Theories of origins
Debate over when nations arose divides into broad camps. Primordialists see nations as a natural unit of society with eternal attributes such as language, religion, territory, or ethnic kinship; perennialists hold that nations are perennial but not natural, derived from long-term ethnic ties; modernists tie nations to distinctly modern conditions.[11](https://dspace.cuni.cz/bitstream/handle/20.500.11956/205936/140134168.pdf?isAllowed=y&sequence=1) Among the best-known modernist accounts are [Benedict Anderson](https://www.edgepedia.org/benedict-anderson)'s *Imagined Communities*, which shows how print-capitalism shaped the formation of modern nations; Ernest Gellner's interpretation of nations as a product of industrialization, which dissolved pre-modern society based in families, villages, and valleys and created an anonymous, mobile, educated mass needing a new common bond; and [Eric Hobsbawm](https://www.edgepedia.org/eric-hobsbawm)'s demonstration of the non-ethnic and non-linguistic foundations of modern nations.[11](https://dspace.cuni.cz/bitstream/handle/20.500.11956/205936/140134168.pdf?isAllowed=y&sequence=1)
Scholars generally concur that the nation-state was invented toward the end of the eighteenth century, but they disagree about whether nations or early forms of nationalism already existed before then.[3](https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.14527540) Anderson locates the possibility of the nation as a limited and sovereign community in a long process of secularization that undermined the divinely sanctioned power of monarchs and existing religious conceptions of time and history.[3](https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.14527540) Against the modernist reading, Steven Grosby's *Nations and Nationalism in World History* challenges the understanding of nations as exclusively modern and European in origin, drawing on evidence that nations are found in antiquity and the Middle Ages and throughout the world.[12](https://www.routledge.com/link/link/p/book/9780367077433) Newer scholarship largely backs this antimodernist reading, stressing how deeply nations and nationalism are rooted in the premodern era; yet Eric Storm's comparative study of the [Age of Revolution](https://www.edgepedia.org/age-of-revolution) shows that ideas of nationhood from before that period mattered little when nation-states were formed in Europe and the Americas.[13](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nana.12857)
Explanations also differ on what made new nation-states appear where they did. Using large datasets, Andreas Wimmer's 2013 study on a big scale showed that the emergence of new nation-states owed far more to geopolitical conditions than to internal modernization, a population's ethnic uniformity, or how powerful nationalist movements actually were.[13](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nana.12857) Work on nation-state proliferation more broadly suggests focusing on the interplay of nationalist activism and great-power policy.[14](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nationalities-papers/article/abs/identity-contingency-and-interaction-historical-research-and-social-science-analysis-of-nationstate-proliferation/AE22AC9FCCBB767592BE915CBB6C6D6F)
## Civic and ethnic conceptions
A long-standing distinction, associated with [Hans Kohn](https://www.edgepedia.org/hans-kohn), contrasts two ideal types of nation. In the civic narrative, Western nationalism is a form of patriotism or civic spirit centered on the legal and political institutions of the modern state; in the ethnic narrative, nationalism is tied to an essentialist conception of the nation as an ethnic community.[4](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nana.12991) The dichotomy acquired renewed prominence in both academic and public discourse after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the outbreak of ethnic conflict in the former [Yugoslavia](https://www.edgepedia.org/yugoslavia) in the 1990s.[4](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nana.12991) Even Western nation-states described as relatively homogeneous were homogeneous only in some respects, embracing a citizenry similar in historical experience, language, religion, or custom, though by no means all of these.[4](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nana.12991)
The distinction also carries political weight. During the age of nation-state formation, most states with heterogeneous populations sought to become nation-states by creating a uniform national culture through the assimilation or extermination of minority nations on their territories.[10](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-international-studies/article/nation-has-conquered-the-state-arendtian-insights-on-the-internal-contradictions-of-the-nationstate/7DBB5AFB4E56B7950C2D97B55A66E22E) In postcolonial societies, ethnic groups have contested the status of the majority around which the nation would be defined.[7](https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.70011)
## Managing diversity within states
Because most states contain more than one nation, comparative politics studies how institutional design manages ethno-national diversity. Robert Schertzer and colleagues propose measuring a state's macro-level approach along three foundational elements: whether and how territorial autonomy is employed, whether and how the state recognizes ethno-national minorities as groups, and the extent to which these minorities receive special group rights.[15](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nana.12446) On recognition, they classify Belgium (1993) and Spain (1978) as high, India as mixed, and France, with its Article 2 and Turkey's "indivisible unity" clause, as low.[15](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nana.12446) What matters most is the way the state characterizes its political community, whether, for instance, as a polity made up of multiple nations or cultures, or as a single undivided nation.[15](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nana.12446)
The **state-nation model** addresses the same problem from the side of democratization. Work comparing countries like India suggests that the appropriate kind of state institutions depends on the context, specifically how intense ethno-cultural mobilization is, and that when competitive elections begin in a polity with a single major group, broadly similar views of history and religion, and one language spoken across its territory, the building of a nation-state and of democracy may reinforce each other.[5](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/government-and-opposition/article/comparative-theory-and-political-practice-do-we-need-a-statenation-model-as-well-as-a-nationstate-model1/987676B3508546069FEE44667A16D77F) Where many significant groups exist, the same research program treats asymmetric federal arrangements and group recognition as the relevant toolkit.[5](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/government-and-opposition/article/comparative-theory-and-political-practice-do-we-need-a-statenation-model-as-well-as-a-nationstate-model1/987676B3508546069FEE44667A16D77F) • [15](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nana.12446)
Institutional choices can also work in the opposite direction. Scholarship on ethnofederal states examines the institutional sources of their survival and collapse, and debates whether ethno-federal institutions are by themselves subversive of stateness and peace, a reading some scholars draw from Valerie Bunce's analysis of the Yugoslav and Soviet experiences in *Subversive Institutions* (1999).[16](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/world-politics/article/divided-we-stand-institutional-sources-of-ethnofederal-state-survival-and-collapse/41306449EF0B2841A5AAFCCD4F3D6645)
## Nation and nationality in law
In legal usage, nationality ordinarily denotes the legal relationship between an individual and a state, and in nation-states nationality and citizenship are sometimes used interchangeably.[17](https://constitutionnet.org/sites/default/files/cn-glossary.pdf) This legal sense is kept distinct from membership of a nation in the cultural or racial sense: the 1955 edition of Oppenheim's *International Law*, current at the drafting of the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, states that "'Nationality' in the sense of citizenship of a certain state must not be confused with 'nationality' as meaning membership of a certain nation in the sense of race," a distinction treated as significant because legal nationality is not included in the CERD definition of racial discrimination.[6](https://icj-web.leman.un-icc.cloud/sites/default/files/case-related/172/172-20190425-WRI-01-03-EN.pdf) The gap between the two senses is visible wherever a nation lacks a state of its own; in international law such people are treated as holding the nationality of the state they live in, while the principle of the right of nations to self-determination remains a contested ground of international politics.[18](https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/170928/files/A_C.3_49_SR.8-EN.pdf)
## References
1. [Julie Mostov, "Nation and Nation-State," Encyclopedia of Political Thought, Wiley](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118474396.wbept0695)
2. ["8.4 Modern Nation-States," Introduction to Anthropology, OpenStax](https://openstax.org/books/introduction-anthropology/pages/8-4-modern-nation-states)
3. [Nationalism: A World History, JSTOR](https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.14527540)
4. [Jaakko Heiskanen, "Mind the gap: The nation form and the Kohn dichotomy," Nations and Nationalism (2023)](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nana.12991)
5. [Alfred Stepan, Juan J. Linz, and Yogendra Yadav, "Comparative Theory and Political Practice: Do We Need a 'State-Nation' Model as Well as a 'Nation-State' Model?" Government and Opposition](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/government-and-opposition/article/comparative-theory-and-political-practice-do-we-need-a-statenation-model-as-well-as-a-nationstate-model1/987676B3508546069FEE44667A16D77F)
6. [Written reply, ICJ case 172, on "national origin" and the CERD](https://icj-web.leman.un-icc.cloud/sites/default/files/case-related/172/172-20190425-WRI-01-03-EN.pdf)
7. [Lily El Amrani, "The nation-state, non-Western empires, and the politics of cultural difference," American Journal of Political Science](https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.70011)
8. [1st European Conference on Nationality, Strasbourg, UNHCR](https://www.unhcr.org/sites/default/files/legacy-pdf/3dc7ca2e4.pdf)
9. ["In Search of the Unified Nation-State: National Attachment among Distinctive Citizens," eScholarship](https://escholarship.org/uc/item/20f203bx)
10. ["'The nation has conquered the state': Arendtian insights on the internal contradictions of the nation-state," Review of International Studies](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-international-studies/article/nation-has-conquered-the-state-arendtian-insights-on-the-internal-contradictions-of-the-nationstate/7DBB5AFB4E56B7950C2D97B55A66E22E)
11. ["Ethnic Group, Nation and Nation-State: What Difference?" Charles University thesis](https://dspace.cuni.cz/bitstream/handle/20.500.11956/205936/140134168.pdf?isAllowed=y&sequence=1)
12. [Steven Grosby, Nations and Nationalism in World History, Routledge](https://www.routledge.com/link/link/p/book/9780367077433)
13. [Eric Storm, "The rise of the nation-state during the Age of Revolution," Nations and Nationalism 28(4) (2022)](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nana.12857)
14. ["Identity, Contingency, and Interaction: Historical Research and Social Science Analysis of Nation-State Proliferation," Nationalities Papers](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nationalities-papers/article/abs/identity-contingency-and-interaction-historical-research-and-social-science-analysis-of-nationstate-proliferation/AE22AC9FCCBB767592BE915CBB6C6D6F)
15. [Robert Schertzer et al., "Mapping institutional mechanisms of ethno-national representation," Nations and Nationalism (2018)](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nana.12446)
16. ["Divided We Stand: Institutional Sources of Ethnofederal State Survival and Collapse," World Politics](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/world-politics/article/divided-we-stand-institutional-sources-of-ethnofederal-state-survival-and-collapse/41306449EF0B2841A5AAFCCD4F3D6645)
17. [Glossary of Constitutional Terms, ConstitutionNet](https://constitutionnet.org/sites/default/files/cn-glossary.pdf)
18. [United Nations General Assembly, Third Committee, 49th session, summary record](https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/170928/files/A_C.3_49_SR.8-EN.pdf)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Social life and human behavior › Communities and populations › Society by place and types of society*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license