Nation

A Nation is a large social group with common origins and common characteristics (a national identity).

• Context:
  • It can (often) have a common Natural Language.
  • It can (often) have delusions about its ancestry.
  • It can (often) have a common disdain of its neighbors.
  • It can (often) have one or more Cultures.
  • ...
  • It can range from being a Stable Nation to being a Traumatized Nation.
  • It can range from being a Expanding Nation to being a Shrinking Nation.
  • It can range from being a Nation State to being a Stateless Nation.
  • ...
  • It can be associated with Nation Building.
  • ...
• Example(s):
  • East Asian Nations such as: The Japanese, The Koreans, The Taiwanese, The Chinese, The Mongolians, and The Tibetans.
  • European Nations such as: The French, The English, The Germans, The Austrians, The Italians, The Greeks, and The Romans.
  • Middle-Eastern Nations such as: The Sumerians, The Babylonians, The Phoenicians, The Hittites, The Carthaginians, The Jewish Nation, The Arabs, The Persians, The Turks, and The Assyrians.
  • South Asian Nations such as: The Indians, The Pakistanis, The Bangladeshis, The Sri Lankans, and The Nepalese.
  • African Nations such as: The Egyptians, The Nubians, The Ethiopians, The Kenyans, The South Africans, and The Nigerians.
  • North American Nations such as: The Americans, The Canadians, The Mexicans, The Iroquois, The Kwaquitl, and The Cherokee.
  • South American Nations such as: The Brazilians, The Argentinians, The Chileans, The Colombians, The Peruvians, The Venezuelans, and The Incas.
  • Central American Nations, such as: The Guatemalans, The Hondurans, The Salvadorans, The Nicaraguans, The Costa Ricans, The Panamanians, The Mayans, and The Aztecs.
  • Australian Nations such as: The Australians, The New Zealanders, The Maori, and The Aboriginal Australians.
  • Pacific Island Nations such as: The Micronesians, The Polynesians, The Melanesians, The Samoans, and The Fijians.
  • Caribbean Nations such as: The Haitians, The Dominicans, The Trinidadians, The Bahamians, The Barbadians, The Cubans, and The Jamaicans.
  • ...
  • Multi-Cultural Nations such as: The Americans, The Canadians, and The Mexicans.
  • Stateless Nations (who lack a sovereign state yet maintain a distinct national identity), such as:
    • The Kurds (1920s-present)
    • The Jewish Nation (70 CE - 1948)
    • The Palestinians (1948-present)
    • The Roma (medieval period-present)
    • The Basques (medieval period-present)
    • The Catalans (medieval period-present)
    • The Tibetans (1950-present)
    • The Uyghurs (1955-present)
    • The Rohingya (1982-present)
    • The Tamils (1948-present)
    • The Baloch (1947-present)
    • The Sami (early modern period-present)
    • The Western Saharans (1975-present)
    • The Hmong (19th century-present)
    • The Chechens (1990-present)
    • The Abkhazians (1992-present)
    • The Karen People (1949-present)
    • The Kashmiri (1947-present)
  • ...
• Counter-Example(s):
  • Regions with complex national identities or political instability like: The Iraqis, and The Afghanistanis.
  • Ambiguous cases such as: The Chinese and The Christians.
  • Non-national entities such as a Political State.
  • ...
• See: Habitus (Sociology), Ethnic Group, Race (Human Classification), Tribe, Community.

---

---

References

2019

• https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2019-02-05/new-americanism-nationalism-jill-lepore
  • QUOTE: ... To review: a nation is a people with common origins, and a state is a political community governed by laws. A nation-state is a political community governed by laws that unites a people with a supposedly common ancestry. When nation-states arose out of city-states and kingdoms and empires, they explained themselves by telling stories about their origins—stories meant to suggest that everyone in, say, “the French nation” had common ancestors, when they of course did not.

2016

• (Wikipedia, 2016) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/nation Retrieved:2016-10-22.
  • A nation (from Latin: natio, "people, tribe, kin, genus, class, flock") is a large group or collective of people with common characteristics attributed to them - including language, traditions, mores (customs), habitus (habits), and ethnicity. By comparison, a nation is more impersonal, abstract, and overtly political than an ethnic group. It is a cultural-political community that has become conscious of its autonomy, unity, and particular interests.

     Stalin's Marxism and the National Question (1913) declares that "a nation is not a racial or tribal, but a historically constituted community of people;" "a nation is not a casual or ephemeral conglomeration, but a stable community of people"; "a nation is formed only as a result of lengthy and systematic intercourse, as a result of people living together generation after generation"; and, in its entirety: "a nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture."

    The nation has been described by Benedict Anderson as an “imagined community” and by Paul James as an "abstract community". It is an imagined community in the sense that the material conditions exist for imagining extended and shared connections. It is an abstract community in the sense that it is objectively impersonal, even if each individual in the nation experiences him or herself as subjectively part of an embodied unity with others. For the most part, members of a nation remain strangers to each other and will never likely meet. Hence the phrase, "a nation of strangers" used by such writers as Vance Packard.

2016b

• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/22/english-nationalism-belonging-britain-scottish-independence
  • QUOTE: As a guide to human characteristics, “the English” isn’t useful. Like many general descriptions, it falters in the face of the particular. “The masses are always the other, that we do not know, and cannot know,” wrote the scholar and critic Raymond Williams in 1958, and perhaps I’m starting to use “the English” in a similar way, to describe people other to myself and the people I know at first or second hand. …
    … Of course, to be British had once been a braggart identity.

1945?

• William Ralph Inge.
  • QUOTE: ... A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbors. ...

---