Nation

The term nation has multiple meanings. It is frequently employed to refer to a country, as in sentences such as “France is a nation” and “Snow is falling across the nation's midsection.” It also is used as a synonym for large social groups such as the French, Arabs, or Cherokees. The term nation generally refers to large social groups; however, it is also used interchangeably with terms for other large social formations such as ethnic groups, nationalities, races, and tribes. These concepts also overlap as many nations are multiethnic, multiracial, and multitribal. Despite similarities in meanings, nation has its own distinct meanings and origins. It derives from the Latin nationem, meaning “breed or race,” which itself stems from nasci, “to be born.” When the word nation entered the English language in the 13th century, it reflected this original meaning by referring to a “blood-related group.” However, by the 17th century, nation was applied to inhabitants of a country. The use of the word nation today echoes one or both of these meanings.

The meaning of nation was expanded and shaped by the Enlightenment and then the Romantic period. The Enlightenment figures such as John Locke and John Milton emphasized the rights of individuals with governance dependent on the free consent of the governed. Jean-Jacques Rousseau accepted that individuals’ rights were essential, but he believed that individual rights could best be protected through group membership because collective groups best provided security to individuals. Therefore, nations were viewed as individuals bound together for collective security rather than by common cultural characteristics. Because states existed to provide security, it was crucial for individuals within states to develop an “ardent love for the fatherland/motherland” so that states could perform their mission of providing security. These ideas fit well with the emerging modern state, whose inhabitants (i.e., citizens) were then seen as a nation bound together by the state.

Rousseau's preoccupation with security meant that he believed that national membership was best determined by the need to maximize states’ abilities to ensure the security of their citizens. Accordingly, Rousseau believed that the size of nations should be no larger than that which could be sustained by the available natural resources in a territory. Similarly, security also was achieved by the location of states’ boundaries along physiographic features such as mountain ridges and rivers because they were seen as the most easily defendable. Therefore, rather than grouping people together by common cultural characteristics, Rousseau believed that national membership was defined by groups’ optimal sizes relative to the available resources and the location of the individuals within these easily defended boundaries. Today, it is accepted that nations require resources [Page 1972]and need to defend themselves; however, few believe that natural resources determine the existence and the size of nations and who belong to them. However, Rousseau so thoroughly intertwined national identity with the natural world that he and those who built on his ideas believed that nature determined the number, sizes, and appropriate territories of nations.

Later romantics such as Johann Gottfried Herder deemphasized the role of individuals and focused instead on the collective group, das Volk (the people), bound together by shared culture, most notably language, religion, and history. Romantics believed that each language was “a currency of thought.” Therefore, to bond together into a nation, individuals had to speak the same language. Vernacular languages were essential because each one embodied a nation's culture, beliefs, and values, molding its members’ thinking and behavior in a way not completely translatable into other languages. Nature also was seen as a determinant of national identity because it was believed to be a force that shaped culture, including language. This notion was reinforced by environmental determinism as it grew in the 19th century. Thus, language and physiographic regions were seen to go hand in hand and were viewed as mutually reinforcing. For example, Irish nationalists frequently asserted that nature (which often includes God) created an island called Ireland and, therefore, nature intends for one people (i.e., the Irish) to live there under the governance of a single Irish state. This belief is expressed in Article 2 of the Constitution of the Republic of Ireland, written in 1937: “The national territory consists of the whole island of Ireland, its islands and the territorial seas.” Similarly, French nationalists developed the belief that France was naturally bounded by the Atlantic, the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Rhine River. For example, Buache de la Neuville wrote in 1791 that France's boundaries should be fixed according to “the natural division of the Globe formed at its origin by the Creator.” By the middle of the 19th century, the concept of natural boundaries provided the French public with “a lesson of sacred union” and a sense of historical continuity.

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