Nation

What is a nation? Ernest Renan famously defined it as solidarity between a group of people constituted by a mutual desire for, and preparedness to contribute to, the continuation of a distinctive way of life. But what is the basis of this distinctive form of life? What are the consequences of these commitments and sentiments? Why do nations matter, morally speaking, if indeed they do?

Is a nation a natural kind, or is it more closely related to psychological phenomena and thus more mutable and negotiable? According to the former, nations are constituted by people that share certain objective properties or characteristics, such as race, language, a common ethnic descent, or that are shaped by a distinctive climate and homeland. According to the latter, a nation is, above all, the product of subjective belief, that is, a common bond of sentiment. Most political theorists have opted for the second as [Page 588]opposed to the first model, fully aware that the actual uses to which nationhood and nationalism have been put has often appealed to the language of natural kinds. Many have done so precisely because they think it is important to save the idea of the nation, as well as nationalism, from the terrible crimes perpetrated by many nationalists. Others do so in order to point out the fictitious and ultimately bogus status of nations and thus cast into doubt the philosophical respectability of nationalism in general.

It is important not to run together the idea of a nation with two other related but distinct concepts, namely ethnic groups and the state. Ethnic groups and nations are undoubtedly historically closely connected. Both are aggregates of people that share certain common features and that engage in forms of mutual recognition. It has been argued that, in fact, all nations have deep, though often obscured, origins in ethnic communities. But an ethnic group is tied much more closely to the idea of kinship and descent than a nation. Every ethnic group might potentially become a nation, but it need not. Many nations might have their origins in particular ethnic communities, but they can, and often do, branch out to encompass more than one. Similarly, although many states today are nationstates, the two are not identical. (Some critics say it is unfortunate the largest global association of states is called the United Nations, for it is clear that its members are neither united nor made up of nations but rather states.) Many nations may aspire to statehood, but they need not (e.g., indigenous peoples). And many states, if not most, contain more than one nation. So there is no necessary logical connection between nationhood and statehood. This has enormously important consequences for normative arguments about nationalism.

It is often suggested that nations, at least as we understand them today, are a product of modernity, and especially of the nineteenth century, and thus have specific preconditions—such as an integrated economy and common social institutions—which are then used to promote a common language or culture. On this reading, nationalists in control of these institutions and resources produce nations, not vice versa. However, although these preconditions help promote the common bond of sentiment central to nationality, they aren't necessary conditions, because we can find nations without the apparatus of modern industrial states, and in non-Western contexts as well. Also, the language of nationhood as a specific form of political argument has a much older lineage than the nineteenth century, to be sure; we find references to nations as political units as far back as the fourteenth century. But there are indeed important changes that emerge in the modern era. In the early modern period, and especially by the French Revolution, the idea of a nation is increasingly associated with the notion of a people acting collectively to exercise (or at least oppose) political authority. To have the idea of a people possessed of a will, you need some way of conceiving of them as a collective body—as a people. Here the older ideas of nationhood involving a shared culture, language, or homeland are overlaid with an explicit commitment to a shared political project of self-government or popular sovereignty. Because modern political communities are not structured along kinship lines, or based on intimate face-to-face relations, what holds them together, in part, are beliefs about a common political project transmitted through a shared language made manifest in the various modes of mass communication in that society (its books, newspapers, and other media).

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