“What do you understand by nation? Is the nation same as the state? Discuss.” (2012)
A nation is a large community whose members feel they share a common identity, history and destiny, and who want political self-rule. Ernest Renan (“What is a Nation?”, 1882) called it a daily plebiscite: a shared memory joined to a present will to live together. A state is a political-legal organisation. Max Weber defined it as the body that holds a monopoly of legitimate physical force over a territory. The first is a community of sentiment, the second an apparatus of power. They often coincide, but they are not the same.
Understanding the nation
- Primordialists (Edward Shils, Clifford Geertz) root the nation in “givens”: blood, language, religion and custom.
- Modernists see the nation as a product of modernity. Ernest Gellner (Nations and Nationalism, 1983) linked it to industrialism’s need for a common high culture spread by mass schooling. Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities, 1983) called it an imagined community made possible by print capitalism. Eric Hobsbawm showed that many national traditions were invented recently.
- Ethno-symbolists (Anthony D. Smith) argue that modern nations build on older ethnies, with their myths, memories and ties to a homeland.
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels tied nations to the rise of capitalism and the national market.
Nation and state distinguished
| Criterion | Nation | State |
|---|---|---|
| Nature | Socio-cultural, psychological | Political-legal |
| Basis | Shared identity and sentiment | Territory, population, government, sovereignty |
| Essential element | Consciousness of unity | Sovereignty and legitimate force |
| Membership | Felt belonging | Legal citizenship |
| Origin | Evolves historically | Can be created by law or treaty |
Why they are not identical
- Nations without states. Kurds, Palestinians and Tibetans have a strong national identity but no sovereign state of their own.
- States with many nations. The United Kingdom contains English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish identities, and Scotland held an independence referendum in 2014. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia broke apart along national lines.
- States building nations. Post-colonial states in Africa often inherited arbitrary colonial borders and then had to create a national identity.
- Transnational nations. Diasporas stretch national belonging well beyond state borders.
The Indian debate
T. K. Oommen (Citizenship, Nationality and Ethnicity, 1997) argues that treating nation and state as the same pushes linguistic and religious minorities outside the nation. India holds great diversity within one state: the Constitution recognises 22 scheduled languages. Naga and Mizo movements, and linguistic reorganisation after 1956, show nationalities negotiating a place inside one state. Alfred Stepan, Juan J. Linz and Yogendra Yadav therefore describe India as a state-nation, not a classic European nation-state. Its loyalty is civic and constitutional, and it allows several cultural identities at once.
Conclusion
Nation and state are analytically distinct. The nation-state is a historically specific fusion of the two, born in Europe after the French Revolution. Where state and nation are forced to coincide through assimilation, conflict follows. Plural democracies do better with a civic idea of the nation that the state protects rather than imposes.