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Question
Why is it difficult to define the nation? How are nation and state related in modern society?
Solution
- A nation is a peculiar sort of community that is easy to describe but hard to define.
- We can describe many nations founded on the basis of common cultural, historical institutions like a shared religion, language, ethnicity, history or regional culture.
- But it is hard to come up with any defining features for the nation.
- For every possible criterion there are exceptions and counterexamples.
- For example :- There are many nations that do not share a common language, religion, ethnicity and so on. On the other hand, there are many languages, religions or ethnicities that are shared across nations. But this does not lead to the transformation of a single unified nation.
Nation at the simplest level, is a community of communities. Members of a nation share the desire to be a part of the same political collectivity. Nations are communities that have a state of their own.
- In modern times, there has been a one-to-one bond between nation and state. But this development is new.
- It wasn’t true of the past that a single state could represent a single nation or every nation must have its own state.
- For example, Soviet Union explicitly recognized that the people it governed were of different nations.
- Also, people constituting a nation may actually be citizens or residents of different states. There are more Jamaicans living outside Jamaica than in Jamaica.
- Dual citizenship could, also, be a possibility. These laws allow citizens of a particular state to also simultaneously be citizens of another state. Example, Jewish Americans May be citizens of Israel as well as the USA.
- Thus, nation is a community that has been able to acquire a state of its own. It‘s also seen that states are finding it more and more necessary to claim that they represent a nation.
- A feature of the modem era is the establishment of democracy and nationalism as dominant sources of political legitimacy. This implies that nation is the most accepted or proper justification for a state, while people are the ultimate source of legitimacy of the nation.
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