Nation, State, and Nation-State
I was listening to the most recent episode of Pod Save the World on my walk this morning, and I started thinking about the difference between a state, nation, nation-state, and country. Here’s the link to the episode if you want to listen too.
And if you want more, here’s the link to their YouTube channel.
I won’t go into all of the detail, but I was struck by a similar issue that was part of each global hot spot they talked about: the disconnect between the state (defined as a political entity with the characteristics in the left column on this chart) and the nation (the cultural connection among the people who live in a given state).
Political scientists talk about these concepts a lot. When I taught high school American Government, I made passing reference to them. But when I taught high school Comparative Government, these concepts were front and center. They play out during the process of political development.
There’s lots to say about this, but let me just make a few points.
A nation is made up of the cultural connections among people. Often this includes a shared language, religion, founding history (or mythology), and traditions.
States are specifically governmental. As the second column in the chart notes, a state is defined by territory, population, government, and sovereignty.
A nation-state describes that happy circumstance when a state and a nation are coterminous
A country has a somewhat more vague definition. This term isn’t used in the academic political science literature, but it’s included in this chart because it is commonly used by a wider group of people.
Here’s another chart that helps make sense of these concepts.
As the hosts of this podcast were surveying the current status of world affairs (an optimistic goal for 90 minutes!) I realized that most of what they were discussing was the result of a disconnect between nations and states. Here are some example of how this plays out.
They focused a lot on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is fundamentally about a conflict between the nation (the people) of Ukraine and the state of Russia. When Putin first launched his invasion in March of 2022, I remember a lot of pro-Putin analysts dismissing Ukraine as an “artificial” state, created only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. But this isn’t true. The Ukrainian nation evolved very differently from the Russian nation. The Vikings first settled the area of Ukraine more than 1,000 years ago, and for hundreds of years Ukraine was part of the Ottoman Empire. Another group of Vikings, called the Varangians, settled along the Dnieper River, generally northeast of Ukraine. The two cultures evolved with different languages and traditions, although there was some overlap. At the end of the First World War, when both the Russian and Ottoman Empires were dismantled, the resurgent Soviet Union annexed Ukraine and made it part of the Soviet state for the next 70 years. When the Soviet Union fell apart, Ukraine became independent as a Ukrainian nation-state.
They also talked about coups in Africa. Again, this relates to the concepts of state and nation. When the Europeans colonized Africa in the 19th century, they did so with little regard for the existing nations on the continent. In general, the West generally uses the demeaning term “tribes” to refer to nations in parts of the world that came under European conquest (see indigenous nations – “tribe” – in North America for comparison) and pays little attention to them in the scramble for Africa. Much of the instability in post-colonial Africa can be traced to the arbitrary lines drawn by European powers in their rush to exploit the natural resources of the continent. They drew colonial boundaries that split nations and other boundaries that arbitrarily threw different nations together into one colony. When these colonies achieved independence, the persistence of national (tribal) identity and the artificiality of colonial (now state) borders complicated the process of nation/state building.
The relationship between colonialism and military coups is easy to trace. When the European powers colonized Africa, they attempted to bring together nations that had nothing in common – no common language, culture, religion, history, or traditions. To create a sense of common purpose, they created a military force to maintain order in the colony, intentionally recruiting from all of the nations (tribes) the colony encompassed in the hope of creating a new affinity for the colony over the indigenous nations. However, the colonizing powers did little to encourage political or economic participation from the colonized people. At independence, therefore, the primary “national/state” unifying entity was the military. The military has played out outsized role in the politics of African states for the past half-century, largely because of the lack of congruity between the nations and the states in Africa and the lack of common identity to resist the lure of the military autocrat.
They also talked about China, which you’ll see as an example of a “state” on the first chart. We don’t often think about the differences among the various nations (peoples, ethnicities, tribes) in China. They exist, although they have been subsumed under the majority Han ethnicity in the modern Chinese state. There are other nations that make up the Chinese state – the Manchu, the Mongols, the Hui, and the Tibetans – but to varying degrees, these ethnicities have been suppressed over time. Both India and China claim some border regions between the two countries, claiming that the people who live in these regions belong to one state or the other.
They also talked about India, where Hindu nationalism is on the rise. As you probably recall, when the Indian subcontinent became independent from Britain in 1947, it was divided into a Hindu state (India) and at first two Muslim states (East Pakistan and West Pakistan). East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1972 but was still a Muslim state. India’s constitution defines it as a secular and democratic republic, but Prime Minister Modi represents the right-wing Hindu nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) which is pushing for a Hindu identity for India – even to the point of changing its name from the colonial-era India to Bharat (a traditional Hindi name for the region).
This discussion provides just a taste of the complexity of these concepts. It’s probably fair to say that most hot wars are about the disconnect between nations and states in some fashion. It's enticing to analyze the current state of affairs in the United States in the context of evolving ideas of state, nation, and nation-state, but I’m not going to do that today. That’s for tomorrow’s essay.