A nation may refer to a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, or history. In this definition, a nation has no physical borders. However, it can also refer to people who share a common territory and government (for example the inhabitants of a sovereign state) irrespective of their ethnic make-up. The word nation can more specifically refer to people of North American Indians, such as the Cherokee Nation that prefer this term over the contested term tribe.
According to Joseph Stalin writing in 1913 in Marxism and the National Question: "a nation is not a racial or tribal, but a historically constituted community of people;" "a nation is not a casual or ephemeral conglomeration, but a stable community of people"; "a common language is one of the characteristic features of a nation"; "a nation is formed only as a result of lengthy and systematic intercourse, as a result of people living together generation after generation"; "a common territory is one of the characteristic features of a nation"; "a common economic life, economic cohesion, is one of the characteristic features of a nation"; "a common psychological make-up, which manifests itself in a common culture, is one of the characteristic features of a nation"; "A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture." According to Stalin, this would exclude Jews as they have no common territory.
An alternative view, expressed by Otto Bauer, author of Social Democracy and the Nationalities Question (1907), that "A nation is an aggregate of people bound into a community of character by a common destiny." would include Jews. R. Springer, author of The National Problem (1909), also cited by Stalin in his discussion of this matter, held similar views.
Read more about Nation: Etymology, Medieval nationes
Other articles related to "nation, nations":
... to dividing the territory into independent states, considering that this would weaken the nation, which needed unity to counter any attempted reconquest by Spain, which would be supported by ... ideology argued that it was the desire and will of the nation to be formed in this way, and cited the prosperity established under this form of ... The nation formally assumed sovereignty and was constituted by free, sovereign and independent states ...
... A nation is a unified social community ... Nation or The Nation may also refer to A country, a division of a geographical territory marked by boundaries ...
... edition of the volleyball Olympic tournament, in 1964, was won by Japan, the host nation ... The American-led boycott of the 1980 Games left many strong volleyball nations like Japan and South Korea out of the games ... boycotting the games, and once more many strong volleyball nations like the USSR, East Germany and Cuba did not participate ...
... A significant early use of the term nation, as natio, occurred at mediaeval universities to describe the colleagues in a college or students, above all at the University of ... opening in 1349 the studium generale which consisted of Bohemian, Bavarian, Saxon and Polish nations ... eat and have their places of meeting, each nation apart from the others, and a Knight has charge of each one of these hostels, and provides for the ...
... importance (as did the governments of other geographically large nations, such as the Soviet Union and the United States) ... In the words of Director General of Civil Aviation AB Corbett, A nation which refuses to use flying in its national life must necessarily today be a backward and defenceless nation ... National Airways Commission (ANAC) and charged it with the task of reconstructing the nation's air transport industry ...
Famous quotes containing the word nation:
“Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood ... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.”
—Indira Gandhi (1917–1984)
“We Americans have the chance to become someday a nation in which all radical stocks and classes can exist in their own selfhoods, but meet on a basis of respect and equality and live together, socially, economically, and politically. We can become a dynamic equilibrium, a harmony of many different elements, in which the whole will be greater than all its parts and greater than any society the world has seen before. It can still happen.”
—Shirley Chisholm (b. 1924)
“I have been spending my first night in an American “summer hotel,” and I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining callow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!... What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.”
—Edith Wharton (1862–1937)