Nation

“Nation” is one of those terms in which everyday and social scientific languages intersect with and feed into one another. It is then not at all surprising that complications and ambivalences ensue when trying to define it. Indeed, during the past two centuries, and increasingly over the whole globe, the nation has been treated as a god and a demon; been declared born and dead many times; been regarded as a modern as well as a primordial form of social and political community; been conceived of as both a rational structure and an imagined/imaginary community; created as much welfare as misery; been equally a source for political democracy, cosmopolitan dreams, and ethnic cleansing; coexisted with empires, colonies, blocs, protectorates, city-states, and other forms of sociopolitical organization; gone through experiences of unification, totalitarian terror, occupation, division, and then re-unification; and been legitimized around ethnic, racial, republican, monarchic, liberal, multicultural, federal, and even class principles. Yet, despite – or more possibly owing to – all this variation, the nation has somehow managed to present itself as a solid, stable, and ultimately the necessary form of social and political organization in modernity. Again in this case, the sources of this alleged solidity have proved difficult to identify: increase in the state's control over “its” population through nationalization policies such as literacy campaigns, schooling, taxation, and military recruitment; the use and abuse of sentiments of belonging, to emphasize cultural and/or ethnic differences; the rise of an “international” system of nation-states composed of a growing number of at least formally equally sovereign members; the development of a capitalist class structure at the national level and the expansion of capitalism at the global level; the universalistic appeal of popular sovereignty and democracy. Nations and nation-states are, in all certainty, one of modernity's most complicated themes.