What Is a Nation, a State and a Nation-State?

What Is a Nation, a State and a Nation-State?

A Quick Puzzle Before Starting

Read the list below and decide, for each one, whether it is a nation, a state, or both. Keep your answers in mind; they will be revisited at the end of the article.

1. Japan

2. The Kurds

3. Switzerland

4. Scotland

5. The United Kingdom

6. Korea

Most people find this harder than expected. The words “nation,” “state” and “country” are used every day as if they mean the same thing. News presenters speak of the “United Nations,” which is actually an organisation of states. Politicians describe “the state of the nation.” Sports fans cheer for their “nation” at the World Cup, even when the team represents something else entirely. Scotland, for example, plays in international football tournaments, yet it is not an independent state.

In political science and international relations, these terms have precise and separate meanings. Understanding the difference explains why some peoples have fought for independence for generations, why some countries hold together while others break apart, and why borders drawn on maps so often fail to match the identities of the people living within them.

A Simple Way to Picture the Difference

Before turning to formal definitions, an everyday comparison helps.

Think of a family and a house.

• A family is a group of people bound together by shared history, memories, language, customs and a feeling of belonging. A family exists in people’s hearts and minds. It can survive even if it loses its home.

• A house is a physical structure with walls, a roof, a door that can be locked and rules about who may enter. A house can exist whether or not the people inside it feel like a family.

In this comparison:

• The nation is the family.

• The state is the house.

• A nation-state is a family living in a house of its own, with no other families sharing it and no members of the family left outside.

As in real life, the arrangement is rarely so neat. Some families have no house. Some houses contain several families who do not always get along. Some families are spread across several houses. The rest of this article explains each of these situations in turn.

The Nation: A Community of Belonging

Defining the Nation

A nation is a large group of people who see themselves as a distinct community because of shared characteristics and a common sense of identity. These shared characteristics often include:

• Language

• History and collective memory, especially of struggles, victories and suffering

• Culture, including customs, traditions, food, music and literature

• Religion, in some cases

• Ancestry or ethnicity, real or believed

• Attachment to a homeland, a territory regarded as belonging to the group

No single feature is essential. Switzerland’s people speak four different languages yet share a strong Swiss identity. Many Arabic-speaking peoples share a language but belong to different national communities. What matters most is not any one objective feature but the belief among the people themselves that they form a nation.

The Nation as an Idea

Several influential thinkers have tried to explain what holds a nation together.

Ernest Renan, the French historian, delivered a famous lecture at the Sorbonne in 1882 titled “What Is a Nation?” He rejected the idea that race, language or religion alone could define a nation. Instead, he argued that a nation rests on two things: a rich shared memory of the past, and a present desire to live together. In his most famous phrase, he described the existence of a nation as “a daily plebiscite,” meaning that a nation survives only as long as its people continue, every day, to choose to belong to it.

Benedict Anderson, in his book Imagined Communities (1983), offered an idea that has shaped the field ever since. He described the nation as “an imagined political community.” It is imagined, he explained, because members of even the smallest nation will never meet most of their fellow members, yet each person carries in their mind an image of their community. A farmer in one province and a teacher in another may never meet, but both feel connected through shared newspapers, schools, songs and national symbols.

Ernest Gellner, in Nations and Nationalism (1983), argued that nations are largely a product of the modern industrial age. Mass education, standard national languages and printed media created populations that shared a common culture on a scale impossible in earlier times.

Anthony D. Smith offered a counterpoint. He argued that while modern nations are recent, many of them are built on much older ethnic communities, myths, memories and symbols, which explains why national identities can feel ancient and deeply rooted.

Pause and consider: Think about your own sense of national identity. Was it formed mainly by language, religion, history, geography or something else? Have you ever felt more connected to a stranger simply because you discovered you came from the same country?

Two Kinds of National Identity

Scholars often distinguish between two broad types of nationalism, a distinction associated with the historian Hans Kohn in his work The Idea of Nationalism (1944):

• Civic nationalism defines the nation by shared citizenship, political values and loyalty to common institutions. Anyone who accepts these values and becomes a citizen can belong. The United States and France are often cited as examples.

• Ethnic nationalism defines the nation by shared ancestry, language, culture or descent. Belonging is seen as something inherited rather than chosen.

In practice, most national identities combine elements of both.

The State: A Political and Legal Organisation

Defining the State

A state is a political organisation that exercises authority over a defined territory and its population, and is recognised as sovereign. Where the nation is about identity and feeling, the state is about power, law and institutions.

The most widely cited legal definition comes from the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, signed in 1933. Its first article lists four qualifications of a state:

• A permanent population

• A defined territory

• A government

• The capacity to enter into relations with other states

Many scholars add a fifth element that is central to the modern understanding of the state:

• Sovereignty: supreme authority within its territory and independence from outside control.

The State and the Monopoly of Force

The German sociologist Max Weber, in his lecture “Politics as a Vocation” (1919), offered the most famous sociological definition. He described the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”

This idea is central to understanding how states work. Only the state is entitled to maintain armies and police, collect taxes, run courts and imprison those who break the law. When armed groups challenge this monopoly and the government can no longer control parts of its territory, political scientists speak of a failed or fragile state. Somalia, after the collapse of its central government in 1991, became one of the most frequently cited examples.

The Origins of the Modern State System

The modern system of sovereign states is commonly traced to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which ended the Thirty Years’ War in Europe. Historians debate how much the treaties actually changed, but they are widely associated with the principle that each ruler holds authority within their own territory, free from outside interference. This idea, known as Westphalian sovereignty, became the foundation of international relations and later spread across the world through colonialism and decolonisation.

Today, the United Nations has 193 member states, each considered legally equal regardless of size, population or power.

The Question of Recognition

A state’s existence also depends partly on whether other states accept it. Some political entities meet most of the Montevideo criteria but receive limited international recognition:

• Taiwan has its own government, military, currency and elections, but is formally recognised by only a small number of states.

• Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008 and is recognised by many, but not all, members of the United Nations.

• Somaliland declared independence from Somalia in 1991 and has functioned with its own government for decades, yet has received very little formal recognition.

These cases show that statehood is not only a matter of fact on the ground but also of acceptance by the wider international community.

The Nation-State: When the Two Meet

Defining the Nation-State

A nation-state is a state in which the great majority of the population shares a common national identity, so that the political borders of the state closely match the boundaries of the nation. In terms of the earlier comparison, it is a single family living in a house of its own.

The British-Czech philosopher Ernest Gellner captured the idea neatly. Nationalism, he wrote, “is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.” In simple terms, every nation should have its own state, and every state should contain one nation.

How the Idea Spread

The nation-state became the dominant model of political organisation over the last two and a half centuries.

• The French Revolution (1789): The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen stated that “the principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation.” Authority no longer belonged to a king by divine right but to the people as a nation.

• Nineteenth-century unification: Italy (completed largely by 1871) and Germany (unified in 1871) brought many smaller states together into larger nation-states. After Italian unification, the statesman Massimo d’Azeglio is often quoted as saying, “We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians.” The remark reveals an important truth: sometimes the state is created first, and the nation must then be built through schools, armies, national languages and symbols.

• The end of empires after 1918: The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires after the First World War led to the creation of new states in Central and Eastern Europe, based on the principle of national self-determination.

• Decolonisation after 1945: Dozens of new states emerged in Asia and Africa as European empires withdrew, although many inherited colonial borders that grouped together different national and ethnic communities.

Examples of Nation-States

Very few states are perfect nation-states, but some come close:

• Japan, where the overwhelming majority of citizens share Japanese language, culture and identity

• Iceland, with a small, largely homogeneous population and a strong sense of shared history

• Portugal, whose borders have remained largely unchanged for centuries

• South Korea and North Korea, each of which is largely homogeneous, although together they present a special case discussed below

When Nations and States Do Not Match

Most of the world does not fit the neat model of one nation in one state. The mismatch between nations and states explains many of the world’s conflicts and political tensions. Four main patterns can be identified.

1. Stateless Nations: A Family Without a House

A stateless nation is a national community that has a strong sense of identity and often a historic homeland, but no independent state of its own.

• The Kurds are frequently described as the largest stateless nation in the world, with an estimated 30 to 40 million people living mainly across Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. After the First World War, the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) raised the possibility of a Kurdish state, but the later Treaty of Lausanne (1923) did not include one. Since then, Kurdish political movements have sought greater autonomy or independence, and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq now enjoys significant self-government.

• The Catalans in northeastern Spain have their own language, institutions and strong regional identity. A disputed independence referendum in 2017, declared illegal by Spain’s courts, led to a major constitutional crisis.

• The Basques, living on both sides of the border between Spain and France, possess a distinct language unrelated to any other in Europe.

2. Multinational States: Several Families in One House

A multinational state contains two or more nations within its borders.

• The United Kingdom includes England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland held an independence referendum in 2014, in which 55.3 percent voted to remain part of the United Kingdom.

• Canada includes the French-speaking province of Quebec, which held independence referendums in 1980 and 1995. In the second, the side favouring remaining in Canada won by a margin of little more than one percentage point.

• Belgium is divided mainly between Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia, and its politics are shaped by the relationship between these two communities.

• Switzerland recognises four national languages, German, French, Italian and Romansh, and has managed its diversity through a highly decentralised federal system and direct democracy.

Some multinational states have broken apart. The Soviet Union dissolved into 15 independent states in 1991, and Yugoslavia broke up through a series of wars in the 1990s. Others, like Switzerland, have remained stable for centuries. The difference often lies in how well institutions give each community a voice and a stake in the shared state.

3. Divided Nations: One Family in Several Houses

A divided nation is a single national community split between two or more states.

• Korea has been divided since 1945, and formally since 1948, into North Korea and South Korea. The two states share language, history and culture, but have developed radically different political and economic systems.

• Germany was divided into East and West between 1949 and 1990. Its reunification in 1990 shows that divided nations can sometimes be brought back together within a single state.

4. Diasporas: Family Members Living Abroad

A diaspora is a community of people living outside their homeland while retaining a strong attachment to it. Large diasporas, such as the millions of Pakistanis, Chinese, Filipinos, Armenians and Lebanese living abroad, show that a nation can extend far beyond the borders of its state. Diasporas send home remittances, influence politics in both their homeland and their host countries, and keep national identity alive across generations.

Case Study: Pakistan and the Idea of Nationhood

Pakistan offers an important example of how the concept of the nation can shape the creation of a state.

A nation defined by shared faith and identity. The demand for Pakistan rested on the argument that the Muslims of British India formed a separate nation, with their own religion, culture, history and way of life. In his address at the session of the All-India Muslim League in Lahore in March 1940, Muhammad Ali Jinnah declared: “Musalmans are a nation according to any definition of a nation, and they must have their homelands, their territory and their state.” The Lahore Resolution adopted at that session, on 23 March 1940, became the foundation of the movement that led to the creation of Pakistan on 14 August 1947.

The role of language and regional identity. Pakistan’s early history also shows how national unity requires more than a single unifying principle. The Language Movement in East Pakistan, which reached a turning point on 21 February 1952, demanded recognition of Bengali as a national language. The movement became a powerful symbol of Bengali identity. In 1971, East Pakistan separated and became the independent state of Bangladesh. In recognition of the Language Movement, UNESCO declared 21 February as International Mother Language Day in 1999.

A diverse nation within one state. Today, Pakistan brings together Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashtun, Baloch, Saraiki, Muhajir, Kashmiri and many other communities, with Urdu as the national language and a shared national identity built on common faith, history and citizenship. This makes Pakistan an example of a state working to balance a broad national identity with strong regional and linguistic diversity.

Pause and consider: Pakistan was created on the basis that a shared identity could form a nation. What lessons does the separation of 1971 offer about the importance of language, regional identity and fair political representation in holding a nation together?

Why the Distinction Matters in World Politics

Separatism and independence movements. When a nation lacks a state, or feels excluded within one, it may seek autonomy or independence. Many of the world’s conflicts, from the Caucasus to Africa, arise from this tension.

Irredentism. When a state claims territory in a neighbouring country because people of the same nation live there, the result can be serious conflict. The term comes from the Italian irredenta, meaning “unredeemed,” and originally referred to Italian-speaking lands outside Italy in the nineteenth century.

Colonial borders. Many borders in Africa and the Middle East were drawn by European powers with little regard for the national and ethnic communities living there. The result was states containing many communities and nations divided between several states, a legacy that continues to shape politics today.

Nation-building. Many governments, especially in newly independent states, have invested heavily in creating a shared national identity through schools, national languages, flags, anthems, armies and public holidays. This process, known as nation-building, recognises that a state without a strong national identity may struggle to remain united.

Supranational integration. The European Union shows a different direction. Its member states have pooled parts of their sovereignty in areas such as trade and, for many, currency, while their citizens retain strong national identities. It raises an important question for the future: will the nation-state remain the main form of political organisation, or will new forms of community emerge above and below it?

Returning to the Puzzle

Here are the answers to the puzzle at the beginning of the article.

1. Japan: A nation and a state, and therefore one of the closest examples of a nation-state.

2. The Kurds: A nation without a state, often described as the largest stateless nation in the world.

3. Switzerland: A state with a strong civic national identity, built on four language communities. It is a multilingual state whose people nonetheless share a Swiss nationhood.

4. Scotland: A nation within a larger state. It has its own parliament and identity, but it is not an independent sovereign state.

5. The United Kingdom: A multinational state made up of several nations.

6. Korea: A divided nation split between two states.

How many did you answer correctly?

Conclusion

A nation is a community of people bound together by shared identity, memory and a sense of belonging. A state is a political and legal organisation that holds authority over a defined territory and population. A nation-state is the point at which the two coincide, with one national community governing itself within its own sovereign borders.

In reality, this perfect match is rare. Across the world, nations without states, states with many nations, nations divided by borders and diasporas spread across continents shape the politics of independence movements, border disputes, national unity and international cooperation. Recognising these distinctions makes it possible to read the news with sharper understanding, and to see why the question of who belongs, and where, remains one of the most powerful forces in world politics.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the main difference between a nation and a state?
A nation is a community of people who share a sense of identity based on factors such as language, history, culture or religion. A state is a political organisation with a government, a defined territory, a permanent population and sovereignty. A nation is about identity, while a state is about authority and institutions.

Is a country the same as a state?
In everyday speech, “country” and “state” are often used interchangeably to mean an independent political unit such as France or Pakistan. In political science, “state” is the more precise term. “Country” is sometimes also used for places like Scotland or Wales, which are nations within a larger state rather than independent states.

What are the four elements of a state?
According to the Montevideo Convention of 1933, a state must have a permanent population, a defined territory, a government and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. Many scholars also emphasise sovereignty as an essential fifth element.

Can a nation exist without a state?
Yes. Such nations are called stateless nations. The Kurds, Catalans and Basques are common examples. They have strong national identities and historic homelands but do not have independent states of their own.

Which is the largest stateless nation in the world?
The Kurds are often described as the largest stateless nation, with an estimated 30 to 40 million people living mainly in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria.

What is a multinational state?
A multinational state is a state that contains two or more nations within its borders. The United Kingdom, Canada, Belgium and Switzerland are common examples. The former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were multinational states that eventually broke apart.

Is Japan a nation-state?
Japan is often cited as one of the closest examples of a nation-state, because the overwhelming majority of its population shares a common language, culture and national identity within a single sovereign state.

Is the United States a nation-state?
The United States is usually described as a civic nation-state. Its national identity is based mainly on shared citizenship, political values and institutions rather than common ancestry, which allows people from many different backgrounds to share an American identity.

Is Pakistan a nation-state?
Pakistan was founded on the idea that the Muslims of British India formed a distinct nation entitled to their own state. Today it is a sovereign state with a shared national identity based on faith, history and citizenship, while also containing diverse ethnic and linguistic communities such as Punjabis, Sindhis, Pashtuns and Baloch.

What is the difference between a stateless nation and a stateless person?
A stateless nation is a national community without its own independent state. A stateless person is an individual who is not recognised as a citizen by any state under its laws. Members of a stateless nation usually hold the citizenship of the states in which they live, while stateless persons have no citizenship at all.

What is nation-building?
Nation-building is the process by which a government or society works to create a shared national identity among its population, often through education, a common language, national symbols, public holidays and shared institutions. It is especially important in states that contain many different communities.

Also Read: https://pakimtehan.com/blog/geopolitics/how-mountains-rivers-and-seas-protect-or-expose-a-country