When is a nation?

Abstract

Although numerous authorities have addressed the question, ‘What is a nation?’, far less attention has been paid to the question, ‘At what point in its development does a nation come into being?’ Evidence is offered that Europe's currently recognized nations emerged only very recently, often centuries later than the dates customarily assigned. In some cases, it is problematic whether nationhood has even yet been achieved. Four problems involved in dating the emergence of a nation are: (1) national consciousness is a mass not an élite phenomenon, and the masses, until quite recently semi‐ or totally illiterate, were quite mute with regard to their sense of group identity(ies); (2) nation‐formation is a process, not an occurrence, and the point in the process at which a sufficient number has internalized the national identity in order to cause nationalism to become an effective force for mobilizing the masses does not lend itself to precise calculation; (3) the process of nation‐formation is not sequentially pre‐ordained, but capable of terminating at any point; and (4) the sense of constituting an ancestrally related people, which is central to the sense of nationhood, seldom has much relationship to fact, so that the ethnographic history of a people is often of little pertinence to the study of nation‐formation.

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