There is no RationalWiki without you. We are a small non-profit with no staff—we are hundreds of volunteers who document pseudoscience and crankery around the world every day. We will never allow ads because we must remain independent. We cannot rely on big donors with corresponding big agendas. We are not the largest website around, butwe believe we play an important role in defending truth and objectivity. | Fighting pseudoscience isn't free. We are 100% user-supported! Help and donate $5, $10, $20 or whatever you can today with  ! |
Nation
| Oh no, they're talking about |
 |
| Theory |
| Practice |
| As usual |
| Country sections |
            |
“”It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag, a few speeches, and a national anthem. |
| —Nicholas Nassim Taleb,The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable |
Anation (often interchanged withcountry) is a group of people composed mostly of strangers who live under a common political structure; emphasizing certain shared characteristics, such aslanguage,religion,ethnicity, andhistory that give rise to acollective identity. As asociological andpolitical term, it is a fluid concept — what Benedict Anderson has termed an "imagined community."[note 1] It has been common in history for different nations to fuse together[note 2] or for a single nation to break apart.[note 3] Sometimes, a single person may feel theybelong to more than one "nationality", depending on circumstances.[note 4]
Most of thestates ofWesternEurope were built along national lines - Denmark, Malta, and Iceland, for example; but compare Austria, Ulster, Switzerland, Catalonia, San Marino, Belgium, Luxembourg, Cyprus, the Vatican City, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. However, nation-building also came about due to Europeanmonarchs fostering a sense of nationhood amongst their peoples throughnationalism, adopting the "vulgar"languages and concentratedmyth-making.[note 5]SinceWorld War I, nationality as the primary prerequisite for statehood has declined. Today, most states are rather multi-national[note 6] though there was a brief resurgence of "ethnic group gets a country" in the 1990s with the break up of thecommunist system in Eurasia.
The population of the nation ofCanada includes over 600 recognizedFirst Nations
.
See also[edit]
Notes[edit]
- ↑Other scholars like Anthony D. Smith have similarly emphasized how persistent and fluid the notion of nation was even before the modern conception of the nation-state.
- ↑For example, as the different Jurchen and other tribes in NortheastChina became theManchu, or how the Cornish, etc., all becameEnglish.
- ↑A modern example of this seems to be the Chinese and theTaiwanese, and possibly theNorth andSouth Koreans.
- ↑This sums up the feelings of manyYugoslavs at the beginning of the 1990s.
- ↑Examples of such myth-making includeKing Arthur,Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, and El Cid.
- ↑Either because they have national minorities or were never nation-states, to begin with.