Interlude: Nation

Abstract

Originating from the Latin natio (meaning birth, tribe, kin), the term ‘nation’ describes a form of socio-political organization that is prevalent in most countries today and is considered normative and, strangely enough, without alternative. In spite of its universality and apparent givenness, however, the nation is far from natural. It is rather a relatively new and specific kind of political community with a strictly regional genealogy: It first emerged in early modern Europe, got consolidated in the process of colonialist expansion and empire-building in the 18th century, and was subsequently ‘exported’ as the globally dominant form of collectivity (see ch. 13). The concomitant ideology, nationalism, plays down this historicity by suggesting that the nation itself is virtually eternal but its current political form, the nation-state, of relatively late provenance. As political theorist Benedict Anderson observes, “[i]f nation-states are widely conceded to be ‘new’ and ‘historical,’ the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past” (1991, 11).