Nation: Definition, Characteristics, History, and Forms of Political Community

For political collectives that constitute themselves into a nation as a state with a constitution, as in the French Revolution (1789-1799) in the National Assembly, terms such as nation of will or nation of state exist. State and nation are used synonymously here. Instead of ethnic constructions, common ideals such as "liberty, equality, fraternity" primarily serve as the basis here, which willingly holds the community of the nation together. In this context, it was also postulated that territorial or other particular group ties had to be shed in order to enable the creation of a common nation. Belonging to the nation was here often linked to a promise of emancipation and a compulsion to assimilate.

The Swiss Confederation, which consists of German-, French-, Italian- and Romansh-speaking population groups, is considered to be a nation of wills with a heterogeneous state people. An ethnic nation or cultural nation, on the other hand, does not necessarily form a uniform state people, since a supranational cultural area such as the Arabic language and cultural area can also serve as a national identification horizon. People who form an ethnic nation are also addressed as a people in the ethnological sense. In addition to the ethnic groups or nationalities of multi-ethnic states, this can also apply to ethnic minorities within nation states, for example the Chukchi within Russia.

The social construction of the nation can be seen in a number of contradictions. For example, language cannot always be used as a national defining feature. For example, the German-speaking countries do not form a common nation. Nor are states such as Brazil and Portugal a common nation, despite their cultural affiliation with the Lusophonie, because they have experienced different state-building processes (→ nation-building, state-building).

In Latin, natio originally referred to a community of people of the same origin, then to a community recognizable by common language, customs and traditions, and in Roman usage initially as a foreign term for foreign-like immigrant people living with the native population. With the Ius gentium, a separate legal basis was created for dealing with people who did not possess Roman citizenship.

Following the Roman usage, in Christian Latin the 'nationes' or 'gentes' are primarily the Gentile peoples, as followers of pagan cults or as Gentiles willing to convert, who accept the Gospel with the Jewish Christians and form with them the community of the Church.

At the medieval university, students had to enrol in nationes according to their countries of origin, with their own statutes and procurators. These university nationes, usually there were four of them, were named after the main areas of origin of the local students. At the University of Paris, the nationes gallicorum, normannorum, picardorum, and anglicorum were distinguished, with the "gallic" including Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, and Orientals, and the "anglic" including Germans and their neighboring northern and eastern peoples. At the University of Prague, the "Polish" nation included not only students from the Kingdom of Poland but also students from the eastern parts of the Empire, the "Bohemian" nation also included Hungarians and southern Slavs, the "Bavarian" nation included not only the Bavarians but also the Swabians, Franks, Hessians, Rhinelanders and Westphalians, and the "Saxon" nation included the North Germans, Danes, Swedes and Finns.

As a self-designation for a people with political-state unity and an individuality based on common ancestors and history, the term nation gained importance in French from the 16th century onwards, which then spread to the other European languages in the 18th century with the French Revolution, emphasizing the totality and sovereignty of the people of the state over class and particular claims to state sovereignty. As a result of the Revolution and growing population numbers, the idea of the nation as a collective state developed a great dynamism, which was initially directed against autocratic feudalism, economically and politically constricting small states, and the thinking of the country (German princely states or the German linguistic and cultural area) or against imperial foreign rule (multi-ethnic states of Russia, Austria-Hungary).

In his standard work Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart (Grammatical-Critical Dictionary of High German Dialect), Johann Christoph Adelung describes the term nation at the end of the 18th century as "the native inhabitants of a country, insofar as they have a common origin and speak a common language; they may, incidentally, constitute a single state or be divided into several [...] Even special branches of such a nation, i.e. inhabitants of a province speaking the same dialect, are sometimes called nations. Before this word was borrowed from Latin, Volk was used for nation, in which sense it is still common among ancient nations. Because of the ambiguity of this word, however, one has largely abandoned it in this meaning and sought to introduce Völkerschaft for nation, which word has already found approval. For the German dictionary of the Brothers Grimm, the nation is "the (inborn) people of a country, of a large state entity". Accordingly, the term has been incorporated into the German language "since the 16th century from the French nation, Italian nazione (from the Latin natio)". Similar definitions are found in the Oeconomische Encyclopädie by Johann Georg Krünitz, which was written at about the same time, and, much more extensively, in the Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, which was written in the second half of the 19th century.

In his famous speech of 1882, Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?, Ernest Renan identified past, present, and future as the factors that constitute the principe spirituel of the nation. A people forms a nation not because of a common race, language, or religion, not because of common interests or geography, but rather because of common memories of the past and the desire to live together now and in the future. In this respect, the nation is a daily plebiscite.