ABSTRACT
The whole idea of its 'rise' in any period may be misleading insofar as it subsumes the appearance of the idea of the nation into the appearance of the nationalist movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The phenomenon of the practice of government in pre-modern societies suggests that the notion of the nation as a natural political community reflected the phenomena of the collective nature of much government and its need of voluntary submission. Kingdoms or other units of government in medieval Europe were also perceived as natural units, bound together not just by their present political unity but by their common descent. The medieval evidence suggests that ethnicity, the belief in common descent and customs and so on, was then quite often the result, rather than the cause, of political unity. The way that they were worked out owed much to Germans who argued that people who spoke German, ought to have some kind of political unity.
