ABSTRACT
Modern education has benefited massively from the fact that the “nation” entered into an entangled relationship with the “state” in the long 19th century. The silencing of analyses of the nation and its close relationship to the state means that conceptual, definitional work has been largely left undone, leaving people with a jumble of terms that does not favor lucid conceptualization. It was not that it simply led to two terrible world wars that brutally exposed its malignancy in the first half of the 20th century nor that its rise had been a response to two pressing problems in the 18th century. The prerequisite for their establishment was the idea of a modern, that is constitutional, state as well as the idea of a nation that claimed a cultural communality beyond natural rights and that was “politicized” to the extent that it could enter into an alliance with the modern state for mutual advantage.
