ABSTRACT
Nation has come to be important in political terms largely either through the idea of nationalism, or as part of the nation state concept. No obvious technical definition exists, but any working definition in the social sciences would include most of the following criteria. A nation is a body of people who possess some sense of a single communal identity, with a shared historical tradition, with major elements of common culture, and with a substantial proportion of them inhabiting an identifiable geographical unit (see ethnicity). The difficulty of definition arises from the way in which all of these criteria may be false in any set of examples. For example, while Belgium is clearly a nation, the sharp, and historically long-term, religious and linguistic cleavages between the Flemish (largely Catholic Dutch-speaking) and Walloon (largely anti-clerical French-speaking) peoples, and the fact that Belgium only existed in its present form from the 1830s, seem to counter the definition. An even clearer example of historical discontinuity which has not prevented a very intense national identity would be Poland, which has not existed as an independent state for much of the last 1,000 years, and whose territory has shifted across much of central Europe. Similarly nations can exist despite extensive dispersion geographically: the identification of the Jewish diaspora with its traditional Palestinian homeland, both before and after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, is a good example of this (see Zionism). Although the political usage of the term does generally denote something approximating to the nation state, as in the `British nation' (which might more appropriately be seen as a union of three or four separate nations), the example of the Jewish nation, as well as the affinity felt for an ancestral homeland among Africans, Chinese and many other peoples now dispersed through much of the world, indicates that a deep human sentiment of `belonging' is involved. Despite this, a school of social scientists argues that the idea of a nation is often largely `constructed' by eÂlites to raise support for a socio-economic system they dominate.
