ABSTRACT
The national state, through its exercise of legitimate power throughout the territory, legally regulates the relations between what are now not merely members of the nation but are also citizens of the national state. In the formulation of the category and others such as ethnicity, patriotism, and nationalism, we shall return to the numerous, previously observed complications involved in examining the history of nations and nations in world history. The use of the category ethnicity to describe a society that appears to be a nation but lacks a state does not seem to be appropriate. The political ideal that there should be one homogeneous national culture for one state is how nationalism, as distinct from a nation, should be understood. Too often in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries nation was wrongly equated with race, and race was equated with linguistic categories, such as Aryan, Semitic, Dravidian, and so forth.
