ABSTRACT
According to Hayes, the word ‘nation’ has been in use since the seventeenth century to describe ‘the population of a sovereign political state, regardless of any racial or linguistic unity, and this description still enjoys general sanction’ (Hayes, 1928: 5).1 The League of Nations and the United Nations Organization went by this identification of the nation with a state’s population. Classical political economists meant by ‘nation’ the people in a market encompassed by the state. They had no interest in what is today called cultural nationalism, and they mainly debated on the benefit or harm of ‘economic nationalism’ that was affecting free trade. On the other hand, history treated the ‘nation states’ as the main actors in the power play of the world operating, until about the end of the nineteenth century, from Europe. A political nation is a ‘state-nation’.2
