page_title: Nation state
section_title: In practice
hierarchical_section_title: Nation state / In practice
caption_attribution_description: English: A GROUP OF AINOS. THE Ainos are a people inhabiting the Northern island of Yesso. They differ from the Japanese in language and race. Their origin is lost in a wild and fabulous tradition. The legend runs thus—“That the race owes its preservation to a doll which swam across from Corea to the uninhabited island of Yesso.” They were conquered some three hundred years ago by the Japanese. The people are employed during the summer months in felling trees in the forests, or collecting Kombo (a species of sea-weed) for the Government, and they may be said to be veritable hewers of wood and drawers of water. They are superstitious and have great belief in the supernatural. Their women are stout and handsome, though their beauty is somewhat marred by the habit of tattooing their upper lip.
context_page_description: A nation state is a state in which a great majority shares the same culture and is conscious of it. The nation state is an ideal in which cultural boundaries match up with political boundaries. According to one definition, "a nation state is a sovereign state of which most of its subjects are united also by factors which defined a nation such as language or common descent." It is a more precise concept than "country", since a country does not need to have a predominant ethnic group.
  A nation, in the sense of a common ethnicity, may include a diaspora or refugees who live outside the nation state; some nations of this sense do not have a state where that ethnicity predominates. In a more general sense, a nation state is simply a large, politically sovereign country or administrative territory. A nation state may be contrasted with:
  A multinational state, where no one ethnic group dominates.
  A city-state which is both smaller than a "nation" in the sense of "large sovereign country" and which may or may not be dominated by all or part of a single "nation" in the sense of a common ethnicity.
context_section_description: In some cases, the geographic boundaries of an ethnic population and a political state largely coincide. In these cases, there is little immigration or emigration, few members of ethnic minorities, and few members of the "home" ethnicity living in other countries.
  Nation states where a single ethnic group makes up more than 85% of the population include the following:
  Albania: The vast majority of the population is ethnically Albanian at about 98.6% of the population, with the remainder consisting of a few small ethnic minorities.
  Armenia: The vast majority of Armenia's population consists of ethnic Armenians at about 98% of the population, with the remainder consisting of a few small ethnic minorities.
  Bangladesh: The vast majority ethnic group of Bangladesh are the Bengali people, comprising 98% of the population, with the remainder consisting of mostly Bihari migrants and indigenous tribal groups. Therefore, Bangladeshi society is to a great extent linguistically and culturally homogeneous, with very small populations of foreign expatriates and workers, although there is a substantial number of Bengali workers living abroad.
  China: The vast majority of China's population is Han, making up 92% of the population and geographically distributed on the eastern side of China. The government also recognizes 55 ethnic minorities, including Turks, Tibetans, Mongols and others. Some scholars think that China is not a typical nation state, but a civilisation state.
  Egypt: The vast majority of Egypt's population consists of ethnic Egyptians at about 99% of the population, with the remainder consisting of a few small ethnic minorities, as well as refugees or asylum seekers. Modern Egyptian identity is closely tied to the geography of Egypt and its long history; its development over the centuries saw overlapping or conflicting ideologies. Though today an Arab people, that aspect constitutes for Egyptians a cultural dimension of their identity, not a necessary attribute of or prop for their national political being. Today most Egyptians see themselves, their history, culture and language (the Egyptian variant of Arabic) as specifically Egyptian and at the same time as part of the Arab world.
  Estonia: Defined as a nation state in its 1920 constitution, up until the period of Soviet incorporation, Estonia was historically a very homogenous state with 88.2% of residents being Estonians, 8.2% Russians, 1.5% Germans and 0.4% Jews according to the 1934 census. As a result of Soviet policies the demographic situation significantly changed with the arrival of Russian speaking settlers. Today Estonians form 69%, Russians 25.4%, Ukrainians 2.04% and Belarusians 1.1% of the population (2012). A significant proportion of the inhabitants (84.1%) are citizens of Estonia, around 7.3% are citizens of Russia and 7.0% as yet undefined citizenship (2010).
  Eswatini: The vast majority of the population is ethnically Swazi at about 98.6% of the population, with the remainder consisting of a few small ethnic minorities.
  Greece: 91.6% of the permanent residents are ethnic Greek; the remaining 911929 inhabitants consist of immigrants from Albania (480,824), Bulgaria (75,915), Romania (46,253), former USSR (70,000), Western Europe (77,000) and the rest of the world (161,937).
  Hungary: The Hungarians (or Magyar) people consist of about 95% of the population, with a small Roma and German minority: see Demographics of Hungary.
  Iceland: Although the inhabitants are ethnically related to other Scandinavian groups, the national culture and language are found only in Iceland. There are no cross-border minorities as the nearest land is too far away: see Demographics of Iceland.
  Japan: Japan is also traditionally seen as an example of a nation state and also the largest of the nation states, with population in excess of 120 million. Japan has a small number of minorities such as Ryūkyū peoples, Koreans and Chinese, and on the northern island of Hokkaidō, the indigenous Ainu minority. However, they are either numerically insignificant (Ainu), their difference is not a
caption: Ainu, an ethnic minority people from Japan (between 1863 and early 1870s).
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