page_title: Nation state
section_title: History and origins
hierarchical_section_title: Nation state / History and origins
caption_attribution_description: English: Europe 1848-49. Historical map with main revolutionary centres, important reactionary troop movements, states with abdications and national conflicts. Please don't alter the map, when you think there something not written or depicted correctly. Leave a message at the talk page of the file. After a verificiation and a possible discussion, i will upload a new map version with all new changes. This prevents an unnecessary waste of disc space and ensures a good result, aesthetically and contentwise. - The author. Deutsch: Europa 1848/49. Historische Karte mit wichtigen revolutionären Orten, Hauptschlagrichtungen konterrevolutionärer Truppen, Staaten mit Abdankungen von Monarchen und Nationalitätenkonflikten. Bitte die Karte bei Änderungs- und Korrekturwünschen nicht selbst verändern, sondern eine Anmerkung im Diskussionsbereich der Bilddatei hinterlassen. Nach einer Prüfung und ggfs. Diskussion werden evtl. Änderungen von mir zusammengefasst eingearbeitet. Das vermeidet unnötige Speicherplatz-Verschwendung und gewährleistet ein ästhetisch ansprechendes und inhaltlich korrektes Ergebnis. - Der Urheber.
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: The origins and early history of nation states are disputed. A major theoretical question is: "Which came first, the nation or the nation state?" Scholars such as Steven Weber, David Woodward, Michel Foucault and Jeremy Black have advanced the hypothesis that the nation state did not arise out of political ingenuity or an unknown undetermined source, nor was it a political invention; but is an inadvertent byproduct of 15th-century intellectual discoveries in political economy, capitalism, mercantilism, political geography, and geography combined together with cartography and advances in map-making technologies. It was with these intellectual discoveries and technological advances that the nation state arose. For others, the nation existed first, then nationalist movements arose for sovereignty, and the nation state was created to meet that demand. Some "modernization theories" of nationalism see it as a product of government policies to unify and modernize an already existing state. Most theories see the nation state as a 19th-century European phenomenon, facilitated by developments such as state-mandated education, mass literacy and mass media. However, historians also note the early emergence of a relatively unified state and identity in Portugal and the Dutch Republic.
  In France, Eric Hobsbawm argues, the French state preceded the formation of the French people. Hobsbawm considers that the state made the French nation, not French nationalism, which emerged at the end of the 19th century, the time of the Dreyfus Affair. At the time of the 1789 French Revolution, only half of the French people spoke some French, and 12–13% spoke the version of it that was to be found in literature and in educational facilities, according to Hobsbawm.
  During the Italian unification, the number of people speaking the Italian language was even lower. The French state promoted the replacement of various regional dialects and languages by a centralised French language. The introduction of conscription and the Third Republic's 1880s laws on public instruction facilitated the creation of a national identity under this theory.
  Some nation states, such as Germany and Italy, came into existence at least partly as a result of political campaigns by nationalists, during the 19th century. In both cases, the territory was previously divided among other states, some of them very small. The sense of common identity was at first a cultural movement, such as in the Völkisch movement in German-speaking states, which rapidly acquired a political significance. In these cases, the nationalist sentiment and the nationalist movement clearly precede the unification of the German and Italian nation states.
  Historians Hans Kohn, Liah Greenfeld, Philip White and others have classified nations such as Germany or Italy, where cultural unification preceded state unification, as ethnic nations or ethnic nationalities. However, "state-driven" national unifications, such as in France, England or China, are more likely to flourish in multiethnic societies, producing a traditional national heritage of civic nations, or territory-based nationalities. Some authors deconstruct the distinction between ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism because of the ambiguity of the concepts. They argue that the paradigmatic case of Ernest Renan is an idealisation and it should be interpreted within the German tradition and not in opposition to it. For example, they argue that the arguments used by Renan at the conference What is a nation? are not consistent with his thinking. This alleged civic conception of the nation would be determined only by the case of the loss gives Alsace and Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian War.
  The idea of a nation state was and is associated with the rise of the modern system of states, often called the "Westphalian system" in reference to the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). The balance of power, which characterized that system, depended on its effectiveness upon clearly defined, centrally controlled, independent entities, whether empires or nation states, whic
caption: The Revolutions of 1848 were democratic and liberal in nature, with the aim of removing the old monarchical structures and creating independent nation-states.
exif: {}