NATIONS

NATION

Nation, named human community possessing an historic territory, shared myths, symbols, and memories, a common and distinctive public culture, and common laws and customs for the members.

There is no exact definition of a nation. They are all varied. Some scholar are stipulate (proposing how the term should be used) or ostensive ( defining it by pointing out examples). There is an assumption that the nation is a product of nationalism. There is an objective of nationhood through criteria’s such as language, religion, territory etc. and also psychological criteria’s such as will, imagination memory etc.

Later on nation also included criteria’s such as borders, citizenship, political community, sovereignty.

Basic features of nations:

1. a growing communal self-definition, including self-naming, and contrasting self with other communities, “us” and “them”; 2. the development and cultivation of a fund of distinctive symbols, myths, memories, and traditions of the community; 3. the growth of collective attachments to an ancestral land, or to a land associated with a particular ethnic community; 4. the development and dissemination of a distinctive and shared public culture to the members of a community; and 5. the standardization and application to its members of common laws and customs, which normally involve common rights and duties. These are general processes that, as we shall see, find their way into many influential accounts of the formation of nations.

In the 19^th and 20^th Century most of the member of the nations were not conscious of their of long standing nation hood and had to be aroused by nationalist. These nationalist began to be revive the country. For example in India we have our own share of leader who during the colonist time aroused the public to stand for their country.

Nation and nationalism are seen as a product of modernization. This is because modernization began to bring people together and closer and a few people realized that they have very similar culture and tradition and theses people began a process of join kingdoms into a nation.

Nations were formed in various ways.

n Gellner- Industrial modernization was uprooting villagers eroding their culture and traditions and forcing them to adopt a new culture and tradition in an anonymous and impersonal city. The homogeneity and fluidity of modern societies serviced by a highly mobile, literate workforce tended to iron out cultural differences.

n Benedict Anderson provides an alternative constructionist account that locates the origins and spread of nations in the realm of culture. Imagined community coz members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in their minds each lives the image of their communities.The community is imagined as in a comradeship but still inequalities and exploitation take place. Religion is imagined by humans in response to the burden of human suffering

n Eric Hobsbawm and his associates that nations are not only recent, but “invented”, social constructs engineered by ruling state elites through the judicious selection of “invented traditions” of national community, history, mythology, and language, which link a modern nation to a fictive historical past the nation became a form of social control, and nationalism was encouraged in order to manipulate and channel the sentiments and votes of the newly mobilized and enfranchised masses in rapidly industrializing and democratizing societies

Types of nations:

Liberal Nations – Nations are genuine organic communities. It talks of sovereignty and world of nations states.

Conversation Nation – Definite view on a nation. Could be external or internal. Internal means a group of people dictates what it means to a citizen. External means foreign countries dictates what a country is.

Expanision – Expanding what a nation is.

Anti- Colony Nations--- These refer to the nations which are formed by opposing the colonist rule over them. There was a mushrooming of them in 1950s and 60s and especially over Asia and African countries