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The earliest attempt to define a nation was made in 1882 by Ernest Renan, a French scholar. He defined nation, as a human collectively brought together by will, consciousness and collective memory (and also common forgetfulness, or a collective amnesia). The strength of Renan’s definition lay in providing a voluntaristic (as against naturalistic) component to the understanding of nation. In a significant corrective to Renan’s understanding , Joseph Stalin in 1912 stated that a Nation, was a human collectivity sharing a common territory, language, economic life and a psychological make-up. His complete definition in his own words: ‘A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of the a common language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.’ Although it must be taken into consideration, the capacity of many human groups to form nations without already being blessed by either a single language or a common territory. Jews in the 20th century, scattered through Europe and America and completely devoid of a territory they could call their own, nonetheless possessed the necessary prerequisites of a nation, without fulfilling some of Stalin’s criteria.
Therefore , Nations are complex phenomena that are shaped by a collection of cultural, political and psychological factors. Culturally, a nation is a group of people bound together by a common language, religion, history and traditions. There is, however, no objective blueprint for the nation because all nations exhibit some degree of cultural heterogeneity. Politically, a nation is a group of people who regard themselves as a natural political community. Although this is classically expressed in the form of a desire to establish or maintain statehood, it also takes the form of civic consciousness. Psychologically, a nation is a group of people distinguished by a shared loyalty or affection in the form of patriotism. Nevertheless, such an attachment is not a necessary condition for membership of a nation; even those who lack national pride may still recognize that they 'belong' to the nation.
Nationalist ideologues, writers, poets or practitioners of nationalist politics) have tended to look upon nations as given and somewhat perennial. These nations, according to nationalist perception, only needed to be aroused from their deep slumber by the agent called nationalism.
Definitions on nations have been quite scarce. It would be true to say that nations have been described much more than they have been defined.
Nation-State
Inclusive concepts of the nation tend to blur the distinction between the nation and the state, between nationality and citizenship. It is an autonomous political community bound together by the overlapping bonds of citizenship and nationality. In practice, however, the nation-state is an ideal type and has probability never existed in perfect form anywhere in the world. No state is culturally homogeneous; all contain some kind of cultural or ethnic mix. There are two contrasting views of the nation-state. For liberals and most socialists the nation-state is largely fashioned out of civic loyalties and allegiances; for conservatives and nationalists it is based upon ethnic or organic unity.
The nation-state is widely considered to be the only viable unit of political rule and is generally accepted to be the basic element in international politics. The vast majority of modern states are, or claim to be, nation-states. The great strength of the nation-state is that it offers the prospect of both cultural cohesion and political unity. When a people who share a common cultural or ethnic identity gain the right to self-government, community and citizenship coincide.
A combination of internal pressures and external threats has produced what is commonly referred to as a 'crisis of the nation-state'. Internally, nation-states have been 'subject to centrifugal pressures, generated by an upsurge in ethnic and regional politics. This has meant that ethnicity or religion has sometimes displaced nationality as the central organizing principle of political life. Externally, nation states have arguably been rendered redundant by the advent of *globalization. This has meant that major decisions in the economic, cultural and diplomatic spheres are increasingly made by supranational bodies and transnational corporations, which nation states have only a limited capacity to influence. Those who criticize the nation state ideal point out either that a ‘true’ nation-state can be achieved only through a process of ‘ethnic cleansing’ – as Higher and the Nazis recognized – or that nation-states are always primarily concerned with their own strategic and economic interests, and are therefore an inevitable source of conflict or tension in international affairs.
Exclusive concepts of the nation tend to blur the distinction between the nation and the race, between nationality and ethnicity.
The importance of the nation to politics is most dramatically demonstrated by the enduring potency of nationalism and by the fact that the world is largely divided into nation-states.
Critics of the national principle argue that nations are political constructs, 'imagined' or 'invented' communities whose purpose is to prop up the established order in the interests of rulers and elite groups. In this view nationalism creates nations, not the other way round.
The study of simple societies by anthropologists and sociologists have revealed some correlation between the complexity, size of society and settled political authority. R.H. Lowie writing about the early Communities says they must have been tiny and egalitarian and were like a ‘kindred group’. Thus kinship exercised a great influence in maintaining unity. The society was more or less undifferentiated, so there was no great distinction made between religious institutions and political institutions. The head of the community was both a religious as well as a political head. In modern societies there is separation between the religious and the non-religious domain, separate the domain of authority. Comte and Herbert Spencer regaded the emergence of state as a Consequence of the increasing size and complexity of societies.
The state is regarded as highest of all human associations. Greeks used the word “polis” for which the word city-states. Nicolo Machiavelli first used the term “state” in political science.Sociologists view it as a social phenomenon. Jurists regard the state as a juridical establishment. The state consists of a considerable number of individuals, occupying and controlling a reasonably well defined territory and possessing a government which is capable of maintaining order at home and of resisting interference and control from abroad. MacIver, "a state is an organisation which rules by means of a supreme government over a definite territory." According to Max Weber, State Is a human community which successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’.
LIBERALIST THEORY OF STATE
MARXIST THEORY OF STATE
GANDHIAN THEORY OF STATE
Functionalist
Democratic Socialists
Conservatives
New Right
Feminists
Anarchists
POPULATION
TERRITORY
GOVERNMENT
SOVEREIGNITY
The state is different from the nation in the following respects.
Recently, the late twentieth century nevertheless witnessed a growing irrelevance of state in the modern world. Chief amongst these developments have been: globalization and the incorporation of national economies into a global one that cannot be controlled by any state; privatization and the growing preference for market organization over state management; and localism, the unleashing- of centrifugal pressures through a strengthening of regional and community politics
Civil society has been defined in a variety of ways. Originally it meant, a society governed by law, under the authority of a state as contrasted with uncivilized society. Now a days , civil society is distinguished from the state, and is used to describe a realm of autonomous groups and associations, such as businesses, pressure groups, clubs, families and so on. In this sense the division between civil society and the state reflects a 'private/public' divide; civil society encompasses institutions that are 'private' in that they are independent from government and organized by individuals in pursuit of their own ends. G. W. F. Hegel (17701831), on the other hand, distinguished civil society not only from the state but also from the family.
Civil society is widely used as a descriptive concept to assess the balance between state authority and’ private bodies and associations. For instance, totalitarianism is defined by the abolition of civil society, and the growth of private associations and clubs, lobby groups and independent trade unions in post-communist societies is described as the re-emergence of civil society.
In the conventional, liberal view, civil society is identified as a realm of choice, personal freedom and individual responsibility. Whereas the state operates through compulsory and coercive authority, civil society allows individuals to shape their own destinies. This explains why a vigorous and healthy civil society is usually regarded as an essential feature of liberal democracy, and why classical liberals in particular have a moral preference for civil society over the state, reflected in a desire to minimize the scope of public authority and maximize the private sphere. In contrast, the Hegelian use of the term is negative in that it counter poses the egoism of civil society with the altruism that is fostered by the family and within the state. Marxists and socialists generally have viewed civil society unfavorably, associating it in particular with unequal class power and social injustice. Such views would justify either the overthrow of civil society as presently structured, or the contraction of civil society through the expansion of state control and regulation.
By: Parveen Bansal ProfileResourcesReport error
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