Nation state

While the Office for National Statistics and others describe the United Kingdom as a "nation state", others, including a then Prime Minister, describe it as a "multinational state", and the term Home Nations is used to describe the four national teams that represent the four nations of the United Kingdom (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales).

This is in contrast to a nation state, where a single nation accounts for the bulk of the population.

A nation state is a state in which the great majority shares the same culture and are conscious of it.

Today, the modern nation state is the predominant form of state to which people are subject.

Walker Connor discusses the impressions surrounding the characters of "nation", "(sovereign) state", "nation state", and "nationalism".

Depending on the meaning of "nation" used, the term "nation state" could be used to distinguish larger states from small city states, or could be used to distinguish multinational states from those with a single ethnic group.

Germany is another nation-state that has switched between confederal, federal and unitary rules, since the German Confederation was founded in 1815.

However, historians also note the early emergence of a relatively unified state and identity in Portugal and the Dutch Republic.

It was a predecessor state of the Netherlands and the first fully independent Dutch nation state.

Walker Connor discusses the impressions surrounding the characters of "nation", "(sovereign) state", "nation state", and "nationalism".

Westphalian sovereignty is the concept of nation-state sovereignty based on territoriality and the absence of a role for external agents in domestic structures.

During the Italian unification, the number of people speaking the Italian language was even lower.

This situation persisted through the Renaissance but began to deteriorate with the rise of modern nation-states in the early modern period.

For others, the nation existed first, then nationalist movements arose for sovereignty, and the nation state was created to meet that demand.

Sovereignty reemerged as a concept in the late 16th century, a time when civil wars had created a craving for stronger central authority, when monarchs had begun to gather power onto their own hands at the expense of the nobility, and the modern nation state was emerging.

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 German states proclaimed their union as the German Empire under the Prussian king Wilhelm I, finally uniting most of Germany as a nation-state (Austria was excluded).

The nation state received a philosophical underpinning in the era of Romanticism, at first as the "natural" expression of the individual peoples (romantic nationalism: see Johann Gottlieb Fichte's conception of the Volk, later opposed by Ernest Renan).

While initially the revolutions fell to reactionary forces and the old order was quickly re-established, the many revolutions would mark the first step towards liberalization and the formation of modern nation states across much of Europe.

Thus they inevitably gave way to larger organisations of society, including the empire and the nation-state.

The Ottoman Caliphate as an office of the Ottoman Empire was abolished under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1924 as part of Atatürk's Reforms.

Atatürk's Reforms (undefined) were a series of political, legal, religious, cultural, social, and economic policy changes, designed to convert the new Republic of Turkey into a secular, modern nation-state, implemented under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in accordance with the Kemalist ideology.

The Ottoman Caliphate as an office of the Ottoman Empire was abolished under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1924 as part of Atatürk's Reforms.

As the president of the newly formed Turkish Republic, Atatürk initiated a rigorous program of political, economic, and cultural reforms with the ultimate aim of building a modern, progressive, and secular nation-state.

Connor, who gave the term "ethnonationalism" wide currency, also discusses the tendency to confuse nation and state and the treatment of all states as if nation states.

Hence, nation-states with strong traditions of ethnic nationalism tend to define nationality or citizenship by jus sanguinis (the law of blood, descent from a person of that nationality), and countries with strong traditions of civic nationalism tend to define nationality or citizenship by jus soli (the law of soil, birth within the nation state).

Racism, which in Boulainvilliers's theories was inherently antipatriotic and antinationalist, joined itself with colonialist imperialism and "continental imperialism", most notably in pan-Germanic and pan-Slavic movements.

This led to the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802) and then to the conquests of Napoleon, and to the subsequent European-wide debates on the concepts and realities of nations, and in particular of nation-states.

The relation between racism and ethnic nationalism reached its height in the 20th century fascism and Nazism.

The Nazis declared that they were dedicated to continuing the process of creating a unified German nation state that Bismarck had begun and desired to achieve.

A global political system based on international agreements and supra-national blocs characterized the post-war era.

The resulting "Westphalian sovereignty" established the current international legal order characterized by independent sovereign entities known as "nation states", which have equality of sovereignty regardless of size and power, defined primarily by the inviolability of borders and non-interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign states.

The nation state received a philosophical underpinning in the era of Romanticism, at first as the "natural" expression of the individual peoples (romantic nationalism: see Johann Gottlieb Fichte's conception of the Volk, later opposed by Ernest Renan). 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.

Renan's definition of a nation has been extremely influential.

Later in the 20th century, after the break-up of the Soviet Union, leaders appealed to ancient ethnic feuds or tensions that ignited conflict between the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, as well as Bosniaks, Montenegrins and Macedonians, eventually breaking up the long collaboration of peoples.

The majority of Serbs inhabit the nation state of Serbia, as well as the disputed territory of Kosovo, and the neighboring countries of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Montenegro.

These polities developed into multi-ethnic trans-national empires.

The most preeminent polities today are Westphalian states and nation-states, commonly referred to as "nations".

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.

The term immigration was coined in the 17th century, referring to non-warlike population movements between the emerging nation states.

The state was formed by secession from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1830, whose neutrality and integrity was protected by the Treaty of London 1839; thus it served as a buffer state after the Napoleonic Wars between the European powers France, Prussia (after 1871 the German Empire) and the United Kingdom until World War I, when its neutrality was breached by the Germans.

The German Empire (Deutsches Kaiserreich, officially Deutsches Reich), also known the "Second Reich" or Imperial Germany, was the German nation state that existed from the unification of Germany in 1871 until the abdication of Emperor Wilhelm II in 1918.

(The internal diversity of the Ottoman Empire, for instance, was very great.) After the 19th-century triumph of the nation state in Europe, regional identity was subordinate to national identity, in regions such as Alsace-Lorraine, Catalonia, Brittany and Corsica.

German nationalism, which resurfaced following the French occupation of Germany under Napoleon, sought to unify all the German-speaking populations of the former Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation into a single nation-state.

In Europe, during the 18th century, the classic non-national states were the multiethnic empires, the Austrian Empire, Kingdom of France, Kingdom of Hungary, the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire and smaller nations at what would now be called sub-state level.

Napoleonic rule resulted in the further dissemination of the ideals of the French Revolution, including that of the nation-state, as well as the widespread adoption of the French models of administration, law, and education.

In France, Eric Hobsbawm argues, the French state preceded the formation of the French people.

A nation-state is not composed of a single homogeneous ethnic group (a community), but of a variety of individuals willing to live together.