Nation state

A multinational state, where no one ethnic group dominates (may also be considered a multicultural state depending on the degree of cultural assimilation of various groups).

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

A nation state (or nation-state) is a state in which the 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 ones.

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

A federated state which may or may not be a nation-state, and which is only partially self-governing within a larger federation (for example, the state boundaries of Bosnia and Herzegovina are drawn along ethnic lines, but those of the United States are not).

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 the predecessor state of the modern Netherlands and the first nation state of the Dutch people.

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 Germany as a nation-state.

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.

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

The 17th, 18th and 19th centuries saw the growth of the concept of the sovereign "nation-state", which consisted of a nation controlled by a centralised system of government.

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.

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

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 in the disputed Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Montenegro.

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. For example, they argue that the arguments used by Renan at the conference What is a nation? are not consistent with his thinking.

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

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 as Imperial Germany, was the German nation state that existed from the unification of Germany in 1871 until the abdication of Kaiser 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.

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.

Armenia is a unitary, multi-party, democratic nation-state with an ancient cultural heritage.

The Francophone Walloon identity of Belgium is linguistically distinct and regionalist.

Strictly, regionalists favour confederations over unitary nation states with strong central governments.

This process was partially reversed from the 1970s onward, with the introduction of various forms of regional autonomy, in formerly centralised states such as France.

In a national context, centralization occurs in the transfer of power to a typically sovereign nation state.

Language prohibitions were sometimes used to accelerate the adoption of national languages and the decline of minority languages (see examples: Anglicisation, Czechization, Francisation, Italianization, Germanisation, Magyarisation, Polonisation, Russification, Serbization, Slovakisation).

This centralization/homogenization struggle was not unique to Joseph II, it was a trend that one could observe all around Europe with the birth of the enlightened idea of Nation State.