Plano, Jack and Olton, Roy. International Relations Dictionary (Kalamazoo Michigan: Western Michigan University Press, 1979).

Nation:

A social group which shares a common ideology, common institutions, and customs, and a sense of homogeneity.... In the nation ... there is present a strong sense of belonging associated with a particular territory considered to be particularly its own. A nation may comprise part of a state, be coterminous with a state, or extend beyond the borders of a single state. (E.g. There are many Native American nations which fit this definition. They existed before the establishment of the United States and if the particular territory which they considered their own was not ethnically cleansed (For an excellent article on ethnic cleansing [Tony Judt, "A New World Disorder, Los Angeles Times (April 11, 1999), M1-2] click here) in the process of the building of the United States, they are still there and may extend beyond the borders of the U.S. into the neighboring states of Canada and Mexico. They constitute a nation, such as the Navajo Nation in Arizona, but are without a state of their own.)

In common parlance the words "country," "state," and "nation" are often used synonymously, but they do not mean exactly the same thing. "Country" has geographic connotations, "state" expresses the legal organization of a society, but the term "nation" involves a sociocultural perception of the group. The hyphenated term nation-state aptly describes a socially and culturally homogeneous group possessing the legal organization to participate in international politics. (In the case of the Balkans, following World War I, the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes politically banded together what they had idealized as one nation into the state of Jugoslavia. It was internationally recognized as a nation-state and held together by a number of factors until the last decade of the 20th century. What the decade of the 1990's has subesequently revealed is that despite close language and ethnic similarities, the South Slavs lacked a common history and religion and had overlapping claims on the territory with which they considered themselves associated. They failed to develop a strong enough sense of nationalism to overcome these dissimilarities.

Nationalism:

The spirit of belonging together, or the corporate will that seeks to preserve the identity of the group by institutionalizing it in the form of a state. Nationalism can be intensified by common social, linguistic, historical and religious ties. It is usually associated with a particular territory.

---

National Self-Determination and Sovereignty are two principles that arose out of the concepts of state and nation that originated in European revolutions of political modernization beginning in the 17th century and which spread to the non-European world in the twentieth century. Useful are he following definitions taken from:

Michael Lind, "Redefining Sovereignty," Los Angeles Times (May 16, 1999), M 1,6. :

Self-determination is the principle that each nation has the right to govern itself. In practice, this means people should be governed by those who share their nationality defined by language, religion, descent or some other aspect of identity. For members of one ethnic group to rule another is presumed to be illegitimate by today's notions of political justice.

The principle of sovereignty holds that states should be equal in privileges, even if they are unequal in wealth and power. The modern conception of sovereignty originated in Europe in the 17th century. It was extended to the non-European world after World War II, when the European colonial empires in Africa, the Middle East and Asia were broken up. In earlier eras the concept of sovereignty made little sense, for the usual form of political organization was the hierarchical empire. According to the theory of sovereignty, the first privilege of a state is the integrity of its territory.

Close this frame to return to previous page.