http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NationA nation is a body of people who share a common history, culture, language or ethnic origin, who typically inhabit a particular country or territory.[1] The development and conceptualisation of the nation is closely related to the development of modern industrial states and nationalist movements in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries,[2] although nationalists would trace nations into the past along an uninterrupted lines of historical narrative.[3]
Benedict Anderson argued that nations were "imagined communities" because "the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion", and traced their origins back to vernacular print journalism, which by its very nature was limited with linguistic zones and addressed a common audience.[4]
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Birth of the concept of "Nation" during the French Revolution
The concept of nation (both political and cultural) as we understand it today, i.e. as a basically political notion, emerges around the end of the 18th century and coincides with the end of the Ancien Régime. At that time, the first solid theoretical formulations of the nation occur and are applied in concrete political demands like the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Ever since, the ideas of political nation and cultural nation have evolved intertwined. Nevertheless, the term "nation", derived from Latin, existed before with other meanings.
The term Nation has two distinct meanings: The political nation, used in the domains of international law and politics is the political subjecs which exerts the political sovereignity.of a democratic state. The cultural nation is a sociological or ideological concept, which is more subjective and ambiguous in its meaning than the political nation. The cultural nation can roughly be defined as a community of people with certain common cultural features, which are ethically or politically relevant to them. In a broader sense, nation is also sometimes used to refer to a number of other things: State, country, territory or inhabitants of the former, people, among others.