What makes up a nation?

The answer to this depends on whether you are asking about the word “nation” in technical, social science, terms or in layman’s terms.   The way that social scientists use the word “nation” is much different than the way regular people use it in everyday life.

In everyday life, people tend to use the word “nation” to mean the same thing as “country.”  We call the US a nation just as we call Brazil a nation or Germany a nation.  In order to be a nation, a place needs to have defined borders that are recognized by other countries.  It has to have a government that is acknowledged to have the right to rule within those boundaries.  Thus, the US is a nation because essentially everyone agrees that we have specific boundaries and that our national government has the right to rule everything inside those boundaries.

In social science, the term “nation” has a very different meaning.  Here, it means something more like “ethnic group.”  A nation, in these terms, is a group of people who feel bound together by some common tie that they have.  This can be such things as their history, their language, their religion, their culture, or their appearance.  When we define nation in this way, it is easy to say what a nation needs to have, but harder to tell if a group qualifies as a nation.  For example, are all Americans part of one nation?  We are of many different ethnic groups, religions, and appearances.  Our cultures and history are somewhat different (because we come from different places) but somewhat similar (because we have mostly all become Americanized to a greater or lesser degree.  Are we a nation?  There is no official way to tell.  Similarly, groups like ISIS feel that all Muslims are bound by their religion and should be one nation, but not all Muslims feel this way.  Again, there is no official way to tell if they are a nation.

A “nation,” then, is made up of different things depending on how we are using the term.  In layman’s terms, a nation is made up of the landmass that lies within given boundaries and is ruled by a government.  In social science terms, a nation is made up of people who feel connected to one another because of some shared characteristic or characteristics.