Sociology

To truly understand the difference between the concept of state and nation, its necessary to consider that the human being as a social being, since the beginning of its history, has attempted to organize and regulate their coexistence in order to maximize the benefits and comfort of living in society.

With this in mind, we can define the concept of a state as one of the latest models for social organization a sovereign political entity, which consists of a territory, population and a government in charge of establishing the laws and with the coercive power to enforce them.    

A Nation, however, is better understood as the identity of a relatively large group of people sharing a sense of belonging and who recognize themselves based on aspects such as their language, culture and a common history.

When a nation  has its own territory and government, it can be defined as a nation-state, like the case of France and Japan, whose populations can be identified and differentiated from the ones of neighboring states in areas such as language, history and culture.

There are also other cases where a state can host several nations i.e. there is no Swiss nation but Swiss population is composed by Italians, Germans, etc.-, and nations so numerous that they cover more than one state  i.e. the Arab nation in several Middle Eastern countries.

Despite the fact that the concept of the modern state can be traced back to the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1948, the concept of nation-state becomes important after the fall of the great European empires after the First World War, when the then president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, suggested this model as the base for international coexistence however, the same concept of nation-state was, according to historian Niall Ferguson in his book The War of the World, the cause for the most of the major conflicts of the twentieth century.

The problem with the emergence of the nation-state is that in some cases the minorities that had long lived in the territory of this new political entity were victims of an ethnic cleansing sponsored by the new government. A clear example of this situation can be seen in the birth of the Turkish state after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, where the new Turkish government started a campaign of terror and genocide against the Armenians, at the time, a nation living in the territory of the new Turkish state.

Fortunately, in most cases the conflicts between the nation-state and the minorities were solved not by violence, but by cooperation and integration of these minorities into the state without completely losing their distinctive cultural traits. This is why in the present we can find multinational-states where the diversity of their population is not seen as a weakness, but a strength to build on.  

This trend seems to condemn the young nation-state to oblivion making room for the integration of cooperation in multinational-states like the European Union where what prevails is not the homogeneity of its inhabitants, but the diversity of languages, cultures and traditions that enrich all nations.