A nation is a stable, historically formed community of people

What is a nation? In general, it is enough simply to answer this question. A nation is a stable, historically established community of people. And this will be quite true. But it is not enough. What then is different from the people? After all, the people are also a historically stable community of people. Probably, the answer needs to be looked for a little deeper. Therefore, first of all, we will still deal with what the people are.

What is the people?

This concept has been used by mankind for a long time. Since ancient times, the people are a stable, historically formed community of people whose representatives are connected by living on the same territory, common origin, belonging to a common cultural environment. At different times in the composition of a particular people there was a very different admission. For example, in ancient Greece the people of the Hellenes were opposed to barbarians. That is, the Greeks were all who spoke in ancient Greek. In Europe, in the Middle Ages, only privileged classes, which had any significant weight in the feudal structure of society, were considered by the people. Numerous peasants saw the aristocrats the same niello in all corners of the continent. Today the people are not only a stable community of people. So in principle people in one state are called. Even if different categories of citizens belong to completely different cultures, races, have different roots. Citizenship is the first criterion today.

And what is a nation?

This concept is very close to the notion of the people. And it is related to him. However, the nation we perceive as something more complex, a kind of higher education. And indeed, all modern researchers of this issue note that for the emergence of a nation there are few common features that are inherent in all its representatives (as is the case with the people), a psychological component, a certain identity is extremely needed here. The first nations arose in Europe during the New Age. This era was extremely important in terms of reorganizing the societies of the Old World. Capitalism broke the outmoded system of feudal relations, instead of local identifications, when the peasant associated himself only with his own village and his master, new, more global identifications were created. Traditional communities collapsed over several centuries, and new ones emerged in their place, in which the Lyons worker began to feel solidarity with the clerk from Marseilles, although they were not connected in any way, except for belonging to one single community - the French. One of the researchers of this phenomenon, Benedict Anderson, has successfully characterized nations as imaginary (fictional) communities. And this is true in the sense that this stable, historically formed community of people, in fact, exists only in the heads of its representatives. It is the identification and comprehension of the common historical destiny and further interests that are its most important pledge, since the representatives of the nation remain them, if they speak different languages, have different roots, religious beliefs and even if they migrate to other countries. Political and ethnic nations

At the same time, it is important to note that today there are two variants of ideas about nations - ethnic and political. The first is a stable, historically established community of people on the basis of one bloody ethnic group. Classical examples are the Germans and Poles, because in their worldview and collective representations, the blood relationship is at the heart of it. At the same time, globalization of the whole world and mass migration have created the need to integrate foreign elements into the commonality of nations. For example, in the mass consciousness of the modern French, they may well be those whose ancestors were from the Maghreb countries. Of course, for this they should share the historical aspirations of the French, and even consider themselves part of them.