A nation is an imaginary community

The concept of a nation is very often used in modern political rhetoric. Public figures are trying to connect her with her own image and her aspirations. But what is it really like?

Introduction of Definition: Nation

First of all, it should be noted that in modern Russian there is a whole set of terms similar to the concept of a nation: people, ethnicity, nationality. At the same time, the nation itself is an image that has several views on its definition. There is also some conflict associated with translations of foreign terms. So, for the Germans, both the people and the nation are folk. Two concepts are united by one term. But in the special English-language literature, the concepts of people and nation differ. The first, by the way, is not quite the same as the people in our understanding. For a Russian-speaking person, a nation is a kind of continuation of the people, its development into a higher category. While the people are more of a legal and biological unity that has existed since ancient times, and the concept of a nation expresses rather a socio-psychological community. It is the awareness of a joint historical destiny, common heroes and tragic moments, the unity of the past and the future that turns people into a nation. This is something more than just a set of similar characteristics like culture and language (although they are the basis). The development of the nation, in the opinion of modern researchers of the question, at its highest point implies the creation of a state. After all, this is the most effective way of expressing common national interests through foreign and domestic policies.

The birth of a nation

In the modern historiography of the question there are several currents that differently consider the origin of the nation. However, the most authoritative researchers still attribute the emergence of nations in their modern form to the era of the New Time. In addition, this is originally a European phenomenon. The nation is the offspring of development Capitalist relations and the scientific and technological revolution. For the peasant of the Middle Ages there was no such self-identification and there was no difference between the French and German feudal lords. And for the latter all the peasants seemed to be a single mass. One of the prominent researchers of modernity, Benedict Anderson created a special concept of "imaginary community". This means that a nation is the fruit of the human imagination by and large. It arises only when traditional communities (for example, village communities) are collapsing and new, more global societies are emerging. Local identification no longer fits, and the worker in Munich, for example, begins to feel his community with the clerk of Dortmund because of these processes, although they have never met. For the nation, unified symbols are extremely important - the foundation of this solidarity of its representatives. Often the color of the nation - poets, writers, musicians, historians - is also the creator of these symbols. They form the image of unity in the minds of the inhabitants of a certain territory.