Nation-States

A nation is a large group of people who are united by common cultural characteristics, such as language and ethnicity, or by shared history. A nation-state is a state whose territory corresponds to that occupied by a particular nation.

The concept that nations have the right to govern themselves is known as self-determination. To preserve and enhance distinctive cultural characteristics, nations seek to govern themselves without interference. Nations have pushed to create nation-states because desire for self-rule is a very important shared attitude for many of them.

Nation-States in Europe

In modern times, the concept of nation-states developed first in Europe. After World War I, which engulfed nearly all of Europe, leaders of the victorious countries met at the Versailles Peace Conference to redraw the map of Europe. One of the chief advisers to President Woodrow Wilson, the geographer Isaiah Bowman, played a major role in the decisions.

The goal of the Allied leaders was to divide Europe into a collection of nation-states, using language as the principal criterion for identifying ethnic groups. New states were created and the boundaries of existing states were adjusted to conform as closely as possible to the territory occupied by speakers of different languages (Figure 8-14). This undertaking created some clear-cut examples of nation-states, but many of the states created a century ago in Europe have not survived as nation-states. The attempt after World War I to divide Europe into nation-states was not a recipe for peace.

Europe, 1924

Much of Europe was organized into nation-states.

During the 1930s, Germany’s National Socialists (Nazis) claimed that all German-speaking parts of Europe constituted one nationality and should be unified into one state. After many years of appeasing the Nazis’ expansion in Central Europe, the United Kingdom and France finally declared war when the Nazis invaded Poland, clearly not a German-speaking state.

Following its defeat in World War II, Germany was divided into two states (Figure 8-15). Two Germanys existed from 1949 until 1990 (Figure 8-16). A massive forced migration of people in Europe after World War II relocated many ethnic groups into the newly demarcated territory of the region’s various nation-states (refer to Figure 7-49). With the end of communism, the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist, and its territory became part of the German Federal Republic. The present-day state of Germany bears little resemblance to the territory occupied by German-speaking people prior to the upheavals of the twentieth century.

Europe, 1980

Germany was divided into two states after its defeat in World War II.

Berlin Wall

When Germany was divided between East Germany and West Germany, the City of Berlin was also divided. To prevent its citizens from crossing over into the West, East Germany built a wall in 1961. After reunification of Germany in 1990, gates were opened, and the Wall was soon demolished. The Brandenburg Gate in the center of the photo is a remnant of a wall that encircled Berlin during the eighteenth century to facilitate collecting a tax that had to be paid to carry goods in or out of Berlin.

Reorganizing Europe’s Nation-States

By the late twentieth century, many Europeans thought that ethnicity had been left behind as an insignificant relic, such as wearing costumes to amuse tourists. Karl Marx wrote that nationalism was a means for the dominant social classes to maintain power over workers. He believed that workers would identify with other working-class people instead of with an ethnicity.

In the twenty-first century, however, ethnic identity has once again become important in Europe. The multinational states of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union were broken up into multiple states. In Czechoslovakia, a multinational state was peacefully transformed in 1993 to two nation-states—Czechia and Slovakia. Slovaks comprise only 1 percent of Czechia’s population and Czechs less than 1 percent of Slovakia’s population.

On the other hand, former Yugoslavia has been the principal example of a failed nation-state in Europe, as discussed in Chapter 7. The breakup of Yugoslavia included a peaceful conversion of Slovenia in 1991 from a republic in multinational Yugoslavia to a nation-state. However, other portions of former Yugoslavia became nation-states only after ethnic cleansing and other atrocities, as discussed in the previous chapter.

Slovenia

A good example of a nation-state because people of Slovene ethnicity make up more than 80 percent of the country’s population.

Ljubljana, Slovenia

The castle on the hill was constructed in the eleventh century and rebuilt in the fifteenth century.

Ethnic Diversity Within States

There is no perfect nation-state because the territory occupied by a particular ethnicity never corresponds precisely to the boundaries of countries. Nonetheless, some states are excellent examples of nation-states. For example, the ethnic composition of Japan is 98.5 percent Japanese, 0.5 percent Korean, 0.4 percent Chinese, and 0.6 percent other.

Figure 8-19 depicts an attempt by political scientist James Fearon to measure the extent of ethnic diversity in a country. States with the least diversity would be the best examples of nation-states. Many of the world’s states with the least ethnic diversity are in Europe. On the other hand, most of the states that are most ethnically diverse are in Africa.

Ethnic Diversity

Many of the best examples of nation-states are in Europe. The most ethnically diverse countries are primarily in Africa.

Pause & Reflect 8.2.2

In the twenty-first century, what has been the general trend in Europe with regard to multinational states, nation-states, and ethnicities?