A nation (from Latin: natio, "people, tribe, kin, genus, class, flock") is a large group or collective of
people with common characteristics attributed to them — including language, traditions, mores
(customs), habitus (habits), and ethnicity. By comparison, a nation is more impersonal, abstract, and
overtly political than an ethnic group.[1] It is a cultural-political community that has become conscious of
its autonomy, unity, and particular interests. [
In terms of a political entity, a state is any politically organized community living under a single system
of government.[1] States may or may not be sovereign. For instance, federated states are members of a
federal union, and may have only partial sovereignty, but are, nonetheless, states. [1] Some states are
subject to external sovereignty or hegemony, in which ultimate sovereignty lies in another state.[2]
States that are sovereign are known as sovereign states.
The term "state" can also refer to the secular branches of government within a state, [3] often as a
manner of contrasting them with churches and civilian institutions.
Speakers of American English often use the terms state and government as synonyms,[note 1] with both
words referring to an organized political group that exercises authority over a particular territory. [4]
Many human societies have been governed by states for millennia, but others have been stateless
societies. Over time a variety of different forms developed, employing a variety of justifications for their
existence (such as the divine right of kings, the theory of social contract, etc.). In the 21st century, the
modern nation-state is the predominant form of state to which people are subject.
State & Country Defined
If you've ever looked at globes and maps, you've probably seen quite a few carved up by international
boundaries of various States. A State is a political unit that has sovereignty over an area of territory and
the people within it. Sovereignty is the legitimate and ultimate authority over a polity (i.e., a political
unit). For example, the United States is a State that is sovereign over all 50 states and its territories, such
as Puerto Rico and Guam. There is no higher political authority over the geographic region that is
controlled by the United States.
You may be wondering about the difference between a 'country' and a 'State.' A country is simply
another word for State. The United States can be referred to as either a 'country' or a 'State.' People use
the terms interchangeably. However, in political science, and especially in the area of international
relations, the term 'State' is used as it is more precise and less ambiguous, as 'country' can refer to other
things, such as a rural environment.
You may also be wondering about the 50 states comprising the United States. The 50 states are political
subdivisions of the United States. The 50 states do not have independent sovereignty like the United
States and other States. It is convention to capitalize the term 'State' when referring to State in terms of
a sovereign political unit, and not to capitalize the term 'state' when referring to a political subdivision of
a State, such as 'the state of Minnesota' versus 'the State of Germany.'
Nation Defined
Another important term in political science is 'nation.' A nation consists of a distinct population of
people that are bound together by a common culture, history, and tradition who are typically
concentrated within a specific geographic region. For example, all Jewish people comprise a Jewish
nation and different tribes of Native Americans are considered nations, such as the Lakota. Not all
nations have States. While the Jewish nation is not a State, Israel is a State. On the other hand, the
Lakota nation does not have a State of its own.
Modern States tend to try to develop a sense of nation within their territorial boundaries. It is believed
that a state consisting of a nation of people is more cohesive and easier to govern as there is a common
set of beliefs, values, culture, and history. In fact, States that are able to successfully create a nation out
of its population are called Nation-States.
Government Defined
The term 'government' also has a more precise meaning in political science compared to the way it is
bandied about in casual conversation. Government can be viewed in two different ways: as an
institution and as a process. As an institution, the government is the group of people with the authority
over a political unit at a given time. In other words, it's the people in power that exercise the power of
the political unit, whether it's a small town or a sovereign State.
For example, the current elected Congress, the president, the executive agencies under the president,
and the sitting members of the United States Supreme Court constitute the government of the United
States. When using 'government' in this manner, we usually refer to it with the article 'the,' and say 'the
government,' rather than just 'government.'
There are three different things to define here:
State: "A state is an organized community living under a unified political system, the
government" (Wiki definition).
This is basically just a community (usually in a specified territory) that was ruled by a specific
government.
It may or may not have been sovereign.
Nation: A nation may refer to a community of people who share a common language, culture,
ethnicity, descent, or history (Wiki).
Note that a nation has no required geographical tie-in (as an extreme example, consider the nation
of Roma, or post-Diaspora-pre-modern-Israel Jews). But they must/should, as a rule, share history,
culture and language (never thought I'd quote Stalin on a Politics.SE :)
The idea of a nation and a state being the same thing ("Nation-state") is fairly new in modern
politics[1] (it came about as one of the consequences/results of Peace of Westphalia, which ended
the 30-year-war in Europe, when the concept of "Westphalian sovereignty" was introduced).
Before that, a vast majority of people did not - per se - had a firm notion of a "nation", at least in
Europe. Your loyalties were either to your immediate locale (village, town, clan), or to your
hierarchical ruler (feudal lord, usually, and ultimately whichever prince/Emperor ruled the whole
territory of the state).
But you didn't consider the territory ruled by that Emperor to be "your" state - the fact that they
shared the ultimate liege lord was irrelevant both practically, AND philosophically/culturally.
Also, as alluded to by @Affable's answer, most of the states through history did NOT match the notional
nations geographically, and many crystallized as nations much later than 1648. For example, Russia at
first had a gazillion city-centered small states. Then, when they were unified under a central
government, they fairly promptly ate up the territories of OTHER nations and turned into transnational
empire, which they still in effect are. Germany wasn't really unified as a nation till either Congress of
Vienna in 1815 or even Bismarckian unification in mid-19th century. Italy was a collection of warring
states till 1861 or so. Islamic empires/khaliphates were transnational and Arab Nationalism didn't really
exist till 20th century, after Ottoman Empire was gone.
[1] - There were earlier attempts and ideas to create a nation-state - for example, I would consider
Alexander the Great's efforts to be such, since he tried to unify the culture of his empire (and definitely
succeeded doing so in the scope of Greek Peninsula itself). I'm not sure how to classify Rome - they tried
to also strongly unify the culture of their empire, and had a Latin as common language.
These terms seem to be used interchangably - by whom and where? These are complete different
things.
The nation - is the sociological phenomenon - the community of people with awareness of common
origin, history, language and culture. The religion can also be the unifying factor - like with the Jewish
nation before the creation of Israel.
The state - is the legal term of the administrative structure having the power over the given territory.
The state is the territorial entity, the nation - the sociological. The nation can exist without any state; it
can be scattered over the whole world and still be the nation. The state can exist without any nation, by
ruling over various nations having nothing in common; an example is an empire.
Nation is a way of feeling,thinking and living,it is a psychological condition of the mind which emphasizes
the consciousness of unity due to spiritual or other feelings.while the state emphasizes political unity
and objectivity which is a condition of law,the state is an enforceable obligatiory condition inseparable
from all civilized ways of living.
A state may be defined as a politically organised body of people inhabiting a defined geographical entity
with an organised legitimate government whilst a nation is a group of people with a common
race,culture,religion and historical experiences but who may not necessarilly live together in a single
territory.
The following defines all 3 terms. To ease reading, I do not use blockquotes, but everything below the
line below are verbatim quotations;
We should also give the terms state and nation some scrutiny. Although they are often used
synonymously (or joined together to produce "nation-state"), they actually refer to two quite distinct
entities. For our purposes—and those of politics more generally—
might define the “state as a distinctive political community with its own set of rules and practices, more
or less separate from other communities. For the specific purposes of IR [International Relations], “the
state” refers to the modern sovereign state, which possess a “legal personality” and is recognized as
possessing certain rights and duties. […]
We now turn to the idea of the nation, a term that refers specifically to “a people” as opposed to a
formal entity. There is no widely agreed definition of what constitutes “a people”; in general, though,
the term generally denote[s] a kind of collective identity that is grounded in a shared history and culture
and may or may not lay claim to some kind of political recognition as well as a specific territory. […]
[...] These examples reflect the commonly accepted conflation of state and people that produces the
familiar term “nation-state,” which, again, reflects the principle of national self-determination. In
principle, though, the matching of state and nation has rarely, if ever, been so neat and unproblematic.
There is virtually no state in the world that contains a single, homogeneous nation. Many states are
made up of two or more “nations" and even these are not always distinct. [...]
Globalization (or globalisation; see spelling differences) refers to the free movement of goods, capital,
services, people, technology and information. It is the action or procedure of international integration of
countries arising from the convergence of world views, products, ideas, and other aspects of culture.[1]
Advances in the means of transport (such as the steam locomotive, steamship, jet engine, and container
ships) and in telecommunications infrastructure (including the rise of the telegraph and its modern
offspring, the Internet and mobile phones) have been major factors in globalization, generating further
interdependence of economic and cultural activities.[2][3][4] Though many scholars place the origins of
globalization in modern times, others trace its history long before the European Age of Discovery and
voyages to the New World, some even to the third millennium BC. [5][6] Large-scale globalization began in
the 1820s.[7] In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the connectivity of the world's economies
and cultures grew very quickly. The term globalization is recent, only establishing its current meaning in
the 1970s.[8] In 2000, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) identified four basic aspects of
globalization: trade and transactions, capital and investment movements, migration and movement of
people, and the dissemination of knowledge. [9] Further, environmental challenges such as global
warming, cross-boundary water and air pollution, and overfishing of the ocean are linked with
globalization.[10] Globalizing processes affect and are affected by business and work organization,
economics, socio-cultural resources, and the natural environment. Academic literature commonly
subdivides globalization into three major areas: economic globalization, cultural globalization, and
political globalization.[11]
The term globalization is derived from the word globalize, which refers to the emergence of an
international network of economic systems.[12] One of the earliest known usages of the term as a
noun was in a 1930 publication entitled Towards New Education, where it denoted a holistic
view of human experience in education. [13] A related term, corporate giants, was coined by
Charles Taze Russell (of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society) in 1897[14] to refer to the
largely national trusts and other large enterprises of the time. By the 1960s, both terms began to
be used as synonyms by economists and other social scientists. Economist Theodore Levitt is
widely credited with coining the term in an article entitled "Globalization of Markets", which
appeared in the May–June 1983 issue of Harvard Business Review. However, the term
'globalization' was in use well before this (at least as early as 1944) and had been used by other
scholars as early as 1981.[15] Levitt can be credited with popularizing the term and bringing it into
the mainstream business audience in the later half of the 1980s. Since its inception, the concept
of globalization has inspired competing definitions and interpretations, with antecedents dating
back to the great movements of trade and empire across Asia and the Indian Ocean from the 15th
century onwards.[16][17] Due to the complexity of the concept, research projects, articles, and
discussions often remain focused on a single aspect of globalization.[18]
Sociologists Martin Albrow and Elizabeth King define globalization as "all those processes by
which the people of the world are incorporated into a single world society." [1] In The
Consequences of Modernity, Anthony Giddens writes: "Globalization can thus be defined as the
intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local
happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa." [19] In 1992, Roland
Robertson, professor of sociology at the University of Aberdeen, an early writer in the field,
defined globalization as "the compression of the world and the intensification of the
consciousness of the world as a whole."[20]
In Global Transformations, David Held and his co-writers state:
Although in its simplistic sense globalization refers to the widening, deepening and speeding up
of global interconnection, such a definition begs further elaboration. ... Globalization can be
located on a continuum with the local, national and regional. At one end of the continuum lie
social and economic relations and networks which are organized on a local and/or national basis;
at the other end lie social and economic relations and networks which crystallize on the wider
scale of regional and global interactions. Globalization can refer to those spatial-temporal
processes of change which underpin a transformation in the organization of human affairs by
linking together and expanding human activity across regions and continents. Without reference
to such expansive spatial connections, there can be no clear or coherent formulation of this
term. ... A satisfactory definition of globalization must capture each of these elements: extensity
(stretching), intensity, velocity and impact.[21]
Held and his co-writers' definition of globalization in that same book as "transformation in the
spatial organization of social relations and transactions—assessed in terms of their extensity,
intensity, velocity and impact—generating transcontinental or interregional flows" was called
"probably the most widely-cited definition" in the 2014 DHL Global Connectiveness Index.[22]
Swedish journalist Thomas Larsson, in his book The Race to the Top: The Real Story of
Globalization, states that globalization:
is the process of world shrinkage, of distances getting shorter, things moving closer. It pertains to
the increasing ease with which somebody on one side of the world can interact, to mutual
benefit, with somebody on the other side of the world.[23]
Paul James defines globalization with a more direct and historically contextualized emphasis:
Globalization is the extension of social relations across world-space, defining that world-space in
terms of the historically variable ways that it has been practiced and socially understood through
changing world-time.[24
What is Globalization ? - Meaning and its
Importance
We often hear the word globalization in many contexts and repeated frequently as a
concept to denote more trade, foreign companies and even the ongoing economic
crisis. Before we launch into a full-fledged review of the term and its various
manifestations, it is important to consider what exactly we mean when we say
globalization.
Globalization is the free movement of goods, services and people across the world in
a seamless and integrated manner. Globalization can be thought of to be the result
of the opening up of the global economy and the concomitant increase in trade
between nations. In other words, when countries that were hitherto closed to trade
and foreign investment open up their economies and go global, the result is an
increasing interconnectedness and integration of the economies of the world. This is
a brief introduction to globalization.
Further, globalization can also mean that countries liberalize their import protocols
and welcome foreign investment into sectors that are the mainstays of its economy.
What this means is that countries become magnets for attracting global capital by
opening up their economies to multinational corporations.
Further, globalization also means that countries liberalize their visa rules and
procedures so as to permit the free flow of people from country to country.
Moreover, globalization results in freeing up the unproductive sectors to investment
and the productive sectors to export related activities resulting in a win-win
situation for the economies of the world.
Globalization is grounded in the theory of comparative advantage which states that
countries that are good at producing a particular good are better off exporting it to
countries that are less efficient at producing that good. Conversely, the latter
country can then export the goods that it produces in an efficient manner to the
former country which might be deficient in the same. The underlying assumption
here is that not all countries are good at producing all sorts of goods and hence they
benefit by trading with each other. Further, because of the wage differential and the
way in which different countries are endowed with different resources, countries
stand to gain by trading with each other.
Globalization also means that countries of the world subscribe to the rules and
procedures of the WTO or the World Trade Organization that oversees the terms and
conditions of trade between countries. There are other world bodies like the UN and
several arbitration bodies where countries agree in principle to observe the policies
of free trade and non-discriminatory trade policies when they open up their
economies.
In succeeding articles, we look at the various dimensions of globalization and the
impact it has had on the global economy as well as in the mobility of people from
poverty to middle class status. The point here is that globalization has had positive
and negative effects and hence a nuanced and deep approach is needed when
discussing the concept. What is undeniable is that globalization is here to stay and
hence it is better for the countries in the global economy to embrace the concept
and live with it.
