In the modern world, the question is rather acute: "Is nationality a political, social or biological concept?" Before talking about nationality, you should familiarize yourself with the related terms.
People. Ethnos. Nation
The people - the "new race", the "born race" of people united by one common territory - is a fundamental concept in our topic. From the definition it is clear that this is an exclusively biological term - people who are closely related.
Ethnicity is a people, that is, over time, a group of people formed from close peoples who have one language (belong to the same language group) and have a common origin, roots, but not geographically connected.
A nation is a people with its common history of development, culture, and customs. If one nation creates its own national state, it will be called a nation. Thus, it is already a more aggressive, political concept. A nation may include several close national groups.
Nationality is ...
Nationality refers to any nation on biological grounds. It has no connection with a country or a specific territory. For example, Germans, Kazakhs or British, who live permanently in Russia, their nationality remains the same with a change of residence, state. Without nationality (a characteristic of kinship between people) there will be no development of a people, it will not become a nation.
Now almost all states are multinational, although there are also separate national republics.
It is important not to confuse citizenship and nationality. The first concept is social, which means the society of which country the individual belongs to. The second, as can be seen from the definition, is biological and shows who a person is by birth, origin.
Although in some countries the word "nationality" is still a definition of an individual’s nationality.
Nationality
The people are the smallest unit in today's discussion, you can literally take this word as a clan, a family. In the course of their development, families (tribes) grew, divided, connected with neighbors. But since they had common roots, and life passed in interaction with each other, territorial proximity, then gradually common, similar traits were formed, so strong genetically that they were transmitted to the descendants regardless of time and distance - nationality of peoples or national nationality.
So, if you look at the Germans, for example: non-Saxon Germans, Franconians, Saxons, Swabians, Bavarians - this is how many sub-ethnic groups (peoples) belong to the same nationality of people.
Russians have about thirty ethnic groups throughout Russia and beyond. And just two dialects - North Russian (okay) and South Russian (okay).
How to determine nationality
It would seem easier. He lives in Germany, dad is German, mother is German, he is also German! But the path of humanity on Earth is already quite long. Everything was mixed up - peoples, ethnic groups, nations ... It is very difficult to determine whether a person belongs to a particular nationality. Especially when the pope has Poles and Jews in his family, and his mother has Spaniards and Finns, and everyone lives in Australia.
There are still several ways:
- The child accepts nationality from the father. A father is from his father, and in this way a rather clear line of kinship (national) line is built. This happens almost all over the world, except for a few nations. For Jews, for example, the child adopts the nationality of the mother.
- Some folk groups have very bright, similar appearance. Body structure or character traits. According to such signs, a person is considered one or another nationality.
- People who do not have the opportunity to find out the nationality of their ancestors (orphans, for example) take or accept in the process of upbringing, growing up the features of that national group with which they interact most (adoptive parents or employees of the orphanage).
- The most basic way has two interconnected determination processes - subjective and objective. The first one is what nationality a person relates to: what traditions he observes, has the appearance and character, the carrier of what language he is. The second is how his relatives perceive it. That is, do people identify the chosen national group of this person with themselves. Thus, nationality is a personal consciousness and the surrounding consent that a person belongs (is related by kinship) to a certain group of people (peoples, ethnic groups).