A nation is an imaginary community.

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

Definition Introduction: Nation

First of all, it should be noted that in modern Russian there is a whole range 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 at once. There is also some conflict associated with translations of foreign terms. So, for the Germans, both the people and the nation are folk. The two concepts are united by one term. But in special English-language literature, the concepts of people and nation are distinguished. 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 a nation, 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 shared historical fate, common heroes and tragic moments, the unity of the past and the future that turns the people into a nation. This is already more than just a set of similar characteristics like culture and language (although they are the basis). The development of a nation, according to modern scholars, at its highest point involves the creation of a state. After all, this is the most effective way of expressing common national interests through foreign and domestic policy.

Birth of a nation

In modern historiography of the issue, there are several trends that differently consider the origins of a nation. However, the most respected researchers still attribute the appearance of nations in their modern form to the era of the New Age. Moreover, this is originally a European phenomenon. Nation is the brainchild 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 contemporary scholars, Benedict Anderson, created the special concept of “imaginary communities”. This implies that a nation is a figment of the human imagination by and large. It arises only when traditional communities (for example, village communities) collapse and new, more global societies arise. Local identification is no longer suitable, and the worker of Munich, for example, as a result of these processes begins to feel his commonality with the clerk of Dortmund, although they never saw each other. Common symbols are extremely important for a nation - the foundation of this solidarity of its representatives. Often the color of a nation — poets, writers, musicians, historians — is also the creator of these symbols. It is they who form the image of unity in the heads of the inhabitants of a certain territory.