NATIONS AND NATION STATES
What I have called states are often spoken of as 'nations'. This is confusing but understandable. In everyday settings we don't make distinctions unless necessary, and often nation' doesn't mean anything more than "country'. In addition, the term 'state' in American English is already reserved for the sub- units of the US foderal system and is also sometimes used to refer to government. The United Nations could not have been called the United States of the World" States in the sense we have becu discussing are also refermed to as "uation-states', perhaps to dis- tinguish them from Greek poleis or Renaissance city-republics. If we think of states and nations as different things, an interesting question is whether states must be nation-states. To raise this question we need to distinguish states and nations In the sense that interests us here, a nation is a society whose members are linked by sentiments of solidarity and selfconscious identity based on a number of other bonds (eg, history, territory, culture, race, 'ethnicity', language, religion, cus- toms) see further Chapter 19). A group of humans will constitute a nation in this sense in so far as the members share certain properties and in so far as conscious of this shared condition and recognize one another by virtue of these properties. Nations, then, will be collections of individuals with common histories, cultures, lan- guages, and the like, and whose members recognize other members by virtue of their possession ofthese attributes (see Mom 1998: ch