POL101Y1 Study Guide - Final Guide: High Culture, Industrial Society, Communitarianism
16 Oct 2011
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Seemingly obvious answer: the ideology of nations. A nation is a group that wants to have its own state. Nations do not invent nationalism, instead nationalism invents nations. They do not exist outside of the imagination of the ideology of nationalism. A nation is a group of people who believe they share a common fate, history, culture and language. Nationalism says that the state and nation should be congruent: the leaders of states should share with the nation a common culture, a common language, a sense of shared history, sometimes a shared religion. But this only occurs under modern conditions: the sense of caring for people that you don"t even know across the country has only occurred in the past couple hundred years because of the creation of the nation-state. Never before in human history did people insist that their leaders be of the same culture and never did leaders try to make the people share their culture.
