The 4 differences between State and Nation

In a world with more than 7,700 million inhabitants, it is clear that it is necessary to apply some kind of political organization in the territories, in order to regulate both economic and social processes and maintain order and the integrity of people.

Normally, most political and governmental terms tend to escape the general population, since we are not all law students and understanding non-tangible terms (completely abstract) is a somewhat hard task for an average citizen. State, Nation, government, statehood, status quo and many other concepts abound in the specialized literature, but unraveling their meanings can be complex and expensive.

Don’t worry, that’s what we’re here for. Today we dissect you, in a simple and friendly way, the differences between two essential concepts to understand the world of politics: State and Nation. Stay with us, because we assure you that clearly discerning both terms is much easier than it seems.

• We recommend you read: “Why does Finland have the best education in the world?”

State, Government and Nation

The terms State, Government and Nation are the three pillars of politics, each with different meanings and connotations, but completely inseparable. To whet your appetite, we present the standardized definitions of each of them. Let’s go:

• State: form of political organization, endowed with sovereign and independent power, which integrates the population of a territory.
• Government: the highest organ of the executive power of a State or a political community, consisting of the President and the ministers or councilors.
• Nation: all the inhabitants of a country governed by the same Government.

Thus, the State can be summarized, in a few lines, as the sovereign country, recognized as such in the international order, settled in a specific territory and endowed with its own governing bodies. The government is the main tool of the State, since it allows to direct, control and administer its institutions. Finally, the Nation, broadly speaking, is defined as thehistorical-cultural community that develops within the country in question.

It is curious to know that, since 2011, with the entry of South Sudan, the United Nations Organization (UN) has a total of 193 member countries, considered as “sovereign states”. Even so, the number of total countries can rise to 206 worldwide, since there are territories that have declared their independence and function as their own entities, but the international community does not recognize their sovereignty. We leave the ethical interpretation of these data to each reader.

The main differences between State and Nation

Once we have introduced the definitions of these important terms and some interesting data, it is time to explore the differences between the terms State and Nation. We won’t delay any longer.

1. State is a political concept and Nation is a sociological concept

It is interesting to know that, according to various sources, it is estimated thatthere are more than 5,000 nationsor ethnicities in the world. How is this possible when only 193 countries have been recognized?

As we have seen in the definitions in the preface, the state is a purely political concept, referring to the permanent institutions that make a country work. On the other hand, a nation is conceived as the group of the inhabitants of a country who share the same origin, are administered by the same government and, in general, have a common tradition or sociocultural context.

This difference is simple and is almost self-explanatory: the State is a political entity and the Nation a socio-cultural construction.

2. The number of nations need not correspond to the States

So far everything was easy, right? Fortunately or unfortunately, the human mind goes beyond merely technical concepts and, sometimes, the words that designate us do not represent us at all.

When a nation is defined solely from a political point of view, that is, without regard to blood, language, ethnicity, place of birth, sexual status, social class, or any other characteristic, all individuals within a country will belong to the same nation. That is why presidents, when holding press conferences, address all inhabitants as “the Nation.” They all live in the same country and are governed by the same government, which is why they are all political subjects under the same umbrella.

What happens when we take into account all the factors dismissed in the most “pure” concept of Nation? Well, for example, we can talk about the Gypsy Nation in Spain or the Black Nation in the United States. We are not talking about independent states, but cultural nations. In these cases, the State is conceived as a common administrative union to govern different nations. Thus, according to this train of thought, a sovereign State will almost never be translated into a single Nation.

3. The types of State and Nation are not the same

The types of State are clear and easily delimited, since we are facing a political organization constituted by a set of stable bureaucratic institutions that leaves no room for many terminological doubts. Depending on its territorial system, a State can be:

• Unitary: power exists in a single center of authority that extends its capacity for action throughout the territory. It is a unit of the legal system.
• Federal: This is a system in which there is a larger central government and a number of underlying local or regional governments.
• Compound: In this case, there are several centers of political impulsion and a complex institutional structure.
• Confederal: autonomous and sovereign territories unite to be governed by certain common laws.

On the other hand, depending on its form of government, a state can be monarchical, republican, aristocratic and democratic (although, theoretically, some of them can coexist).

The classification of the term Nation is much more complex because, as we have seen, there could be as many nations as sociocultural groupings with a history and feeling of legitimacy. Even so, some authors try to differentiate the ethnic nation (that is, a completely anthropological division that dismisses the concept of “race”) into various “subspecies”. We show them to you in a cursory way:

• Peripheral nations: strains or marginal groups, not fully integrated into the political nation of the State.
• Integrated nations: when ethnic nations have been integrated (whether forcibly or not) into the political nation of the state.
• Historical nation: it is not formally a political nation for lack of a State that endorses it, but it presents a well-defined language, history and institutions.

Thus, we can differentiate some types of ethnic nations according to their political legitimacy, their position in the social stratum and their willingness (or lack thereof) to be part of the political nation. It should be noted that, as you can imagine, there will be many more types of nations in broader senses, as many almost as sensations and needs for group legitimacy arise on Earth.