Not all countries or states are nation states

The argument

Not all states are nation states dominated by one group: many are multinational states where different ethnic and cultural groups live together with equal rights to representation in government and the law. The distinction matters for the question of sequence, because if a state can exist without a single nation underlying it, then the state and the nation are separable things, and the one need not have produced the other. Switzerland, for example, is a country made up of four different linguistic groups — French speakers, German speakers, Romansh speakers and Italian speakers — all of which have differing cultural traditions and heritage, but which coexist in one country where they are subject to the same laws. No shared national identity was required to bring that state into being or to hold it together; a common legal and political framework has done the work that a common nationhood is supposed to do. However, these groups still largely live in their own areas of Switzerland: Geneva is a prominently French-speaking area, while those in Zurich speak German. That pattern is the crucial observation, because it shows the attachments have not dissolved into a Swiss identity but persist beneath it, organised around language and locality rather than around the state. It suggests that nationalism on a smaller level is more important than the overall makeup of the state, and that these smaller attachments are the more durable of the two. This indicates that the existence of Swiss nationalism is not relevant to the overall ethnic and cultural makeup of the country. If the cultural nations within a state can persist independently of the state's identity, and a state can be constituted without reference to them, then nationalism is not necessarily a reason for the formation of political states. The attachments came first and the political container was assembled around them, meaning nationalism preceded the formation of modern nation states.

Context

Nation state: a sovereign state of which most of the citizens or subjects are united also by factors which define a nation, such as language or common descent. Multinational state: a sovereign state where more than one ethnic group forms an important part of the population.

Premises

Counter-arguments

However, a large number of states do have a dominant ethnic group, creating the conditions for strong nationalist feelings which would not necessarily otherwise exist. Additionally, different groups being subject to the same laws in a country does not mean they are in practice treated equally, or that nationalism does not still exist on a significant level.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Switzerland is a real case but an unusual one, and the argument generalises from the exception. A large share of states do have a dominant national group, which is what generates the strong nationalist feeling the argument treats as prior to the state. [Rejecting P2] Regional concentration of language groups shows settlement patterns, not that each group carries a national identity independent of the state. Swiss identity is itself commonly cited as an example of a nationalism assembled by political institutions across linguistic lines rather than inherited from before them. [Rejecting P3] Existence is not priority. Even if smaller-scale identities operate within multinational states today, the premise never dates them relative to the formation of the state, which is the whole of what the question asks. [Rejecting C] The chronological conclusion outruns the evidence, which is drawn entirely from the present arrangement of one atypical country. Shared laws also do not establish that groups are treated equally, so the picture of peaceful coexistence the premises rest on is itself doing unearned work.

Framing

This argument is a relatively recent one because modern multinational states have only existed since fairly recently in history, but it draws on the historic precedent of multiple ethnic or cultural groups living in the same geographical region, but their own specific areas.