Nations are natural ethnic communities

The argument

On this view the nation is not an artefact of politics but a fact about the world that politics subsequently recognises or fails to recognise. The world is divided into distinct ethnic communities, and it is these communities that constitute nations. The task of a theory of nationhood, accordingly, is to identify what makes such a community distinct rather than to explain how states construct one. Two kinds of factor are held to do that work. The first is territorial. The sort of territory a group inhabits is said to shape its cultural character: landscape, climate and the demands of subsistence in a particular place mould the habits, temperaments and forms of life that develop there, and over long periods those become the group's distinguishing traits. A community formed by a place is thereby marked off from communities formed by other places. The second kind of factor is biological, and accounts within this tradition attribute it variously. Some formulations appeal to racial distinctiveness. Others locate it in a sense of obligation among members of an ethnic group grounded in inherited kinship loyalties — the extension to a large population of the attachments that operate within a family. Either way the bond is presented as given rather than chosen, which is what makes the resulting community natural on this account. The conclusion that follows concerns political independence. If nations are constituted by territorial and biological factors, then their existence does not depend on statehood: a nation exists whether or not it has political independence, and a people without a state of its own is a nation nonetheless. Statelessness becomes a political condition imposed on a community already in being rather than evidence that no such community is there, and a claim to independence becomes a claim for recognition of something that already exists.

Context

The idea that some human groups are innately different, due to innate characteristics or the circumstances they live in, has a long history. It became strongly associated with scientific racism in the 19th century and is now widely discredited. Those who still argue credibly for some sort of innate natural difference as the basis for nations usually opt for a relatively soft version of this, emphasising issues like kinship loyalty.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Ethnicity is a notoriously difficult concept to define. There is little evidence of territory shaping any identity in any particular way. For example, mountainous regions have produced cultures as varied as Quechua, Karen, and Montenegrin. Ideas of ethnic unity are very dubious. Theory of innate human difference along ethnic lines is widely discredited as a pseudo-science. Ideas of kinship struggle to explain nations which contain many different ethnic groups such as the American nation of immigrants or India which contains over 2000 ethnic groups according to some counts.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The criteria defining ethnic identity is very hard to describe with any consistency. Ethnicity is not timeless but emerges from historical processes. [Rejecting P1] Ideas about territorial factors shaping human culture and mentality are dubious, and ideas of racial difference are discredited. [Rejecting P1] Many modern nations contain multiple different ethnic groups.