Discovering the “State-Nation”

In his seminal work, the historian Eugen Weber memorably detailed how French leaders in the decades after the French Revolution turned “peasants into Frenchmen” by forging a cultural, linguistic, and national identity that was unmistakably French and was practised only by French people. The nation-state paradigm, on the other hand, is ineffectual at best and harmful at worst for civilizations that have considerable cultural variety, at least part of which is territorially grounded and supported by strong sub-national identities. An alternate route, which the authors refer to as a “state-nation,” is something that Linz, Stepan, and Yadav propose for these complicated scenarios.

History 

 It assists us in reformulating the discussion on the connection between racial and ethnic diversity and political systems. According to what the authors have told us, the purpose of their research is “to broaden our collective political imaginations” (page xiv) on the ways in which democracy and ethnic diversity might be brought together. They have accomplished that objective with remarkable brilliance and success. The concept of the “state-nation” is the driving force behind most of the discussion in this book. The writers compare and contrast this idea with the more commonplace concept of the “nation-state,” as well as other ideas like “multicultural states.” The majority of empirical examples come from India; nevertheless, comments on the experiences, institutions, and practises of other countries, including Belgium, Canada, Spain, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, and the United States, make the greater significance of the argument abundantly evident. The notion of the state-nation is used to explain why certain states are unsuccessful in their attempts to build national unity, while other states are successful in doing so. Ernest Gellner defined a nation-state in his seminal work Nations and Nationalism, which was published in 1983. According to Gellner, a nation-state is a location in which the political borders of a state and the cultural borders of a country coincide. Many people believe that modern France is the finest historical example of this kind of cultural synthesis. The current body of literature on nationalism, on the other hand, views the French model of undifferentiated citizenship as a curiosity from the nineteenth century. It is to be studied primarily for the purpose of comprehending why the Basques and Bretons did not rebel against Paris and its profoundly assimilationist thrust. Eugen Weber demonstrated in his seminal work from 1976 titled “Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914” how the French central state, through the use of methods such as military conscription and compulsory public education, was able to assimilate a wide variety of ethnic groups into the French population. These groups included the Basques, Bretons, Catalans, Corsicans, Gascons, Normans, Picards, and Vendéens As a part of this endeavour, the differences that had previously served as illustrative examples of France’s vibrant character were purposefully and methodically eliminated. And how alive these many differences had been: At the time of the French Revolution, more than half of all persons residing in France spoke no French at all, and “barely 12-13 percent spoke it correctly,” as E.J. Hobsbawm notes in Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. The contemporary nation-state models that most closely resemble France’s include those of Japan, Portugal, and several Scandinavian nations. Ethnically diverse countries, at least some of which have a territorial component and may give rise to demands for independence; multicultural countries, in which ethnic diversity is dispersed throughout the country and does not have a politically charged territorial focus. These two types of countries make up the majority of the rest of the world. The United States of America is an example of the latter type; its Civil War was a constitutional and, some would argue, cultural conflict among people who were fundamentally of the same stock and spoke the same language. “State-nations” is the term that Stepan, Linz, and Yadav use to refer to the former category of political entities, which are characterised by a significant amount of ethnic variety, some of which is territorially concentrated. State-nations include places like Belgium, Canada, India, and Spain, in addition to Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Each has ethno communal distinctions that are highly concentrated spatially. As a result, the ideas presented in the book will reverberate throughout many different communities. Assimilationism is typically associated with nation-states. One of its most distinguishing characteristics is the elimination of racial and cultural differences. State-nations, on the other hand, operate on two levels: they try to foster a sense of belonging with regard to the larger political community, and at the same time, they establish institutional protections for politically significant diversities relating to language, religion, or sacrosanct cultural norms. State-nations work to create a sense of belonging with regard to the larger political community, and at the same time, they do this. When such variations are restricted to a particular region, they almost always call for the protection that may be provided by federal arrangements. Arend Lijphart’s consociationalism differs from the state-nation in that it focuses solely on establishing institutional safeguards for ethno religious diversity but pays no attention to the task of nurturing countrywide loyalties at the same time. 

Conclusion 

The state-nation, on the other hand, has a double-barreled character that distinguishes it from consociationalism. It is also important to differentiate this idea from what Will Kymlicka refers to as “multicultural citizenship.” Even though Kymlicka places an emphasis on recognising some types of variety, he does not consider it possible for centrifugal and centripetal institutions to coexist. It is possible, according to the state-nation approach, for a person to simultaneously have the citizenship of Catalonia and Spain, Quebec and Canada, or Punjab and India. Spanish, Canadian, and Native American individuals with no distinctions between them.