Rethinking the Nation: The Most Misunderstood Idea

Few words in political life are as overused, romanticized, and misunderstood as the word "nation." We invoke it in songs, wave it on flags, and spill blood in its name. We whisper it when mourning a homeland lost, and scream it when fighting for independence. The nation is everywhere. It sits in the speeches of presidents and the graffiti of revolutionaries. And yet, for something so central, it is deeply, tragically misunderstood.

We often speak of nations as though they are mountains—ancient, immovable, inevitable. But the truth is more subtle. Nations are not geological formations. They are constructed realities, shaped not by nature but by humans—through stories, struggles, fears, and hopes. They are more like gardens than mountains: planted, cultivated, pruned, sometimes overgrown or burned down, always needing care and attention.

There is no one road a nation must take to become itself. The nation is not a singular truth waiting to be discovered; it is a collective choice waiting to be made.

One of the greatest intellectual shortcuts of modern times has been the quiet merging of two distinct things: the nation and the state. Today, we say "nation-state" so casually that we forget to ask whether the terms even belong together. They do not—at least not automatically.

A state is a bureaucratic structure, a political machine of borders, laws, armies, and passports. It collects taxes and polices streets. A nation, by contrast, is a deeply emotional construct. It is about belonging, shared memory, trauma, and destiny. It is about who we believe we are, and who we want to become—together.

The United States, for example, is a state made up of many nations—Black, Indigenous, settler, diasporic, religious, linguistic, ideological. The official narrative claims they form a single nation, "one nation under God," but the lived experience tells a more fractured, contested story. There are communities within the U.S. that feel they were never invited into the national story, or worse, were written into it only as footnotes or villains.

This confusion—mistaking the machinery of the state for the soul of a nation—has consequences. It allows the powerful to claim that their rule is not just legal but emotionally sacred. It makes dissent feel like betrayal. It makes alternatives unthinkable.

Constructing a Nation: Not Nature, but NegotiationIf we peel away the myth, we begin to see the nation for what it truly is: a construction. But let us be careful. To say a nation is constructed is not to say it is fake or meaningless. Money, family, and art are also human constructions. Yet they shape our lives profoundly. The nation, similarly, is real because people act as if it is.

I do not believe that nations emerge from some eternal essence—be it race, blood, or even language. Instead, nations form when people decide, together or under pressure, to tell a shared political story. They arise through the repetition of memory and the ritualization of difference. A nation is not a fact—it is a commitment, one that must be renewed constantly.

And I recognize that in a world full of isolation, domination, and global rootlessness, the nation can serve as a form of strategic essentialism—a useful fiction to protect the vulnerable, assert dignity, and claim space in a hostile world. Sometimes, communities essentialize themselves—must speak as one—to be heard at all. But this must be done consciously, not as a doctrine, but as a strategy. Essentialism, if we use it, must always come with an internal warning label.

There is no one way to become a nation. The French path, through a common language and strong state institutions, is not the Kurdish path. The American path of pluralism and contradiction is not the Tibetan path of cultural endurance. The Swiss model of federal compromise and linguistic diversity is not the same as the Japanese model of monoethnic imagination.

This is why critical view matters. When we stop asking what a nation is and begin asking what a nation does—who it includes, who it protects, who it empowers—we find more useful answers. A nation that elevates a single group and erases all others may be strong, but it is not just. A nation that honors its diversity and negotiates its internal contradictions may be fragile, but it is more human.

In this view, we must stop worshipping nations and begin crafting them. And we must allow multiple stories, multiple timelines, multiple futures.

Nations do not emerge from nowhere. They are rooted in what I call political heritage. It is related to being a community and political friendship. That heritage includes the songs we sing, the injustices we remember, the myths we challenge, and the futures we imagine. It includes the names of our ancestors and the ruins of our homes. It includes the rebellions, the treaties, the languages suppressed and revived.

Political heritage is not always glorious. Sometimes it is painful, shameful, and contested. But it is the material from which nations are made. Without it, there is no continuity—only slogans.

To be a nation is not to inherit purity. It is often to inherit responsibility—to carry forward a heritage, to argue over it, and to make something better out of it.

If we must rethink the nation, let us ask different questions.
Not: Is this a “real” nation?
But: Is this a nation that makes people more human, or less?
Not: What makes us unique?
But: What makes us just?
Not: Do we have a right to be a nation?
But: How will we exercise that right without erasing others?

The most beautiful nations are not the ones that glorify sameness, but those that build homes for differences. They are not the loudest on battlefields, but the most generous in conversation. They are not fixed in time, but open to change. They are not sacred—because nothing human should be sacred—but they are precious, because they hold the fragile hope that strangers can become neighbors.

So let us stop looking for the one fixed essence of a nation. It doesn’t exist. But let us start building nations worth belonging to—nations built on trust, recognition, and shared political heritage, not myth or blood.

Because in the end, the question is not whether we belong to one single particular nation. The real question is whether our nation still belongs to us.