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A nation is a type of social organization where a collective identity, a national identity, has emerged from a combination of shared features across a given population, such as language, history, ethnicity, culture, territory or society. Some nations are constructed around ethnicity (see ethnic nationalism) while others are bound by political constitutions (see civic nationalism).[1]
A nation is generally more overtly political than an ethnic group.[2][3] Benedict Anderson defines a nation as "an imagined political community […] imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion",[4] while Anthony D Smith defines nations as cultural-political communities that have become conscious of their autonomy, unity and particular interests.[5][6]
The consensus among scholars is that nations are socially constructed, historically contingent, organizationally flexible, and a distinctly modern phenomenon.[7][8] Throughout history, people have had an attachment to their kin group and traditions, territorial authorities and their homeland, but nationalism – the belief that state and nation should align as a nation state – did not become a prominent ideology until the end of the 18th century.[9]
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was invoked but never defined (see the help page).a broad scholarly consensus that the nation is a recent and imagined identity dominates political science