Page 171 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

NATION

Japan, Europe and Canada as part of a globalising strategy extending
to Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Nasdaq was designed to
build ‘the world’s first truly global stock market – digital and
Internet-accessible, open to anyone anywhere in the world, 24 hours
aday’(http://www.nasdaq.com/about/about_nasdaq.stm).

NATION

An ‘imagined community’ which is understood as distinct and separate
from all other nations. ‘Nation’ is a relational term; like any sign, one
nation consists in being what the others are not. The concept belongs
in fact to the realm of political signification: nations have no essential
or intrinsic properties; each is a discursive construct whose identity
consists in its difference from others.
‘Nation’ is often used to mean nation-state – a sovereign state with
its own government, boundaries, defence forces, etc., and symbolic
markers of nationhood such as a flag, an anthem, local currency, a head
of state, membership of the UN and so on. But there are many nations
that are not also nation-states. Some states encompass more than one
nation (e.g., Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland in the UK). Then
there are nations which exceed national frontiers (e.g., China) or those
incorporated in several other states (e.g., Kurdistan). And there are
some nations without a state or any territory at all (e.g., Palestine).
If territory does not define a nation, then neither does race or
ethnicity, and nor does language or culture. Most modern nations are
multiracial, multilingual and multicultural to some degree, if not
always in official policy, and they are getting more so. The dictionary
or common-sense definition of a nation as being a large number of
people of common ethnic descent, language and history, inhabiting a
territory bounded by defined limits, is thus seriously at odds with the
facts.
In fact, when nations are regarded as ethnic, coupling them to the
state – and putting nineteenth-century liberalism’s innocent-looking
hyphen in the term ‘nation-state’ – can have disastrous consequences.
States that couple statehood with ethnic nationhood can literally fail.
For instance, Sri Lanka installed a Singhalese state, inevitably
precipitating separatism and eventually war with the Tamil nation
living on the island. Fiji has endured years of instability because native
Fijians want a native Fijian state, despite the numerical majority of
people of Indian origin living in Fiji. Singapore on the other hand
avoided that fate by maintaining an ethnically neutral state.

156