Nation state

A nation state, or nation-state, is a political entity in which the state (a centralized political organization ruling over a population within a territory) and the nation (a community based on a common identity) are congruent. A nation, sometimes used in the sense of a common ethnicity, may include a diaspora or refugees who live outside the nation-state; some dispersed nations (such as the Roma nation, for example) do not have a state where that ethnicity predominates. In a more general sense, a nation-state is simply a large, politically sovereign country or administrative territory. Historians and scholars of nationalism studies are divided over whether nations long predated modern nation-states and the ideology of nationalism, or whether modern states and nationalism largely produced the nations we recognize today. However, they generally agree that the nineteenth century, following the age of revolutions, was a decisive period for the rise and consolidation of nation-states.