The concept of nations and nationality has been around for thousands of years. Herodotus wrote about the German nation 2500 years ago. In those days the term did not refer to a country, a government, or a state. It referred to a people. There were dozens of different German tribes with no central authority, but together, they still constituted the Germanic nation. Nations were the sum total of a given "people" who were part of a single ethnic group, with the same language, the same religion, and the same cultural identity.
The development of the nation-state is often called nationalism.…
