What Is a Nation?

In my daily life, I can tend to speak about nations as if they are naturally existing things; India, China, France, Nigeria, America – they all exist in my teenage head as though they came with the ‘combo deal’ of the rest of the planet. They appear on my Google searches with borders, flags, capitals, anthems, armies, passports, and storied, lengthy histories. They feel solid. They feel old. They feel as though they were always around, waiting to become what they are today.

But a nation is not like a mountain. It isn’t discovered by some explorer hundreds of years ago. It is made.

This, essentially, is the driving force of Benedict Anderson’s famous argument in Imagined Communities. Anderson defined the nation as an “imagined political community,” imagined as being both “limited” and “sovereign.” I think that phrasing can sound rather deceptively simple. It can even sound a bit obvious that a country is sovereign and limited. To me, though, calling a country an “imagined” community seems odd. Anderson explains that nations are imagined in the sense that no one actually knows every member of their nation. Anderson’s point is absolutely not that nations are fake. His point is that modern political belonging depends on imagination at scale.

The nation is the answer to a peculiar modern problem: how do millions (or billions!) of complete strangers come to feel like they belong to one another? Like they share some foundational root in common?

Your ‘Average Joe’ may know their family, neighborhood, school, village, workplace, and city. But they almost certainly do not know the nation. They know snapshots of it: a flag, a language, a border, a war story, a school textbook, a national holiday, a cricket match, a passport cover, a song. From these parts, a larger “we” is assembled in the minds of every citizen of the nation. The nation exists only because people learn to imagine themselves as part of the same story.

This is why Anderson’s theory remains foundational. It breaks the mystique of nationalism without dismissing its unequivocal power. To call the nation imagined is not to call it imaginary. Indeed, money is imagined. Law is imagined. I would even hear someone out if they said human rights are imagined. Because each of these is imagined, their power lies only in the fact that enough people believe in them, act through them, and build their institutions around them. A nation is no different. It is a story that turns into an infrastructure.

Anderson’s definition has three main parts to it that matter.

First, the nation is imagined as a community. This means it creates a feeling of ‘horizontal belonging’. A rich industrialist, a peasant farmer, a soldier, a student, and a street hawker may (and do) live completely different lives, but nationalism can describe them as fellow members of the same wider people. Therein lies the emotional genius. It turns complete strangers into kin.

Second, the nation is imagined as limited. No nation claims to include all of humanity. It has boundaries, even when these boundaries are contested or at times “elastic” (a wonderfully euphemistic way of accounting for conquering in war). To say “we are our nation” is also to say “we are not the people not in our nation.” The nation creates belonging by drawing a fine line between the included and the excluded.

Third, the nation is imagined as sovereign. This is what makes it political. A nation does not merely want cultural recognition. It wants the authority to govern itself – an authority so ingrained into the idea of a nation now that people refer to it as a right to self-determination. Modern nationalism emerged in a world where older sources of authority, especially religious empires and dynastic monarchies, were losing their legitimacy. Instead of power trickling down from a God to a king to a subject, nationalism imagines power rising from all the people. The nation, according to Anderson, says: we are a people, and because we are a people, we have the right to rule ourselves.

This explains why nationalism became such a powerful catalyst for anti-colonial movements. Colonized peoples could turn the language of sovereignty against the oppressing empire. If Europeans claimed self-government for themselves, why should Indians, Chinese, Indonesians, Vietnamese, Algerians, or Nigerians be denied the same fundament? The nation-state became the foundational lexicon through which freedom could be demanded.

Yet this is where Anderson’s argument becomes somewhat muddied.

If the nation-state was the language of freedom, then was it also simultaneously a constraint on imagination?

By the twentieth century, political legitimacy had come to look a certain way. A “proper” political community was expected to have fixed borders, a central government, a constitution, an army, a bureaucracy, a national economy, a national history, and citizens who belonged to that one state. This model made independence instantly recognizable. It allowed all the colonized peoples to say: we are a nation, therefore we deserve a state.

But it also narrowed the possible meanings of freedom.

Before this modern nation-state became dominant, political belonging was far more layered. People could belong to their village, region, religious community, language group, clan, caste, kingdom, empire, trading network, or civilization all at the same time. Authority could always overlap, and identity did not always have to be compressed into one national identity.

The modern nation-state today tends to simplify this complexity into one cleaner equation, to put it in a mathematical form: one people = one territory = one (unit of) sovereignty.

That formula can be incredibly powerful. It can protect people from a colonial empire. It can create ‘citizenship’ as a concept. It can build welfare systems, courts, roads, schools, and armies. It can further give the colonized a seat at the table of world politics. But it can also flatten older, messier, and more plural forms of belonging.

This is the problem raised by thinkers like Partha Chatterjee. His challenge is not that Asian or African nationalism was never ‘imagined’ as Anderson holds. I say: of course it was! His challenge, then, is that the colonized peoples had to imagine their freedom inside a world that was already shaped by empire as opposed to the ‘no holds barred’ environment of early European nationalism. Colonial states had pre-mapped territories, already counted populations, classified religions and castes, established administrative boundaries, built bureaucracies, and imposed a rigid template for what political modernity should look like. Anti-colonial nationalism was creative, but it was not created in an empty room as it ought to have been.

This matters because the nation-state was not the only imaginable future.

India, for example, could have imagined freedom as a looser federation, with far more autonomy for linguistic regions, religious communities, provinces, and princely states. The Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 moved for something like this, with a weak center and strong regional power. The big-wigs of the erstwhile British empire didn’t like the idea of power slipping through their fingers, so that plan failed, but its existence shows that the centralized nation-state was not the only possible path.

Gandhi imagined another alternative through the ‘village swaraj’: a decentralized self-rule rooted in local communities rather than a powerful central state. This was an entirely different imagination of what freedom looked like. For Gandhi, self-rule meant more than replacing British rulers with Indian rulers in Delhi. It meant reshaping political life from below.

China, too, had roads not taken before. At the end of the Qing dynasty, some reformers supported constitutional monarchy rather than an entire revolution. Others explored federalist options and provincial autonomy. These alternatives may have been more unstable, impractical, or vulnerable to foreign domination, but they existed. China did not inevitably have to become a modern centralized nation-state. It became one through struggle, crisis, war, reform, revolution, and the pressures of a world organized around sovereign states.

This does not mean that monarchy, village republics, loose federations, or civilizational commonwealths were necessarily better. Some may have preserved hierarchy. Some may have weakened collective defense. Some may have failed to protect minorities. Some may have been too fragile for a world of empires, armies, and industrial capitalism.

But the point is not to romanticize the alternatives.

The point is to notice that the nation-state won partly because it was the form the modern world recognized.

This is where Anderson’s theory can be both accepted and pushed further. He helps us see that nations are imagined. But the more prudent question is: why did one particular style of imagination become so dominant?

Why did freedom come to mean a sovereign state with rigid borders and culture? Why did political belonging have to be translated into citizenship? Why did the cultural community have to become territorial sovereignty? Why did “a people” have to become “a state”?

The answer boils down, to me, to being partly practical. Without a state, a people could be conquered, ignored, divided, or governed by others. In a world of empires, the nation-state was not merely an idea. It was armor.

However, to continue that metaphor, armor is heavy. It does protect, but it also constrains.

Once freedom is imagined through the nation-state, the state begins to speak in the name of the nation. It decides the official language, the official history, the official map, the official heroes, the official enemies, and the official minorities. It turns a living, plural society into a governable population. It says “the people,” even when the people are really divided by class, caste, gender, region, religion, language, and even memory leading back many generations.

This is nationalism’s double movement. It creates solidarity, but it also creates boundaries. It gives people dignity, but it demands absolute conformity. It liberates people from the previous empires, but it may inherit the empire’s tools: the census, the map, the police, the borders, the archives, even the schoolbooks.

So what is a nation?

A nation is not simply a state. States can contain a plethora of nations. On the contrary, many nations don’t have states. Nor is a nation simply a language, religion, race, or territory. Each of those definitions fails somewhere.

A nation is better understood as an organized imagination of belonging. It is a claim that strangers are somehow part of the same historical body. It is made through stories, institutions, rituals, borders, schools, maps, memories, and sacrifices. It is powerful because people believe in it deeply enough to live for it, kill for it, die for it, vote through it, and mourn through it.

But if the nation is imagined, then it can also be re-imagined.

That may be the most important lesson I’ve taken away. Anderson helps us see that nations are made. Chatterjee helps us ask who gets to make them, and under what constraints. The next question is ours: must political belonging always take the form of the nation-state, or can we imagine forms of collective life that are more layered, more plural, and less anxious about difference?

The modern nation-state may have been necessary. It may still be necessary. But necessity should not be mistaken for nature.

A nation is not fake because it is imagined. It is dangerous when it forgets that it is imagined.