Characteristics of National States –

Next, we want to talk to you in Superhistory about what are National States, what they mean and how they were formed and what consequences this formation brought for what are modern states today.

Characteristics of Nation States

During the second half of the XIX century, the National States will be gestated, After a long evolutionary process that it dated back to the rise of the Modern States in the 15th and 16th centuries. We will now see what the main characteristics of these political systems are.

In the National States, as its name indicates, the idea of ​​the “Nation” will be vital. We could describe the “nation” as a large community of individuals “united by a common history, culture, ethnic composition and language”.

But, as we already explained in the article dedicated to the modern states and nation states, in practice many states included several nations within their borders. In other cases, such as the American countries that received hundreds of thousands of immigrants, there was a very heterogeneous population, and many times foreigners outnumbered nationals.

For this reason the governments tried on the one hand toadopt for himself the attributes of the nationmerging them with those of the Condition. Eric Hobsbawm explain this process as follows:

In the In the last decades of the 19th century, the State not only created the nation, but also needed to create the nation. The nation it was the new civic religion of the States. It constituted a link that united all citizens with the State and was, at the same time, a counterweight against all those who appealed to other loyalties over the State: to religion, to nationality or to an ethnic element, to social class. to which each individual belonged.

East process of rapprochement between the State and the Nation was strongly cemented by policies carried out by the rulers, occurring simultaneously in different countries. In this sense, the essential fact was the implementation of state primary education.

In addition to teaching basic knowledge such as teaching of the official language or notions of mathematics, a source was made emphasis on aspects that helped build the notion of the nation with an important role of history and geography. The transmission of the cultural values ​​of the nation, the exaltation of the heroes, and the permanent presence of national symbols -the flag, the anthem- completed the socializing function of the school.

Another important point in the transmission of national values ​​to the population was the introduction of compulsory military service. All this transformation of the role of the state also included a significant increase in government administration and more interference in public services.