The principle is not: Whoever wants to be a nation is a nation. It is just the opposite: A nation simply is, whether the individuals of which it is composed want to belong to the nation or not. A nation is not based on self-determination but on pre-determination.

—Friedrich Meinicke

A nation is […] a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarised, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life.

—Ernest Renan

A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.

—Joseph Stalin

The difficulties that Marxists (and others) have had in coming up with a definition of “the nation” are well known. What I am suggesting here is that this is not surprising, and that it is not necessarily a problem: indeed, I suggest that those who want and try to produce a definition of “the nation” do so because they understand neither for what nor at what they are looking. In essence, what I suggest is that “the nation” has not been satisfactorily defined by materialists, nor will it be, simply because, as it does not exist, a definition is impossible. Please note that I am not saying that nationalism does not exist, nor that states, even national states or nation-states, nor the “national question”, do not exist; simply that “the nation” does not exist. Nor do I intend to say much about the myriad matters of political strategy and tactics that the national question poses. But I contend that a materialist political outlook that is dependent upon a prior definition of what a nation is will always in the end fail.

More (pdf, 91 KB): “The Secret of the Forest is the Trees”