How to tell apart a nation and a state
What you need to know:
- Once you name Nigeria and Brazil as the contestants, you have already — without uttering the word — told us that the activity is or was or will be international: you have obviated the word “international”.
- The only problem is the tendency in the English-speaking world — especially by the North American media houses and even academic classrooms — to confuse the word nation with the word state by using them interchangeably.
As a character in the play She Stoops To Conquer scoffs, we need no ghost to tell us that, if a soccer match was played between any two “nations”, then it was international.
That is why a Kenyan lad becomes an “international” (noun) whenever he is named into the national squad Harambee Stars.
Yet listen to a headline in The Standard on Sunday of November 9: “Nigeria to play Brazil in international friendly match”.
Of course, the clash will be international. But, in this example, the Nairobi weekly has, in the same semantic breath, given its readers the same information twice.
In what way?
In the same fashion that, once you have told us that Kenya’s presidential election was contested by Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga (among others), you add exactly no information value to your statement by saying, into the bargain, that the contest was “inter-candidates” or “inter-individuals”.
SEMANTIC CONTEXT
In a word, by naming the two “nations” concerned in the soccer match, you have obviated the adjective “international”.
You have rendered it completely unnecessary. In that semantic context, you have made the concept “international” too obvious to require any mention. Any numskull can see it for himself.
To obviate, then, is not to make obvious, but to render a thing or idea unnecessary by its “obviousness”.
It is to avoid or prevent a need or a difficulty. Once you name Nigeria and Brazil as the contestants, you have already — without uttering the word — told us that the activity is or was or will be international: you have obviated the word “international”.
The only problem is the tendency in the English-speaking world — especially by the North American media houses and even academic classrooms — to confuse the word nation with the word state by using them interchangeably.
DIFFERENCE
Yet their roots are several, and their difference is quite clear for all and sundry to see.
Strictly speaking, a nation is only an ethnic category, whereas a state is only a political one. The British state embraces many nations, including the English, the Irish, the Scots and the Welsh.
That is why such a state is called multi-national. Other multi-national states include Nigeria, India, Switzerland and — as Ngugi wa Thiong’o reminds us — Kenya.
That is why — though the American media bandy it about all over the place – the term “nation-state sounds so curious.
In truth, a nation-state is a political entity composed of only one ethnic people, namely, an entity whose ethnic boundaries and political (or international) ones coincide more or less exactly.
EXAMPLES
A “nation-state”, then, is an entity composed of only one ethno-national people — one, that is, whose boundaries coincide exactly with those of its state or political expanse.
In the modern world arrangement, then, examples are hard to adduce.
In Africa, perhaps only Lesotho can claim to be a nation-state. But, even there, the coincidence of the nation with the state is illusory only.
For the Basuto nation spills over the state (or international) boundaries into quite another state, namely, South Africa.
