A nation is a group of people who share certain characteristics in common, most commonly language, religion, ethnicity, and history. As a sociological and political term, it is a fluid concept - what Benedict Anderson has termed an "imagined community." It has been common in history for different nations to fuse together  or for a single nation to break apart. Sometimes, a single person may feel they belong to more than one "nationality", depending on circumstances.
Most of the states of Western Europe were built along national lines. However, this was also due to European monarchs fostering a sense of nationhood in their people, through nationalism, the adoption of the "vulgar" languages, and concentrated myth-making. Since the end of World War I, nationality as the primary pre-requisite for statehood has declined. Today, most states are rather multi-national though there was a brief resurgence of "Ethnic group gets a country" in the 90's with the break up of the communist system in Eurasia.
 See also
- ↑ For example, as the different Jurchen and other tribes in Northeast China became the Manchu, or how the Cornish, etc., all became English.
- ↑ A modern example of this seems to be the Chinese and the Taiwanese, and possibly the North and South Koreans.
- ↑ This sums up the feelings of many Yugoslavs at the beginning of the 90s.
- ↑ Examples of such myth-making include King Arthur, Charlemagne, and El Cid.