Abstract

The “nation” has been the primary unit of political membership in modernity, typically stronger than “region” (the American 1865) and almost always stronger than “class” (the European 1914). Membership in the nation has meant citizenship, the basis of civil rights and civic responsibility within the rule of law. However “nation” is also related to the “people,” the source of all democratic power. The “people” was the population in the age of the democratic revolutions before anything like contemporary mass immigration. While the Enlightenment notion of “the people” was not an ethnic definition, the romanticization of the term and its metamorphosis..