Nation

NATION. - In the field of sociology and public law there is no concept more confused than that of the nation, nor any word more difficult to define.

The difficulty arises both from the varied meanings attributed to the term and from the multiplicity of elements that mark the human group it designates.

From its very origins, in the Latin language, the word natio was used to signify several realities. If, according to etymology (natio from nascor), it properly means the act of being born, it nonetheless comes to mean the effect, the origin, the stock, the race and the species, with reference even to irrational and inanimate beings. By an easy transition, from the stock it is applied to the people born in the territory where they dwell and, again by metathesis, to the territory itself, as in the expressions natione Dacus, natione Arretio, and finally to a determined class of persons having some common connection: natio optimatum, natio candidatorum.

In modern usage it can indifferently mean the State, the people, the fatherland and, in a narrower and more proper sense, an ethnic group marked by particular distinctive notes. In international law it is equivalent to the State, as in the expression League of Nations; in common usage to that of State or people, as in the expression Italian nation.

The second source of difficulty derives from the multiplicity of elements, called factors of nationality, that mark the national group, among which it is hard to establish which one expresses its essence. Unity of origin and traditions, of culture and language, of religion and territory are the most common notes with which the nation presents itself to the observer's gaze and from which, according to personal preferences, an extreme variety of definitions may follow. Mancini, in fact, gave predominance over the others to the consciousness of nationality, followed by Palma and Jellinek; Le Fur and Leclercq to the will to live in common; Bluntschli to language; Fichte to race, Delos to common civilization and culture, while nationalist currents identified the nation with the State.

The most recent inquiry is more or less in agreement in admitting three points: none of the factors of nationality can be considered as an essential element of the nation; the nation is clearly distinguished from the State; its essence must be sought in something spiritual and interior to man.

The nation, first of all, does not consist in race, a predominantly materialistic concept, which refers by preference to somatic characters, and cannot be integrally applied to man, in whom spiritual qualities, his specific note, predominate over physical characters. The narrowness of the concept of race cannot, therefore, exhaust that of the nation. Even if a nobler meaning is attributed to race, as is done by the anthropo-sociological school, one would still run up against the difficulty of determining its content. By the confession of all serious students of anthropology and ethnology, no other concept is so obscure and so vague. The most fundamental opposition, however, between race and nation consists in this: that the latter must be distinguished by its spiritual characters, while the former remains on the material plane.

Language is undoubtedly one of the most visible indices of nationality, and yet it cannot be held to be a constitutive element. There are, in fact, peoples who speak the same language and are divided into several nations, often in open antagonism. The phenomenon appears with greater evidence in the Republics of Latin America. Like language, neither religion nor territory should be overvalued. The unity of faith is not necessarily required by the existence of a nation, in which groups of different religious profession can well coexist, who nonetheless feel united in their common belonging to the same ethnic group. Territory, moreover, although it exercises a certain influence on the formation of some national characters (e.g., in the Greek people and their culture), is an extrinsic element. The Jewish people was for long centuries a nation without territory.

The exclusion of the individual factors of nationality from the number of essential elements does not, however, legitimize Jellinek's subjectivist conclusion, according to which the nation would be merely a subjective phenomenon, since the various factors are objective qualities that imprint particular and unmistakable notes upon man and prepare the ground from which will germinate that spiritual unity, the concrete manifestation of the existence of a national group.

Insisting further on the negative aspect, it should be added that the nation is not identified with the State, not only because history presents the existence of plurinational States, the classic example being Switzerland, but because the two social formations differ substantially. The nation reduces to unity individuals marked by well-distinct physical and especially spiritual characters; the State, on the other hand, reduces heterogeneous social groups. Without a profound homogeneity of culture and affinity of disposition, the nation does not exist, nor can it exist, whereas the State exists and is vital even without it. Such diversity is intrinsic and essential, since the objective or de facto unity from which the being of the nation germinates consists in the sum of certain partial resemblances that distinguish a determined human group from any other. Until the causes that mold man have shaped a clearly defined type, common to the whole aggregate, the nation does not arise, for lack of the specific stimulus that must determine the generic instinct of solidarity to express itself in that form and not in another.

Differently must it be said of the State, for whose formation the generic resemblances of human nature suffice, of its most common needs and its most universal perfections, equal in all members of the species, whence then the great latitude of its natural end, which extends to all the goods necessary for a sufficiently human and advanced life, whereas that of the nation is restricted to the preservation of its cultural patrimony.

In the last determinations a particular concept of the nation has already begun to emerge, for whose complete formulation it is necessary to proceed to an examination of the experimental datum.

It seems evident, first of all, that the nation belongs to the category of natural social aggregates, being constituted by a nucleus of intelligent beings joined by an internal principle, the effect of innate human sociability, which tends spontaneously to cement together those subjects who are close to one another and united by particular resemblances of origin, disposition and culture. The contrary opinion, which attributes the origin of the nation to the State, is shown to be unfounded by the fact that, even before the modern national States were formed, there already existed, in the territory subject to their political dominion, social cells well individuated as an ethnic group, to which the quality of nation cannot be denied. Not the nation presupposes the State, but the latter presupposes the nation, as the environment in which the phenomenon of the State is produced.

As a natural social aggregate, the nation appears composed of a sum of individuals resembling one another, beyond nature, in certain well-defined accidental specifications. Now, since man is a rational being, he does not join in a de facto association except through a spiritual bond, and consequently one of the essential elements of the nation must be sought in something consciously perceived. Such an element consists in the consciousness of nationality, that is, of all those common notes that mark individuals, or partial units which, as properties of the aggregate, are its social patrimony and produce in subjects the will to live together and the sentiment of being bound to a common destiny.

This first element of a spiritual order is specified even better by the end toward which associated action naturally tends, since the nation too, like every other social formation, remains specified by its end. This in turn properly consists, as Delos has well demonstrated, in the conservation and development of the common cultural patrimony for the benefit of the most complete and perfect formation of the human person. For what produces the unitary consciousness and the will to collaborate of the members of a nation are the organic and spiritual partial units, which form a bond of fact even before the emergence of national consciousness. The objective foundation on which the sentiment of social unity in the nation rests is, therefore, the various similarities that are customarily called factors of nationality. It follows that, by exhausting beyond a certain limit the unity of religion, language, traditions and culture, the instinct of sociability would lose its stimulus and the national aggregate its cohesion. If it wishes to preserve itself in being, it must conserve and develop, protect and preserve its cultural patrimony; this means that its natural purpose consists precisely in this conservation and defense, which cannot be separated from a reasonable progress.

But national culture, its conservation and development, would have no importance at all as a collective end if it did not redound to the benefit of the human person. The bearers and makers of civilization are persons, and not the nation conceived or idealized as a subject standing on its own; the common culture must therefore flow back upon its makers, as a patrimony to which all without distinction have a right. The natural importance of the nation is proportional to the service it renders to man, and this is most singular and proper. It impresses upon his faculties operative habits, permanent dispositions, which will give his operations direction and ease, actualizing the potentiality with which the human being comes to life. It thus carries out a function within man and forms his soul and character, molds his sentiment, impressing upon the entire complex mode of his psychic functions special attitudes that will become permanent.

Through a slow and continuous action the nation grafts into man in an imperceptible way the elements of its culture, communicates to him the patrimony of its spirit, of its ideas, of its traditions, of its language and of its religion, sealing his soul forever, just as the community of origin from the same stock has sealed his body.

Gathering in synthesis the elements described thus far, a complete definition of the nation can be reached. It is in its essence a natural social aggregate which, in the consciousness of its unity of origin and culture, tends to the conservation and development of its own peculiarities and distinctive notes, with a view to the most complete formation of the human person.

Antonio Messineo