THE CHALLENGES OF CULTURAL DIVERSITY

C ommunities , N ations and N ation -S tates At the simplest level, a nation is a sort of large-scale community – it is a community of communities. Members of a nation share the desire to be part of the same political collectivity. This desire for political unity usually expresses itself as the aspiration to form a state . In its most general sense, the term state refers to an abstract entity consisting of a set of political-legal institutions claiming control over a particular geographical territory and the people living in it.

In Max Weber’s well-known definition, a state is a “body that successfully claims a monopoly of legitimate force in a particular territory” (Weber : ). A nation is a peculiar sort of community that is easy to describe but hard to define. We know and can describe many specific nations founded on the basis of common cultural, historical and political institutions like a shared religion,