The Nation-State and Citizenship: Challenges in the Global Age

The nation-state is one of the most dominant political structures of the modern world. It rests on a seemingly straightforward idea: that a politically sovereign territory (the state) and a culturally or ethnically defined people (the nation) should coincide. But in practice, this alignment is rare – and the consequences of pretending otherwise have shaped some of the most pressing social and political conflicts of our time. As globalization accelerates, migration increases, and ethnic minorities assert their rights, the nation-state model faces mounting pressure from all sides.

What exactly is a nation-state?
The conflation of “nation” and “state”
Ethno-national movements: when the model breaks down
The policy impact on ethnic minorities
Citizenship laws and ethnic exclusion
Language, culture, and assimilation pressure
Globalization and the eroding nation-state
Beyond the nation-state: alternative models of belonging
The real cost of getting it wrong

What exactly is a nation-state?

According to Encyclopædia Britannica, a nation-state is a territorially bounded sovereign polity ruled in the name of a community of citizens who identify themselves as a nation. The legitimacy of its rule comes from the right of a core national group to self-determination. The concept gained momentum in 19th-century Europe, when nationalist thinkers like Giuseppe Mazzini argued that every ethnolinguistic group deserved its own state – one nation, one state. The trouble is, by almost any current accounting, there are practically no ethnolinguistically homogeneous nations in the world. As the International Journal of Peace Studies notes, the territorial distribution of human populations is older than the idea of ethnic-linguistic nation-states and simply does not correspond to it.

This gap between ideal and reality is the core problem. Real states contain multiple ethnic groups, religions, and languages. When states are governed as if they represent a single, homogeneous nation, minority communities are almost always left on the margins.

The conflation of “nation” and “state”

The terms “nation” and “state” are frequently used interchangeably in everyday language and even in policy discourse – but they refer to fundamentally different things. A state is a legal and political entity with defined territory, a government, and recognized sovereignty. A nation is a cultural and social concept – a group of people who share a common identity, language, history, or ethnic background. These two do not have to overlap, and in most cases, they don’t.

When politicians or policymakers conflate the two, the implications are serious. It produces a logic that equates full citizenship with belonging to the dominant national or ethnic group. Minority populations – those who don’t fit the dominant cultural profile – may find themselves treated as lesser citizens, outsiders within their own country, or even stripped of legal status entirely. This conflation, as scholars of citizenship and ethnic conflict have documented, sits at the core of how ethnic identity shapes a state’s definition and treatment of its citizens.

Ethno-national movements: when the model breaks down

One of the most visible signs that the nation-state framework is under strain is the rise of ethno-national movements – political mobilizations by ethnic or cultural groups that feel unrecognized, marginalized, or suppressed within the state they nominally belong to. These movements differ from ordinary political activism: as Stanford’s sociology research distinguishes, ethnic nationalist movements specifically claim legitimate rights to sovereignty or authority over a defined territory.

What drives them? The International Journal of Peace Studies points to several interconnected causes: economic deprivation and inequality, the denial of cultural and political rights, the absence of meaningful power-sharing for minority groups, and historical grievances that can fester across generations. When people feel their national identity is suppressed or their group excluded from political life, ethno-national sentiment intensifies.

Examples are not hard to find. Kurdish communities across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria represent one of the most prominent stateless nations in the world – an estimated 30 to 45 million people with a distinct cultural identity but no internationally recognized sovereign state. The secessionist movements in Catalonia (Spain) and Scotland (UK) illustrate that even in stable, wealthy democracies, ethno-national sentiment cannot simply be managed away through economic development. In each case, the tension is between the political boundaries drawn by the state and the cultural identities that predate or cut across those boundaries.

The policy impact on ethnic minorities

When states operate with an implicit or explicit ethno-national logic – treating one group’s culture, language, or religion as the default standard of full citizenship – the effects on minority groups are direct and often severe. Policy becomes a mechanism of inclusion for some and exclusion for others.

Citizenship laws and ethnic exclusion

Citizenship law is one of the most powerful tools states have for defining who belongs. When these laws are drawn along ethnic lines, they can render entire communities legally invisible. UNHCR reports that the majority of the world’s known stateless populations belong to minority groups – a direct consequence of nationality laws that discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, or language. States can also deprive existing citizens of their nationality through changes in law that use discriminatory criteria, making entire communities stateless overnight.

The Rohingya in Myanmar are among the most extreme examples. Myanmar’s 1982 nationality law discriminated on ethnic grounds, effectively rendering hundreds of thousands of Rohingya stateless – denying them legal personhood and leaving them without access to education, healthcare, or employment. As the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has noted, ethno-nationalism that defines the nation through assumed blood ties and ethnicity has found renewed traction with populist political leaders globally, with devastating results for minority communities.

Language, culture, and assimilation pressure

Beyond formal citizenship laws, states routinely use cultural policy to reinforce a dominant national identity. Language policy is a telling example: should states require immigrants and minorities to assimilate linguistically, or should they support multilingualism? Should minority languages receive official recognition? These questions reflect the deeper tension between national unity and cultural diversity. France’s model of civic nationalism, for instance, historically resists recognizing ethnic or religious group distinctions – the French state does not collect official census data based on religion or home language. While this model claims universalism, critics argue it renders minority identities effectively invisible in policy.

In contrast, countries like Canada and Switzerland have embraced official multilingualism and multicultural frameworks as ways of managing internal diversity. The difference in approach reflects distinct national histories and demographic realities, but both face ongoing debates about integration, recognition, and belonging.

Globalization and the eroding nation-state

Globalization has added new layers of complexity to an already strained model. Britannica notes that the free flow of information through the internet and the global distribution of consumer goods have eroded the role of nation-states as producers and disseminators of national culture. Transnational concerns – from climate change to human rights – now compete with nation-centred priorities. At the same time, the rise of international institutions and human rights law has begun to constrain the discretion states once exercised over citizenship.

As research from Stanford on postnational membership argues, the expansion of human rights discourse and the development of bodies like the United Nations and European courts of justice have undermined strictly state-based citizenship, pushing toward recognizing membership rights based on personhood rather than national affiliation alone. This shift is significant: it suggests that the rights one holds need not depend entirely on which passport one carries.

The rise of dual citizenship is another indicator of change. The Migration Policy Institute observes that the growing number of countries allowing dual citizenship has made national membership less exclusive, while migrants’ transnational lives – working in one country, maintaining family ties in another – have made single-state citizenship less relevant to lived experience.

Beyond the nation-state: alternative models of belonging

Scholars and policymakers have proposed various frameworks for managing the tension between national identity and pluralism. Multicultural citizenship, associated with philosopher Will Kymlicka, argues that group-differentiated rights – special protections for linguistic minorities, indigenous peoples, and immigrant communities – are not a threat to democratic unity but a condition for genuine equality. Postnational citizenship goes further, arguing that rights should be grounded in personhood and human dignity rather than national membership. The European Union’s model – where EU citizens can live, work, and vote across member states – represents the most institutionalized experiment in this direction.

None of these models is without tension. Multicultural policies can face backlash from majority groups who perceive group rights as unfair or divisive. Postnational frameworks struggle to operate without the enforcement mechanisms that only states currently possess. And as the Nations and Nationalism journal argues, the distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism is itself insufficient – what is needed is a reconstruction of national identity that brings ethnocultural differences into public political culture, rather than suppressing or ignoring them.

The real cost of getting it wrong

When the nation-state conflates ethnicity with citizenship, the consequences are not merely theoretical. OHCHR estimates there are at least 12 million stateless people globally. Stateless individuals often cannot go to school, access healthcare, work legally, open a bank account, or even register a marriage or death. The US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants describes statelessness as affecting multiple generations, since entire ethnic or tribal groups face discrimination and children inherit their parents’ lack of legal status. In February 2024, the African Union adopted a treaty specifically to eradicate statelessness on the continent – a recognition that the problem is structural, not incidental.

The US Department of State affirms that the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in response to the mass statelessness that followed World War II, established in Article 15 that everyone has the right to a nationality and should not be arbitrarily deprived of it. Yet more than 75 years later, millions remain outside the protection of any state – a testament to how stubbornly the conflation of nation and state persists in law and policy.

The nation-state is not going away. But the idea that political sovereignty and cultural homogeneity must align – and that citizenship should flow from ethnic belonging – is increasingly difficult to defend, both morally and practically. The challenge for contemporary societies is to build political communities that can hold together people of diverse origins, without requiring them to abandon who they are in order to belong.

What do you think? If citizenship is meant to guarantee equal rights for all, should states be allowed to define national identity in ethnic or cultural terms at all? And when a minority group within a state seeks greater autonomy or recognition, where should the line between accommodation and state fragmentation be drawn?

References

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Table of Contents

What exactly is a nation-state? 🔗

The conflation of “nation” and “state” 🔗

Ethno-national movements: when the model breaks down 🔗

The policy impact on ethnic minorities 🔗

Citizenship laws and ethnic exclusion 🔗

Language, culture, and assimilation pressure 🔗

Globalization and the eroding nation-state 🔗

Beyond the nation-state: alternative models of belonging 🔗

The real cost of getting it wrong 🔗