What is a country if it's not a nation?

Photo by Andrew Stutesman on Unsplash

Novelist Marina Lewycka’s musings about the ancient nature or not of Ukraine made me think about countries, nations, peoples and races.

What is a country if it’s not a nation, as American anthropologist Clifford Geertz once asked in an eponymous paper for ‘The Brown Journal of World Affairs’.

What indeed?

And what is a people without a country?

In his paper, Mr Geertz noted that we use some words interchangeably about “the elementary building blocks of global political order”. We say nation, state, country, society, people as if they mean the same thing. In actual fact, they have “a disturbing ambiguity built into their range, intent, and definition.”

France, Hungary, China, Cambodia, Mexico, Ethiopia, Iran or Portugal are just a few examples of nations that are states, countries, societies and peoples, all of these at once. But most other countries, nations, states and peoples have different layers of attainment of these identities.

For, all these descr…