Nation

Broadly speaking a nation may refer to a community of people who share a common territory and government; and who often share a common language, race, descent, and/or history. It can also refer to the inhabitants of a sovereign state irrespective of their ethnic make-up. In international relations, nation can refer to a country or sovereign state. The United Nations, for instance, speaks of how it was founded after the Second World War by “51 countries” and currently has “192 member states”. The word nation can more specifically refer to a tribe of North American Indians, such as the Cherokee Nation.

Etymology
The word nation came to English from the Old French word nacion which in turn originates from the Latin word natio () literally meaning "that which has been born".

As an example of how the word natio was employed in classical Latin, the following quote from Cicero's Philippics Against Mark Antony in 44 BC contrasts the external, inferior nationes ("races of people") with the Roman civitas ("community").:

An early example of the use of the word "nation" (in conjunction with language and territory) was provided in 968 by Liutprand (the bishop of Cremona) who, while confronting the Byzantine emperor, Nicephorus II, on behalf of his patron Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor, declared:

A significant early use of the term nation, as natio, was at mediaeval universities, to describe the colleagues in a college or students, above all at the University of Paris, who were all born within a pays, spoke the same language and expected to be ruled by their own familiar law. In 1383 and 1384, while studying theology at Paris, Jean Gerson was twice elected procurator for the French natio. The division of students into a natio was also adopted at the University of Prague, where from its opening in 1349 the studium generale was divided among Bohemian, Bavarian, Saxon and Polish nations.

In a similar way, the nationes were segregated by the Knights Hospitaller of Jerusalem, who maintained at Rhodes the hostels from which they took their name "where foreigners eat and have their places of meeting, each nation apart from the others, and a Knight has charge of each one of these hostels, and provides for the necessities of the inmates according to their religion," as the Spanish traveller Pedro Tafur noted in 1436.

Nation state
A nation state can be variously defined as one in which the boundaries of a state and nation coincide, or a state in which there is a relative homogeneity among its inhabitants.

Nations without a sovereign state
Nations that are a community of people sharing a common territory and government but are not sovereign states can be controversial subjects due, in no small part, to national security concerns of neighbouring countries. A notable example of a group of people who are sometimes claimed to constitute such a stateless nation are Palestinians. Palestinian nationalism in modern times arose between 1948 and 1950. Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 spoke of "the Palestinian nation" in the context of Jerusalem and Palestine. The State of Palestine is today widely recognized by sovereign states, although often in equivocal terms. Still, oped pieces in Israeli media question the existence of a Palestinian nation, partly due to its very short history.