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*NATION state actors. Damn mobile keyboards. Stupid app wouldn’t let me edit the reply either, hence this.



The term is state actor, anyway.

A state is a sovereign political division, or a subdivision within a federation (France, Arizona).

A nation is a community of people with a common culture, language, ethnicity etc (the Navaho, the Welsh, the Japanese).

When these are the same entity, it's a nation state (Japan), but there are many cases where they aren't the same (Belgium, China, USA, Russia).


> A nation is a community of people with a common culture, language, ethnicity

Nitpick: The belief of the existence of the said common ground is actually more important than its actual existence. France is considered a nation state even though there are several ethno-linguistic groups in France. A few illustrations:

- less than half of the French population during the French revolution spoke French as their native language.[1]

- The second Nobel Prize of Literature from France (Frédéric Mistral) didn't wrote its work in French, but in Occitan[2].

- My family has lived in France for as long as genealogy could trace back, yet half of my great-grandparents only learnt French in school, they didn't spoke it at home.

[1]: I don't have an online source for that, nor the exact figure: I read it in Frernad Braudel's L’Identité de la France

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitan_language


"Nation-state" is an little bureaucratic Americanism because if you talk about a malicious state actor there everyone assumes you mean Florida.




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