Nationality and race

Nationality, as Garner says, ‘is employed to designate a group or portion of the population which is united by racial or other bonds’.⁸³ Lord Bryce, whom Garner cites, includes language and literature, ideas, customs and traditions in this category of bonds or ties—cultural and psychological bonds. It is possible that nationality, at times, can become the sole source of organizing the state. In contemporary times, we have examples of a number of states, which trace their basis on linguistic and ethnic nationality. Bangladesh, Serbia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Uzbekistan, etc. can be cited as a few examples. However, unlike citizenship, these bases of unity are historical and social rather than political, and cannot account for a nation-state with people with diverse social, cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

MacIver says that nationality belongs to men by nature and regardless of rank or class. He likens the sense of nationality with the traditional sense of kinship, though the latter was not as extensive as the former is.⁸⁴ In contemporary times, many nation-states are organized on the basis of nationality and by invoking the doctrine of right of self-determination of nationalities. Taken to its logical extreme, this doctrine implies that ‘every nationality is a state’. According to MacIver, ‘Nationality is the sense of community which, under the historical conditions of a particular epoch, has possessed or still seeks expression through the unity of the State.’ Emergence of states based on the nationality principle after the breakup of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) and Eastern European communist regimes in the late 1980s and 1990s somewhat support MacIver’s views.

Nationality, like kinship, provides somewhat subjective or emotional basis of unity. Though it provides bondage and has become the basis for organizing statehood, it poses problems for states with multi-ethnic/nationality composition.