A nation is a community of people formed on the basis of a combination of shared features such as language, history, ethnicity, culture and territory. A nation is thus the collective identity of a group of people understood as defined by those features. Some nations are equated with ethnic groups and some are equated with an affiliation with a social and political constitution. A nation has also been defined as a cultural-political community that has become conscious of its autonomy, unity and particular interests.
Benedict Anderson characterised a nation as an "imagined community", and Paul James sees it as an "abstract community". A nation is an imagined community in the sense that the material conditions exist for imagining extended and shared connections and that it is objectively impersonal, even if each individual in the nation experiences themselves as subjectively part of an embodied unity with others.
