system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What is the difference between an ethnic group and a nation?
gpt
In modern social science, there’s not really a consistent a distinction made between the two. Look at *Imagined Communities* by Benedict Anderson, for instance, or the even more abstract “Beyond Identity” by Brubaker and Cooper. Where you do see a difference is when it comes to *nationalism*—which is a belief or political philosophy rather than a social category/identity/group (see “Beyond Identity” for pretty much the state of the field there on the later). Most definitions derive from Ernest Gellners, with slight tweaks, but it’s basically the idea that the cultural group (the nation) and the political unit (often the state, but not necessarily) should be more or less congruent, or at the least the cultural group should be dominant in a political unit. 

There’s also some sense that ethnic groups have some common descent—French text books famously used to start, “Nos ancetres, les Gaulois”, our ancestors, the Gauls. An immigrant from Algeria or Morocco who had a different set of ancestors, they seemingly can never be ethnically French, which leaves open the question—can they ever be part of the French nation? That’s a question that much of Western Europe has been struggling with. In our modern, diverse, EU, what does it mean to be part of nation and *is* it still tied to ethnicity? Different groups will have different answers. 

Here is where we see another difference: Hispanics in America are “an imagined political community”, in the words of  Anderson, but they don’t engage in national*ism* in the terms Gellner and his students discuss—namely, “Hispanics” as a group or an identity or a category are not really seeking to be dominant in any sort of governance area. Many minority ethnic groups in diverse states are like this. 

This all gets much more difficult when we talk about nations that don’t imagine they share common descent. See, the nation-states of Europe and much of Asia imagine that they all share some sort of common descent in the broadest sense, as discussed above. Peruvians and Canadians, on the other hand, being part of New World state-nation’s don’t really think that. Belonging to the state sort of means belonging to the nation (again, this can open up a can of worms where there clearly was a sense in the US for a period that America ought to be dominated by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and not newly arrived Catholics and other “hyphenated Americans”). 

It also becomes complicated in post-colonial states from South Africa to Myanmar where there are clearly many ethnic groups within one overall state. In these post-colonial states, the overarching state-based national identity (Nigerian; Kiwi; Malaysian; Singaporean) has varying degrees of salience compared to ethnic groups (Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa; Pakeha, Maori; Malay, Chinese, Indian, Bornean; the same minus Bornean). Both of these levels of identity could be called “nations” or “national identity” in social science but only the second set would be called ethnicities or ethnic groups. 

So they’re two overlapping largely categories, but where they differ depends on exactly which distinctions you want to draw, and which theoretical schematics you’re drawing from (the above only draws on three of the most standard and widely accepted).