In fact, the superficiality of nation-statehood is merely presumed. There is no concrete reason to question the organic nature of the nation-state. The nation-state emerged on the heels of the Enlightenment (Anderson).
Historians cannot escape writing natural histories; writing natural histories is certainly preferable to penning unnatural histories. In Korea, "through the practice of state-sponsored rituals, the building of monuments, and the compilations of official histories, narratives about the collective 'self' were continuously generated," (Em 336 . These are the very same processes of nation-state building as take place anywhere in the world. The process of nation-state and subsequent identity formation is inescapable and therefore natural.
Nation-statehood is still an artifice, though, in the same way that religion can be considered an artifice. In the past, before the term nation-state was used to define and delimit...
Those two "taken-for-granted frames of reference" include that of "religious community" and that of dynasty or "dynastic realm," (12). Doak also points out, "every nationalism contains civic and ethnic elements in varying degrees," (285). Nationalism was not produced by the downfall or decline of the religious sensibility, as Anderson notes. However, "It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny," (12).
It may be important to note the difference between what is nation and what is state. Doak shows that a nation refers generally to the collective ethnic identity that can transcend geo-political boundaries. Nation of Israel may be one example of the power of nationhood over that of the power of statehood. When the state and the nation unite under a common government, historians feel free to talk about the nation-state.
