What is a nation?

This question is rarely asked: can there be a nation not rooted in ethnic identity? This is considered a politically incorrect question, but it should not be.

It is not merely the land/soil, or the culture/religion, it is ethnic identity that leads to the other bonding elements of a nation.

There has always been the tension in basic human nature between the individual and the group, as Edward Wilson has brilliantly pointed out, but the group is ultimately the main unit of successful selection because the individual alone has little power.

If “kindness” is the most important virtue, as some have suggested, we have to take into account the original relationship to “kin” in this word, which should bring a check on the unchecked virtue of universalism. In real human nature altruism has this real connection to kinship.

David Sloan Wilson said, "selfishness beats altruism within groups. But altruistic groups beat selfish
groups." (my italics)

It seems to me that the strongest and longest lasting nations managed to unite land/soil, culture/religion, and ethnic identity. But of these it is the ethnic identity that most deeply bonds a nation and culture. For many centuries it was the ethnic identity of the Jews which held then together when they had no land, and their religion was grounded in the ethnic identity of the “chosen,” which was a strong marriage preference.

Globalism in the name of unfettered individualism has only really advanced capitalist or communist individuals bonded in small groups.

I believe this view of human nature suggests that ethnopluralism is the most harmonious political structure in our crowded world of competing ethnic nations and cultures. Ethnostates and ethnic regions can be united and protected by a federating principle. It was the King who was the uniting and federating principle in the past, now it can be democratic republicanism. This is the political future.