So I've been reading about nationalism pretty extensively lately (mainly as it pertains to post-1600 Japan) and it seems that modern nationalism is really hard to define. I wanted to ask the learned users of this sub about it. What is a modern nation state? ie. What if anything is different about 18th century France that makes it more of a nation state than 12th century France? What about in other, non-European, parts of the world? Did Han China fit the idea of a modern nation state or did that have to wait for the 1911 revolution, or a later dynasty?
Eugen Weber argues in From Peasants into Frenchmen that the French became a nation much later than we think. The rural peasants became "French" in the late nineteenth century after national education.
Han China wasn't a nation until the 20th century. Sun Yat-sen (the first provisional president of China) is famous for saying that China is like "a heap of loose sand" (lots of individuals or families, but no national identity) and thus emphasized nationalism in his Three Principles of the People (the other two are democracy and people's livelihood). So, yes, nationalism in China had to wait until the 20th century.
The best definition of a modern nation-state I found is Benedict Anderson's thesis in his Imagined Communities. A nation is an imagined community in that no person ever meets the majority of the people in any nation (unlike a concrete community like a village). So to keep the cohesion together you need to construct a shared identity through rituals, arts, symbols, and history.
This is best addressed in the Invention of Tradition book, edited by Eric Hobsbawm. Thongkai Winichakul in his Siam Mapped, shows how geographic surveying and the creation of sharply delineated borders helped in the creation of a Thai national identity.
This is why there is a huge diversity in how nations emphasize their origins. Some use ethnicity (like Japan) or others emphasize language and culture (like France) or some other nations emphasize religion (like Russia before 1917). And finally because it's an imagined community you can also have nations like the US that have none of the above (no shared origin in ethnicity, no official language, no official religion) but have an emphasis on shared history and ideals (from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution).
I also did a lot of reading on nationalism: below is a short list of books that I read to get to the above conclusions for me. There's probably newer books on this topic so I'd be interested to see if anyone else have other recommendations.
Eugen Weber: From Peasants into Frenchmen
Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities
Eric Hobsbawm: Invention of Tradition
Thongkai Winichakul: Siam Mapped
Rogers Brubaker: Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany
Ernest Gellner: Nations and Nationalism
Elie Kedourie: Nationalism
Anthony Smith: Ethnic Origins of Nations
John Brueilly: Nationalism and the State