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To analyse patterns of the appearance, establishment and development of such social communities as ethnos and nation that manifested themselves under the influence of globalization processes, one should look into the genesis and evolution of such concepts as “nation’ and “ethnos’ as categories of sociophilosophical discourse, which will allow us to differentiate given theoretical categories and the social phenomena behind them.

The semantics of the concepts in question are comparable in the context of various languages and cultures, where they may have not only different shades of meaning, but often very different meaning in general. It is important to differentiate the almost identical notions of, for example, “nation’ in English and “нация” (natsiya) in Russian.

The meaning of the word “nation’ and related notions differs in various European languages, in particular in French and in German, where the difference in meaning stems from the history of the formation of German and French political nations. While France was formed as a synthesis of historical provinces heterogeneous in terms of language and culture, Germany as a political agent was formed as a result of a political unification of German dukedoms, the population of which was disconnected politically but understood clearly the close links based on culture and history as well as on the German standard language that had by then been formed.

The English term “nation’ has its own cultural and historical particularities, which prove a pattern-like dependence of sociopolitical terminology on the concrete historical conditions under which it was formed.

So, “national’, often translated into Russian directly as “национальный” (natsionalny: национальный Mузей – national museum; национальная безопасность – national security; национальная сборная – national team; национальная история – national history), in fact corresponds better to the Russian terms “state’ and “peoples’, whereas национальный in Russian is widely used when speaking of ethnic minorities and ethnic territorial autonomies included in a federation.

Illustrative cases have been known where a notion borrowed from the English political vernacular via a direct translation, such as natsional’naya bezopasnost’ (national security), is then understood in the scientific and expert community of national-territorial regions of Russia as the security of the state-forming nation (in fact, the state-forming ethnos) of a certain region, but not as a security of the state in general, as it was in English language.

At the same time, the existence of cultural and linguistic particularities in the interpretation of the term “nation’ only highlights the fact that the term has a stable range of meanings, shared by various cultures, on which, according to the author, the objective existence of nations as social communities is based.

In a historical retrospective, the concept of “nation’ that has entered all European languages cam stemmed from the Latin nasci which meant “birth’ and was contrasted by Roman citizens with “barbaric’ communities based on family and tribal relations and common law.

Thus, the term “nation’ appeared and was used in Ancient Rome attached to a meaning rather close to the contemporary one, especially during the emperors’ Rome with its developed civil society and watered-down Roman ethnos.

After the Western Roman Empire fell, feudal states that appeared on its former territories took on, along with the Latin language as a universal European lingua franca, the dichotomous use of two words, natio and gens (the latter directly translated as “tribe’) to designate civilized (Christian) nations as opposed to barbarians (pagans).

It is especially important that the original natio-gens dichotomy, highlighting the difference between the developed civil society of the empire of Rome and the primitive social institutions of the barbaric periphery of Rome, finding itself at the stage of dissociation of the tribal lifestyle, echoes the modern nation-ethnos dichotomy.

This becomes all the more important in light of the fact that the Greek word ethnos, introduced into the wide scientific vernacular not so long ago, has, in reality, almost the same meaning as the Latin gens, denoting cultural and genetic commonality with undeveloped political institutions (at the pre-state development stage) or taken without consideration of the political component.

It is also important to consider the medieval period in order to differentiate clearly between the concepts of “ethnos’ and “nation’. Characteristically, tribes (to be more precise, tribal nobility, elites) of the former barbaric periphery of Rome that were part of the empire of the Carolingian dynasty which gave names to historical provinces and feudal dukedoms (the Burgundians, the Lotharingians, the Bretons, the Franks, the Bavarians, the Saxons and others), insisted on calling themselves “nations’ for a long time after the Western Roman Empire collapsed.

Obviously, in calling their lands “nations’, feudals did not emphasize the ethnocultural particularities of their subjects. They were raising their political status within the Holy Roman Empire from provincial or even tribal to imperial. Thus, medieval political elites legitimized their political ambitions to subjugate and swallow neighbouring political entities.

Thus, in the early medieval period, the concept of a nation (natio) as a social unity was inseparable from the state and political component, basic institutions of which were directly inherited from Rome, but was at the same time linked to local political entities and historical provinces typical of the Middle Ages.

At the same time, the use of the natio concept was linked to feudal entities’ claims for territorial and political expansion, at the very least a new level of political sovereignty, which is exemplified by the history and titling of the hold-over of the empire of Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, later the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (Sacrum Imperium Romanum Nationis Germanicae, Sacrum Imperium Romanum Nationis Teutonicae) or, in German, Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation. This complicated political aggregation of feudal states that existed in 962—1806 and in its most prosperous period included Germany, Northern and Central Italy, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and some of the French regions.

During the late medieval period, nations assumed new social meaning. Although chronicles and documents call certain peoples and the population of historical provinces “nations’, starting from the fifteenth century the term begins to assume yet another meaning, closer to its contemporary use: the concept of the “German nation’ appears, albeit without lower classes included in it.

At the same time, the concept of “nation’ keeps obtaining new meanings. In universities, fraternity-like student corporations were called nations.180 Ex-territorial social and political institutions typical of the Middle Ages, such as cathedrals, religious orders combining knighthood and spirituality (Maltese, in particular), guilds and other corporate organizations were also based on nations. Therefore, nations were territorial entities of corresponding social institutions, linked to certain kingdoms, dukedoms and large historical provinces.

Thus, the use of the concept of “nation’ in the Middle Ages shows that this term’s semantics, albeit different from today, were closely related to the developed and rationally organized political and social institutions inherited from the empire of Rome. These institutions were contrasted with more primitive social structures characteristic of the geopolitical periphery of the Christian world of the time.

Initially used to distinguish the civilized population of the geopolitical nucleus of the empire from tribes on the barbaric periphery with their different cultures, the concept of “nation’ was used during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance to designate rationally organized social groups often corresponding to territorial division into political entities and historical provinces.

According to Ziegler, during the Middle Ages,

Natio is a union with a purpose, a local administratively subgroup, as a faction, a governmental unit, etc. This word does not have the full meaning as a representative political subdivision. It does not mean a predetermined form of the community, does not contain any indication toward the chief line of the social connection or division.181

According to Yury Granin,

…evolution of the meaning of the concept “nation’ in the Middle Ages corresponded to the evolution of the European society of the time, with its typical corporate (guild and estate) social structure and feudal fragmentation, which preserved local communities as they were and prevented large economic and cultural spaces from being created. That is why the next stage of the evolution of understanding of what “nation’ means was historically linked to the transition of the economic sphere to the capitalist (industrialized) method of producing material goods. In terms of politics, this phenomenon was linked to the process of the formation of centralized bourgeois-democratic states in Europe, which in the course of time united their territories’ multiple linguistic and ethnic groups into relatively homogenous communities, culturally and politically.182

In terms of collective consciousness, the objective process of the dissolution of feudalism and the inclusion of village communities and social lower classes into the economic, political and cultural life of the state manifested itself in a steady contrast between the concepts of “nation’ and “people’.

Initially, only nobility and aristocracy by birth, as well as clergy, claimed the right to be part of the “nation’, thus limiting “nation’ to social elites. The third estate’s claims to being part of the nation signified a watershed moment followed by the crisis and fall of the feudalism.

So, in the eighteenth century, the third estate, gaining strength, did not want its members – traders, financiers, lawyers and freelancers – to be part of “people’, believing it deserved to be part of the “nation’ alongside nobility and clergy. In connection with this, Kozing notes that as early as Abbé Sieyès’ What is the Third Estate? the bourgeoisie was unequivocally considered a “nation’ – that is, “included in elites and separated from the peasantry which remained a tax-paying estate that did not participate in the political life”.183

At the same time, one cannot help but notice that the evolution of the concept of the nation, from Rome with its developed civil institutions to the Middle Ages and then to our times, serves as an adequate reflection of the evolution of nation as a social group whose main feature is direct (albeit passive) involvement in the functioning of the social and political institutions of the state and the civil society.

In Rome, with its developed civil society, the whole population of the empire was in one way or another involved in the activities of the state institutions, and the concept of the nation included all citizens of Rome. At the same time, the barbaric periphery of the empire, which was at the stage of tribal unions and the dominance of tribal relations, was objectively closer to tribes (gens).

During the medieval period, the concept of the nation and the social class that considered itself part of it understandably narrowed down to the elite of the stratum, linked to the political and church power and state governing. Thus, medieval nations were relics of the late Roman Empire’s civil society, surrounded by the seas of natural economy and tribal archaisms. Nevertheless, the concept of the nation remained as the name for a system-building social group, defining the system of power (political) relations.

The consequent growth of cities, professions and trade was followed by the justifiable expansion of the meaning of the term, but this expansion was an objective reflection of the increase of the population and of the influence of the social group, comprising the civil society of the time with its stratified limitations.

The beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the increase in importance of the third estate was followed by demands to recognize it as a “nation’ – that is, to grant it civil rights corresponding to its role in the life of the society. Correspondingly, bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries removed obstacles to the expansion of the nation as a concept and as a social group, up to the size of the whole population of the state.

The final fixation of the concept of nation as a structured, culturally and psychologically integrated community of the subjects of the same state is linked to outstanding German philosopher Georg Hegel, who provided the most complete and system-like description of the sociophilosophical problem of the formation and evolution of nations among his contemporaries. In fact, Hegel introduced the very notion of the “nation’ as a basic category in sociophilosophical discourse.

The sociophilosophical doctrine of Hegel is based on the premise that historical development of humankind is predetermined by the evolution of a “global spirit’, which expresses itself through social manifestations of the “spirit of the nation’ (the “spirit of the people’).

According to Hegel, every nation is characterized by the development of the “spirit of the people’, which manifests itself in social forms and “is a certain spirit that creates an obvious, factual world, that… exists in its religion, in its cult, its customs, in its state system and its political laws, in all its institutions, in its actions and activities”.184

At the same time, Hegel’s “spirit of the people’ is a form in which the “global spirit’ can manifest itself: “Principles of spirits of a people in the necessary continuity are themselves only moments of a single united spirit, which elevates and finishes in the history through them, understanding itself and becoming all-encompassing”.185

Hegel’s “global spirit’ is reflected in history: “In global history, the idea of the spirit manifests itself in reality as a range of external forms, each of which finds its manifestation in an actively existing people. But this side of the existence is given in time as well as in space in the form of the natural existence and a special principle, typical of every global and historical people is also typical of it as a natural definitiveness.”