The term natio has been in use since antiquity and, in the European Middle Ages, could be applied to a wide variety of groups of people. There was no clear definition; its usage was fluid and could be applied to any group characterised by shared attributes. This suggests that the word ‘natio’ had no particular discursive significance, did not generally function as a contentious term, and that a definition did not appear necessary. The distinction from ‘gens’, ‘populus’ and so on was unclear, context-dependent and varied from situation to situation.

During the Middle Ages, there were also corporative categories of ‘nation’. These subsumed people on the basis of their formal affiliation and membership, with relatively clear demarcations. The ‘basis of descent’ was usually understood in territorial terms. In so-called ‘university nations’ (which gradually emerged from the 12th/13th century onwards), groups of university members were organised according to their territorial origin. Alongside fairly general designations, the names of countries referred to broad European regions. In Paris, there had been four nations since 1222, one of which covered the whole of Central and Eastern Europe. The four-nation model was adopted by the universities of Prague (1348) and Leipzig (1409). In Prague/Praha, there was one‘Bohemian’nation and three‘German’nations: a Bavarian, a Saxon and a Polish one, the latter comprising people from Thuringia, Meissen, Lusatia, Silesia, Poland and Lithuania. The Bohemian natio also included not only Czech but also German-speaking students from the Bohemian lands, as well as students from Hungary and Transylvania. In Italy, by contrast, ‘nations’ could refer to smaller regions: in Bologna, for example, there were separate ‘nations’ for Tuscany, Lombardy, Sicily, etc. Such ‘nations’ still exist today at some Swedish universities.

The ‘political’ nations of the Middle Ages and, in particular, the early modern period were also of a corporative and territorial nature. They brought together the groups and individuals participating in political power and were gradually identified with the estates of the realm of individual countries or regions; in the Polish-Lithuanian and Hungarian cases, this was mainly the nobility. These nations were the result of the emergence of the crown or the country as a separate entity, which no longer constituted the patrimony of the ruler or the dynasty, as well as the formation of their representation (Bohemia, Hungary and Poland in the 14th century). In this context, the term natio took on a stronger political and formal significance; it was partly distinguished from the gens, which was more closely linked to origin and birth, but remained tied to territory and corporate affiliation. Later formulations such as ‘gente Lithuanus (Ruthenus), natione Polonus’ combined aspects of territorial origin with those of political/corporate affiliation.

The concept of ‘nation’ was, and remained for a long time, multifaceted and could be applied to various groups. This is demonstrated not least by late medieval chronicles and humanist historiographical and geographical works, in which the ‘nation’ oscillates between a political-corporate (estates-based) understanding and ethnic-cultural characteristics (language, customs), although these too sometimes exhibited a firm territorial connection: language served as a distinguishing feature of a country. The first signs of stronger ethnic or linguistic connotations associated with the ‘nation’ can be found by the late Middle Ages at the latest (e.g. the Czech-language Dalimil Chronicle from the first half of the 14th century) and became more pronounced in times of crisis. Arguments based on language and ethnicity played a particular role in the context of the Hussite Wars and the Reformation in general, although the concept of the nation occasionally took on a broader social meaning, referring to ‘the people’. In his university disputation in 1409, Jerome of Prague (c. 1379–1416) used the term ‘národ’ in such a way that it encompassed all strata of the population.

Political crises, the Reformation and wars had a particularly ‘nation-forming’ effect and contributed to the growing significance of the concept of the nation. In addition to the aforementioned Hussite movement in Bohemia, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century and the German Reformation are worth mentioning; the latter in particular led to the further crystallisation of the concept of the ‘German nation’ and was linked to the designation of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. For Martin Luther (1483–1546), the ‘German nation’ initially also had a political and territorial significance, but, thanks to the confrontation with the Roman Church and the role of vernacular languages as a medium of faith, it also took on stronger cultural and linguistic aspects. From the 19th century onwards, modern ‘nationalisms’ and ethnic movements drew upon this tradition – and in particular upon Bible translations and other works in individual languages – in the development of their written languages (Slovene, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Finnish, Kashubian, Frisian, etc.) in the development of their written languages.

The linking of the corporatist-political concept of the nation to the estates remained effective to some extent until the final phase of the existence of the estates-based constitutions and was still common practice in Germany, the Habsburg Empire and Poland–Lithuania even before 1800, despite the criticism levelled at the time against the estates-based principle and the corresponding understanding of the nation, still common practice in Germany, the Habsburg Empire and Poland–Lithuania. Among the Austrian court elite, influenced by the Enlightenment, members of the estates of a specific crown land who held indigenous status were still referred to as ‘nationalists’ at the end of the 18th century, regardless of their political or other views or social identity.

At the same time, a shift in meaning took place on four levels: 1. Reinterpretation as a fundamental category of Enlightened concepts of political order; 2. Development into a fundamental category of collective belonging; 3. Romanticisation of the term; 4. Functionalisation as a battle cry.

New interpretations of the nation increasingly functioned in political discourse during the second half of the 18th century as an alternative to the estates-based system. In the French Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) definitively formulated the idea of the nation as the bearer of popular sovereignty: the people, as the sovereign within a state, constitute the nation, which cannot therefore be reduced to a single estate or class. Continuity with the pre-modern era lay in the fact that the defining criterion was retained (the nation as the sum of those participating in power), but the group was radically expanded through social inclusion. Under this influence, a new discourse spread throughout Eastern Central Europe from the second half of the 18th century onwards, in which the estate-based restriction of the nation was rejected and new concepts emerged – both in ‘aristocratic-republican’ Poland and in the ‘absolutist’ Habsburg Empire. The ‘nation’, defined in political and/or territorial terms, opened up to new groups that were to be included. In Poland, the concept took on anti-aristocratic traits in its radical form; in the Habsburg Monarchy and the German states, it served explicitly as a counter-concept to the estate-based notion of the nation. ‘Nation’ became one of the central terms of political discourse and thus a contentious concept whose meaning remained disputed.

With the concept of the nation developed by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), the idea finally emerged that the nation is, in its essence, a spiritual category and reflects the authenticity of peoples and cultures. This idea made it possible to conceive of the nation beyond the realm of political organisation. It served as the basis for the predominantly ethnic-cultural understanding that subsequently prevailed in Central Europe, which became established particularly in the German, West Slavic and Baltic contexts, characterised by intense interconnections between the various discourses. Since, both in the Holy Roman Empire and in the Polish Rzeczpospolita and the Habsburg composite monarchy (John H. Elliott) had seen virtually no integration of transregional identities oriented towards the state as a whole, ethnic groups provided a starting point for the imagination of cultural and, later, political communities. Consequently, ‘East Central European ethno-nationalism’ is not an expression of a deviation from a standard political model, but rather the result of weaker processes of assimilation at the end of the pre-modern era. Only in the Polish case, and to some extent in the Hungarian case, did the transition from the earlier ‘political conception’ to the ethnic nation last until the second half of the 19th century – in the Polish case as a reaction to the partitions of Poland–Lithuania and the anti-Polish policies of Russia and Prussia.

In the 19th century, mass national movements led to the emergence of ethnic nations as fundamental categories of collective identities and political programmes. One consequence at the level of discourse and practical action in the 20th century was the establishment of national self-determination as the basis for legitimate statehood and the demarcation of borders, as well as the ‘minorisation’ of the discourse on nations (i.e. in the pursuit of establishing nation-states, the coexistence of diverse ethnic ‘nations’ within the political framework was perceived as a ‘minority issue’ ). The political, ethnic and military conflicts of the 20th century favoured a clearly ethnic, and in some cases racial, conception of nations. After the Second World War, the predominantlycultural-ethnic understanding was largely weakened or altered only in the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria in favour of a political concept. In other countries and linguistic contexts within the region, approaches along these lines have been emerging since the 1990s, although thelinguistic-ethnic understanding continues to dominate and is occasionally invoked.

Alongside the public, political and journalistic use of the concept of the nation – and closely intertwined with it – a scholarly and analytical conceptual framework also took shape from the 19th century onwards at the latest, initially in sociology, philology and history, and later in other subjects as well. Since the interwar period, there has also been a body of focused research on the nation and nationalism in Central and Eastern Central Europe, particularly in the German, Polish and Czech contexts (Friedrich Meinecke, Florian Znaniecki, Inocenc Arnošt Bláha). The Bohemian lands (Ernest Gellner, Hans Kohn, Eugen Lemberg and others) and the German-speaking, as well as to some extent Czech- and Polish-speaking (Miroslav Hroch), historical and social sciences formed a particularly important and integral part of international nationalism studies. Following a focus on nation-building processes, the nation came to be interpreted as a historical category and, particularly since the 1990s, has been contextualised through studies of collective identities at both the societal and individual levels. There has been virtually no specifically German or other-language academic discourse on the nation in recent decades.