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The concepts of nature and nation are both rooted in the notion of birth. Thus both can be conceived anew if the underlying vision of natality is conceptualized, following Hannah Arendt, not as a set of inexorable biological processes, but as the fundamental human capacity for political action. This reconceptualization of natality allows proposing an alternative to the prevalent commonsensical ethno-nationalist definitions of nationhood, and also allows a view of the realm of nature itself as inherently political. Arendt's theory finds an interesting referential point in modern developments in biotechnology that threaten to undermine the 'naturalness' of existing notions of ethnically conceived nations. Similarly, nature might be revealed to have a polis working at the very heart of what seemed to be a set of inexorable processes, independent from human beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article outlines the main theoretical positions in research on nations and nationalism. The normative polarization between primordialist and constructivist positions is projected onto the separation between agency-oriented and structural forms of explanation: where theorists wished to discredit evolutionist notions of national emergence, they focused on agency and when the opposite was true, structural explanations of one type or another were used. Only in the 1980s did nationalism become a developed field of enquiry, with journals dedicated to the study of nations and nationalism. The history of research on nations and nationalism has been the history of a gradual problematization of that view, as authors argued that nations are modern and deliberately constructed, and of an evolutionist backlash defending the nation as a natural category. Theorists have recently begun to get beyond this debate, with more adequate approaches to agency/structure and the interplay of identity/interest. Nationalism theory has no consistent theoretical questions, but has worked around four main problematics: the epoch of nations; the content of nationalist discourse; nationalist political mobilization; and the nationalization of the masses.