A nation is held together by consent, not by blood or geography

Evidence

Ernest Renan in his classical essay Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?, Paris, 1882, stressed “the actual consent, the desire to live together, the will to preserve worthily the undivided inheritance which has been handed down” as the chief elements which keep the members of a people together in such a way that they form, a nation. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2189

Categorization

• DEFINE: Renan’s consent-based definition of the nation is a canonical concept to carry into the nationalism readings.
• XREF: Connects directly to Benedict Anderson’s imagined community and to the imagined-community building block the reader is assembling. — connects to: A nation sustains itself through shared memory plus present-day will to live together — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 65; Locke’s commonwealth means any independent political community, not a specific regime — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 160; Political allegiance rests on continuous acknowledgement, not rational consent. — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 432