The nation is a construct, not a valid unit of historical analysis

Evidence

We begin to perceive that the nation is not a unit of analysis for the social history of Europe. The state is a bureaucratic structure, and the nation for which it administers is more a convenient construct than the historical, racial, cultural, and linguistic entity that the term “nation” signifies. The truer character of European history resides beneath the phenomenology of nation and state. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 195

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Robinson’s core methodological claim distinguishing the state as bureaucracy from the nation as ideological construct.
• XREF: Parallels world-systems theory and elides with nation-as-imagined-community arguments.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 195