difference and similarity between state and nation.
Answers
Answer:
There are three different things to define here:
State: "A state is an organized community living under a unified political system, the government" (Wiki definition).
This is basically just a community (usually in a specified territory) that was ruled by a specific government.
It may or may not have been sovereign.
Nation: A nation may refer to a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, or history (Wiki).
Note that a nation has no required geographical tie-in (as an extreme example, consider the nation of Roma, or post-Diaspora-pre-modern-Israel Jews). But they must/should, as a rule, share history, culture and language (never thought I'd quote Stalin on a Politics.SE :)
The idea of a nation and a state being the same thing ("Nation-state") is fairly new in modern politics[1] (it came about as one of the consequences/results of Peace of Westphalia, which ended the 30-year-war in Europe, when the concept of "Westphalian sovereignty" was introduced).
Before that, a vast majority of people did not - per se - had a firm notion of a "nation", at least in Europe. Your loyalties were either to your immediate locale (village, town, clan), or to your hierarchical ruler (feudal lord, usually, and ultimately whichever prince/Emperor ruled the whole territory of the state).
But you didn't consider the territory ruled by that Emperor to be "your" state - the fact that they shared the ultimate liege lord was irrelevant both practically, AND philosophically/culturally.