Ah, so the Nation-State is a modern concept tied to the emergence of European authoritarian/absolute monarchies.

In almost all cases in Europe the strong State predates the Nation and is a necessary precondition for the National identity to set in. Then the Romantic movement of the 19th hundred constructed a lot of new national identities around linguistic communities. Italy and Germany were only recently unified and linguistic and national homogenization is still under way.

In Latin America, Bolivar's Gran Colombia split into three separate states but to a large extent the nationality still straddles the borders. Decolonization has imposed artificial states on underlying populations and created national identities.

It is unclear whether China should be considered a nation or a civilization. Ethnically and linguistically homogeneous it is not, regardless of what the Communist Party would have us believe.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman