ÉTAT, NATION, GOUVERNEMENT

King Louis XIV once said that he was the state. In most modern societies, there is a clear distinction between a government and the state. Public disapproval of a particular government (expressed, for example, by not re-electing certain individuals) does not necessarily represent disapproval of the state itself.  In totalitarian regimes, there is often no clear distinction between the government and the state. In fact, leaders in such regimes often attempt to deliberately blur the lines between the two in order to conflate their interests with those of the nation.

The term nation refers to people who share a common territory and government (the inhabitants of a state) .  The people that make up a nation usually share common languages, culture, ethnicity, or history. In the United States, many tribes of North American Indians refer to themselves as nations.

A state is an organized political community, living under a government. States may be partially or completely sovereign. Some states belong to a union and agree to partial sovereignty in exchange for the benefits of belonging to a federation.  The European Union is a recently created federation that is comprised of sovereign states.  The term state often implies an independent political entity. The term "state" can also be used to refer to one branch of government within a state, as a way to distinguish it from other institutions such as the church or the press.

Government refers to the institutions that control a state at a given time. These institutions can take the form of the judiciary, the legislature and usually an office headed by one individual who serves as the state's main representative or spokesperson. This individual can be a prime minister or president. States are served by a continuous succession of governments.

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