National consciousness

A national consciousness is a shared sense of national identity; that is, a shared understanding that a people group shares a common ethnic/linguistic/cultural background. Historically, a rise in national consciousness has been the first step towards the creation of a nation. National consciousness, at a glance, is one's level of awareness, of the collective, and one's understanding that without "them" there is no "us". It is the mere awareness of the many shared attitudes and beliefs towards things like family, customs, societal and gender roles, etc. This awareness allows one to have a "collective identity" which allows them to be knowledgeable of not only where they are, but how those places and people around them are so significant in that they ultimately make the collective, a nation. In short, national consciousness can be defined as a specific core of attitudes that provide habitual modes for regarding life's phenomena.

Nationalism requires first a national consciousness, the awareness of national communality of a group of people, or nation.

National identities in Europe and the Americas developed along with the idea of political sovereignty invested in the people of the state. In Eastern Europe, it was also often linked to ethnicity and culture.

An awakening of national consciousness is frequently ascribed to national heroes and is associated with national symbols, and was part of the dissolution of Yugoslavia,Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was credited with increasing Ukraine's national consciousness.

Nations, to Benedict Anderson, are imagined.The idea of the "imagined community" is that a nation is socially constructed, and the nation is made up of individuals who see themselves as part of a particular group. Anderson referred to nations as "imagined communities". He thought nations, or imagined communities, were delimited because of its boundaries as far as who is in and who is out. Anderson believed that the nation operates through exclusion. Though, nations do not only exclude those who are outside of it, but they exclude their members who are not immediately considered in the collective idea of their national identity. Not only did Anderson think nations were delimited, he thought they were:

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