"Nations are called States commonly." "The USA is unique in that we have states within a nation" I understand where you are coming from, but I have to disagree

"Nations are called States commonly." "The USA is unique in that we have states within a nation" I understand where you are coming from, but I have to disagree that nation and state is the same. They are different as concepts (state is organized territory, nation is people), and although usually states and nations reside in roughly the same place, not all of them do! USA have managed to develop itself as a nation to some degree, but there are enough countries out there that didn't! To understand this it's enough to look at the states with separatist movements or in general at ones in which the feeling of appurtenance to the country is very low to say the least. There are people inside the same country very foreign to each other (speaking from group attachment perspective), close to the report between any given two foreign people on the planet. Is India a state? Well, it has states within it, like USA, and its overall organization is like a state too. Is India a nation? Not really! People inside it fought together for independence, and they may have common problems like a nation does (defense, foreign policy, etc), but the ethnic groups in there although living peacefully with each other don't really adhere much to something "national". Not yet at least. It's the same with Iraq, a state inhabited by different ethnic groups which the head statesmen failed to make a nation from. The same for a bunch of African states. Nation is different from the state.