Dependent territories of any kind are not considered nation-states, unless they achieve and Iceland . This ''ideal'' has influenced almost all existing sovereign states, and they cannot be understood without reference to that model. It also explains how they are different from their predecessor states. Thus, the term ''nation-state'' is also used, imprecisely, for a state that attempts to promote a single national identity, often beginning with a single National Language (e.g., France , Germany , and Italy ). These ''nation-states'' did not always exist, and most of the present ''nation-states'' are located on territory that once belonged to other non-national states; for example, in the case of much of western Europe , the original state was the Carolingian Empire .
Some nation-states, such as Germany or Italy, came into existence at least partly as a result of political campaigns by Nationalists in the nineteenth century. Historians Benedict Anderson or Eric Hobsbawm have pointed out that in fact, the nation-state precedes nationalism. According to their conception, nationalism is a creation of the nation-state, and not the reverse. For example, French nationalism emerged during the Hundred Years' War , once the French nation-state already constituted through the unification of various dialects and languages into the French Language , and also by the means of Conscription and the Third Republic 's 1880s laws on public instruction. However, in countries divided into multiple states such as Germany or Italia, the sense of a common membership to the same cultural movement, as in the '' Volkisch Movement '', can be said to be nationalism, and in this case precedes the unification of the various states into the German or the Italian state.
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