According to Hill and Spicer, the term “nation-state” is a misnomer, since the ideal model of a monolingual, culturally homogeneous state has never existed, not even among Europeans, who invented the nation-state concept and introduced it to the rest of the world. Modern European states, they argue, emerged after the Renaissance through the rise of nations (i.e., specific ethnic groups) to positions of political and economic dominance over a number of other ethnic groups within the bounded political territories. The term “nation-state”, Hill and Spicer argue, obscures the internal cultural and linguistic diversity of states that could more accurately be called “conquest states.” The resurgence of multiple ethnic groups within a single state, Hill says, is not “potentially threating to the sovereign jurisdiction of the state,” as Urban and Sherzer suggest; rather, the assertion of cultural differences threatens to reveal ethnocentric beliefs and practices upon which conquest states wer...