> To me, the nation and 'tribe' is one and the same.
>
> Cheers!
> Ben
"Nation" has two senses, that of 'people', 'distinct ethnic group' (as
used in the King James Bible), and 'nation-state' (the usual modern
sense). Nation-states can and often do have multiple ethnicities
contained within their borders (France has Bretons and Basques, Spain
has Basques and Catalans, etc).
I have never thought of 'tribe' as applying to a nation-state. Even
with ancient Israel -- where the word 'tribe' gets most of its
coloration -- it was not one tribe, but a tribal confederacy, and by
one thesis, it began as an amphictyony that only later developed all
the trappings of a nation-state. Greece was never a nation-state, but
rather, a fractious amphictyony of independent city-states.
In its earliest stages, Switzerland was not a distinct nation-state,
but rather a treaty organization a la Nato and it's only fairly
recently that the Swiss think of themselves as a distinct people. More
recently, it's really only in the last 50 years that Canadians and
Australians have developed a distinct sense of national identity
(before then, they were just good subjects of the Queen in one of her
Dominions Across the Sea.