pocketmoon66 said:
Now I'm confused
My passport says I'm British yet it's issued by the the United Kingdon of Great Britain and Northern Island.
Ah, yes. A country/state will often for 'political reasons' use the terms that way. The most basic definition of a nation is a body of people who possess the consciousness of a common identity.
Take the Kurds, for example: There exists a Kurdish nation, it’s somewhat vague what their country is, and they definitely have no state.
Words like nation (mostly cultural), country (mostly political), and state (mostly legal) have distinct meanings, but are also deliberately used interchangeably and derivatively and are thus also ambiguous. A nation-state has something inherently legitimate to it, so it is often used both inspire and deter separationalism for example. States want to be nations and nations want to be states.
I'm sure that the GB poll this, everyone does, and that trends can be looked up somewhere as to whether people feel, say: British more so than they do English and so on. While nationality is, in English usage, the legal relationship between a person and a country, it is culturally the status of belonging to a particular nation by birth or naturalization. A more neutral term would be citizenship, but this is not legally interchangeable with nationality.
Now I managed to confuse myself, so I’ll stop. Just be aware that some terms have different political, cultural and legal subtext than others. In official (or scientific) language they would most often be carefully chosen (to signal the intended meaning), while they are often used more interchangeably in casual use.