 Formal organization may not be deemed essential to a group’s having an irreducible and enduring identity. Nations, for example, are often conceived as entities whose identities run across successive generations of nationals. A nation’s historic entitlement to a particular territory would typically be conceived as the entitlement of a single enduring entity rather than a right inherited and bequeathed by successive generations of nationals so that, historically, no temporally continuous entity has possessed rights over the territory. People are given to thinking of nations in this unitary and enduring fashion even in cases, such as the Kurds, where a nation has not been instantiated in a state, or the Poles, where the nation has been deprived of political independence for lengthy periods of its history. Whether we conceive a group as having an identity and being that supersedes that of its members turns not just on what we find in the world, but also on how we see it.