The example of the former Soviet Union recognising more than one hundred internal nationalities shows that:

A single state can contain multiple nations or national communities.

The correct answer is Option 1: A single state can contain multiple nations or national communities.

Option 1: A single state can contain multiple nations or national communities — Correct. The example of the former Soviet Union shows that a state does not necessarily represent only one nation. It recognised more than one hundred internal nationalities, demonstrating that multiple national communities can exist within a single state.

Option 2: Every nation necessarily creates a separate independent state — Incorrect. The Soviet Union example challenges this idea because many recognised nationalities existed within one state without having separate independent states.

Option 3: States cannot represent people with different cultural identities — Incorrect. A state can include people belonging to different cultural, linguistic and ethnic communities.

Option 4: National identity is always weaker than state identity — Incorrect. The example does not suggest that one identity is always stronger than the other; it only shows that nations and states do not always have a one-to-one relationship.

NCERT: The criterion that comes closest to distinguishing a nation is the state. Unlike the other kinds of communities mentioned before, nations are communities that have a state of their own. That is why the two are joined with a hyphen to form the term nation-state. Generally speaking, in recent times there has been a one-to-one bond between nation and state (one nation, one state; one state, one nation). But this is a new development. It was not true in the past that a single state could represent only one nation, or that every nation must have its own state. For example, when it was in existence, the Soviet Union explicitly recognised that the peoples it governed were of different ‘nations’ and more than one hundred such internal nationalities were recognised. Similarly, people constituting a nation may actually be citizens or residents of different states. For example, there are more Jamaicans living outside Jamaica than in Jamaica – that is, the population of ‘non-resident’ Jamaicans exceeds that of ‘resident’ Jamaicans. A different example is provided by ‘dual citizenship’ laws. These laws allow citizens of a particular state to also – simultaneously – be citizens of another state. Thus, to cite one instance, Jewish Americans may be citizens of Israel as well as the USA; they can even serve in the armed forces of one country without losing their citizenship in the other country.