In studies of national identity, the contribution of political science has been relatively scarce and fragmented, whereas in other sciences, the political aspects have largely been neglected. The main objective of this essay is thus to develop a way to read national identity politically. National identity has a wide range of meanings reaching from the identification of an individual with a national unit or community to several forms of collective identity. In order to enhance terminological clarity, the identity of a nationstate is separated as an especially relevant concept for political science. In order to offer preconditions for comprehensive, systematic and empirical analysis, the field of the nation-state identity is constructed by distinguishing and combining the components of the notion of a nation (state, territory, genealogy, culture and identification) with the time-space dimensions of the notion of an identity (homogeneity, differentiation, continuity). The main political foci of the nation-state identity come about from the linking together of the politics of identity with state policies and politics. The two elementary questions are: "what is a nation?" and ‘"what is the identity of a nation-state like?"