Nations, nation-states and nationalism.

Message Share Topic Printable Version Google Delicious Digg StumbleUpon Windows Live Yahoo Bookmarks reddit Facebook MySpace Newsvine Furl Topic Search Topic Options Post Reply Create New Topic

   In the 20th century we saw the full force of what we know as
'nationalism'; highly-organised attempts by an elite to dupe a mass of
people into fighting, working or otherwise for their country. However,
this begs the question, 'what is a nation?' How is it classified and
when did the concept really come into being?

[I should point out at this point, that many people, myself included,
believe that there was no real concept of 'nation' before the
early-modern period, due to a vast array of factors and historical
phenomena. But that really deserves a topic in its own right, so I
won't discuss it here, even though the topic will probably come up if
anybody decides to reply to this thread ]

In contemporary society we are surrounded by so-called nation-states,
so let's begin with what a 'state' is; fairly simple really, a state is
territorially limited and has within it an infrastructure which
pervades the existence of the people within it. It is important to
note, then, that, in theory, one can have a 'state' without a 'nation'
(whatever a nation is defined as), but this is virtually never the
case, the only exception really being the Vatican City, which is a
state filled with Italian nationals... so, really, this isn't an
exception at all, it's just a sovereign state made up of the Italian
nation, but I'm sure you see my point here.

However, a state can contain multiple nations. Take Canada, with its
English-speaking and French-speaking peoples, or the United Kingdom,
which contains four nations under the banner of a single-state.
Conversely, one can be a nation without having a state, like the
Palestinians who, of course, have no officially recognised (that is to
say, according to the earlier definition of state) state but clearly
there is a unique nation in existence.

So what, then, is a nation? A simple definition would appear to be that
of a people unified by some common characteristic. But what are these
characteristics? Language surely cannot count as a basis of describing
a nation, otherwise the UK and the USA would be part of the same nation
(which inherently is not the case), and, closer to home for me, Wales
would not be seen as a distinct nation from the rest of the United
Kingdom (Wales has two official languages, each of which is spoken to
different extents depending on the location). So, having ruled language
out, what about history or other elements thereof? This is probably the
most clear indication of what makes a nation what it is; again, I use
the United Kingdom as an example of this, where the English and the
Scottish have a clear national difference due to the fact that for the
better part of the 13th to 15th centuries, the two countries were at
war. This not only makes the two peoples different, but also defines
the people within the particular self-defined 'state'. However, this
doesn't apply completely; take Italy, which was formed in the late 19th
century from a series of disparate and, one might say, distinct
city-states. In the early 20th century a variety of liberal Italian
governments had huge difficulty spurring the Italians into being
patriotic and loving their country, particularly those from the south
of Italy and Sicily who didn't believe they were part of the same
country as the rest (there was even a revolt by a Sicilian to prove
this point), and the government had to resort to invading various other
countries to try to improve nationalism through war. Even under
Mussolini patriotism wasn't exactly at its height. So, Italy had a
state, but did it really have a nation, despite the fact that the
people were, on the whole, in the same history (Romans, Gaulish
invasion, Renaissance etc)? What exactly was missing in the early years
of the nation-state's formation?

So here I am, still struggling to define 'nation'; one thing I do know,
however, is that nationalism cannot exist without a 'nation', so the
earlier model I described would apply to the colonial states of the
18th and 19th centuries (such as the United States which, despite not
being a 'state' before the War of Independence, probably was its own
distinct nation as the people shared a common background etc, hence the
nationalism), but, really, defining 'nation' is tough, even though we
throw the word around nonchalantly in every-day speech.