mai said:
A lot of today's nations have been more divided politically and economically in the past, doesn't really strengthen your argument here. I use nation in strictly nation-state meaning, i.e. in the meaning it was brought to the political sciences, which absolutely has nothing to do with ethnicity (btw how this's a socioeconomic term?). Spare me from Old French, Latin, Greek etc. -- not relevant. |
It wasn't meant to strengthen my argument, in fact, it was an entirely different argument. Nationalism is rooted in the ethnocentric definition of "nation." How can a country with such a diverse cultural, ancestral, economic, political, and ethnic basis be one nation? How can a state with no official language, cultural traditions, etc be a nation-state?
Just look at the characteristics provided by wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state
"The nation state is a state that self-identifies as deriving its political legitimacy from serving as a sovereign entity for a nation as a sovereign territorial unit.The state is a political andgeopolitical entity; the nation is a cultural and/or ethnic entity. The term "nation state" implies that the two geographically coincide. Nation state formation took place at different times in different parts of the world, but has become the dominant form of state organization."
"The most obvious impact of the nation state, as compared to its non-national predecessors, is the creation of a uniform national culture, through state policy. The model of the nation state implies that its population constitutes anation, united by a common descent, a common language and many forms of shared culture. When the implied unity was absent, the nation state often tried to create it. It promoted a uniform national language, throughlanguage policy. The creation of national systems of compulsory primary education and a relatively uniform curriculum in secondary schools, was the most effective instrument in the spread of the national languages. The schools also taught the national history, often in a propagandistic and mythologised version, and (especially during conflicts) some nation states still teach this kind of history."
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nationalism/#ConNat
The distinction is related (although not identical) to that drawn by older schools of social and political science between “civic” and “ethnic” nationalism, the former being allegedly Western European and the latter more Central and Eastern European originating in Germany (a very prominent proponent of the distinction is Hans Kohn 1965). Philosophical discussions centered around nationalism tend to concern the ethnic-cultural variants only and this habit will be followed here. A group aspiring to nationhood on this basis will be called here an ‘ethno-nation’ in order to underscore its ethno-cultural rather than purely civic underpinnings. For the ethno-(cultural) nationalist it is one's ethnic-cultural background which determines one's membership in the community. One cannot chose to be a member; instead, membership depends on the accident of origin and early socialization. However, commonality of origin has turned out to be mythical for most contemporary candidate groups: ethnic groups have been mixing for millennia.
http://www.towson.edu/polsci/ppp/sp97/realism/whatisns.htm
A nation-state differs from a "state" or a "nation" for a couple of important reasons:
A nation refers only to a socio-cultural entity, a union of people sharing who can identify culturally and linguistically. This concept does not necessarily consider formal political unions.
A state refers to a legal/political entity that is comprised of the following: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) a government ; and d) the capacity to enter into relations with other states.
