| (Note: On this one, I was not
sure where to start. While working on the main page of this site and digging
up the two older essays and rereading them over and over, I loved how simply
they started off with very simple sentences of very big concepts and the
ball just automatically and easily rolled downhill from there. "People
will do what you pay them to do. For everyone who objects on moral
or social grounds there is at least two others who will not care. It does
not matter how harmful their actions are to others, to the environment,
to social order, or to any notions of truth, there always will be enough,
be more than enough, who will do anything if the money is plentiful or
guaranteed to last long enough. (click
here for the full essay) And "Evolution
has no morality. The dinosaurs did not become extinct because they
were immoral. Neanderthal Man did not disappear from the face of the Earth
for being more corrupt or more decadent than early humanity. They were
weaker, not physically but less able to adapt and survive against humans
with larger brains, their millions of years of evolution bested by our
own. Survival of the fittest is a concept used as an excuse by some to
break laws, was in the last century used as an excuse to write or uphold
unjust or punitive laws against certain groups, used to justify aggression
against other countries or other peoples, but it is in the grand scheme
of things the only law." (click
here for this full essay) Both were great beginnings from the simplest
of concepts and led into great essays. For this, I decided to start with
the simplest concept possbile and go from there. This essay I would hardly
describe on the same terms but the topics covered in two above were huge,
and even nations are teeny tiny by comparsion.)
Nations Require Blurry Maps Which Move by Jared DuBois
We have maps. There are lines on our maps. The lines are there for a reason.
The lines mark where "we" end and where "they" begin. When we go to war,
the lines show what is ours to defend and what is theirs to take away.
They show who are our potential enemies and who are our own people according
to their street addresses and postal codes. Is it really this simple? Are
"nations" just countries? If one could say yes, we can forget about nations
altogether. We have countries, we know what countries are, where they begin
and end, who is us and who is them according to our maps, so what do we
need an extra word, "Nations", for if it just means countries?
The problem is there are many definitions for "Nations" that do not mean
countries at all and do not coincide with specific countries. Nations as
a concept in a group or tribal sense, is an older concept than modern countries,
what we call Nation States, and can pertain to many types of group classifications
depending on the definition and intent of the person throwing the term
around, and can be borderless residing in the hearts and minds of the person
believing they are or are not part of a common nation with others somewhere
else. "Nation" can mean many things but when not used in conjunction with
a particular internationally recognized existing country, it refers to
a group of people sharing similar cultural traits and often a similar or
common language. It is also thought that those in the group consider themselves
a part of that group and accept others, who also think they are a part
of that group, as belonging to that group as well. Whereas the term "people"
can, does, and should mean everyone, a "nation" is a sub-group, a part
apart from or of that, or "a people" which has more exclusive rules to
be considered a part of.1
Before getting into the technical academic terms for what is or is not
a nation, it is not incidental by any means to try to assess what the term
"nation" means to most people. Though to many it is synonymous with meaning
a country, it has a very different modern meaning, defined for them by
how most people get their information, television and advertisements. I
am not only an American, but I have been influenced, one might say brainwashed
because of how readily it popped into my mind when researching this paper,
to see myself also or instead as a member of the "Nike Nation" by a once
extremely clever but now overused sneaker manufacturer's marketing campaign.
This is not merely a cute atypical reference to the subversion of the meaning
of the term "nation" by popular culture. David Andrews, a professor at
the University of Maryland, received a substantial grant a few years ago
for his paper, “Nike Nation: Advertising and the Re-Imagined Nation-State”.2
The generalization and commercialization of this term is now everywhere
in popular culture. Local school's sports teams and multimillion dollar
sports franchises commonly use the term nation in conjunction with their
teams supposed "fans", such as "Wildcat Nation" or "Red Sox Nation" to
attempt to instill a sense of loyalty, community, and belonging with their
would-be patrons. As media analyst Lionel Beehner recently pointed out,
"book writers have pinned down with aplomb what ails our country. We're
a Prozac Nation, a Fast Food Nation, a Rogue Nation, a Poker Nation, a
Roadtrip Nation, an Alien Nation, and, invoking the DJ's blessed surname,
a Savage Nation, —all at the same time. ... There's no shortage of snappy
two-word titles with "nation" plunked at the end, defining who we are,
explaining why our funny nation acts the way it acts."3
If you think such notions are irrelevant, or besides the point, one should
just remember how the popular media defines terms and the language in the
minds of its people far more than scholarly journals do, and not only influences,
but determines, defines, and shapes their sense of identity and culture
for them.
The term nation can go beyond specific borders or ethnicity and that is
why it is a good hitching post for people, advertisers or politicians,
to appeal to, direct, or even use it to create a sense of identity for
their own purposes. In his book, Nations and Nationalism, Ernest
Gellner states that the term "nation" is hard to define. What is ambiguous
or hard to define can be shaped, molded, and used. He states that political
boundaries, countries, can fail to include all of a particular nation,
and having them instead spread out over many different states.4
A sense of nationhood can be independent than one's political state or
"national" borders therefore according to him, the term "nation" is not
dependent upon and can run in opposition to national identity, in the sense
of borders.
Author Peter Sugar in Nationalism in Eastern Europe, thinks that
the definition of "Nation" should be considered in conjunction with state
(country) identity. He says that "Nation, like state, is a political
concept. It pays relatively little attention to nationality,(it can even
be hostile to nationality) but treats all people living within the state
as a unit, a nation."5
He believes that the process of creating a nation or a single national
identity required or was accompanied by a strong degree of assimilation
of lesser identities into a common national one, which he used -ation at
the end of their primary ethnicities to describe the process, (Spaniarization,
Frenchification, Russification, etc.). and that the terms "country and
state, nationality and nation became synonyms in the minds of the members
of the majority. The minorities clung to their nationality, and in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries tried to create their own states."6
While
it seems that Sugar and Gellner use the term "nation" differently with
Sugar stressing the popular meaning, upon a closer reading, Sugar's use
of the term "nationality" corresponds more to the meaning we now use for
the term of a "nation" or sense of "a people", whereas "nationality" is
more commonly used today different than he used it, as meaning citizenship.
Previous to the above quote he defined "nationality" in his terms as a
loosely defined sense of cultural identity along the lines of a "nation"
as defined by Gellner and others more recently. Thus rereading where he
defined "Nation" as paying little attention to nationality, he meant the
state paying little attention to a sense of ethnic or "nation" identity,
and minorities clinging to their "nationality", by that he meant clinging
to their sense of comprising or being a separate "nation" within the state,
in more modern terms.
Regardless of who calls peoples' looser than citizenship self-concept of
identity, whether it be called a "nation" or a "nationality", which is
more of a disagreement on using which term for which concept, both Sugar
and Gellner have a more profound disagreement over what nationalism is.
While both state that nationalism is socio-political, they disagree upon
the nature. Gellner states that the rulers, if one sees using nationalism
as "a theory of political legitimacy", ought to be of a similar ethnicity
or a sense of nation, as those who are the largest segment of the
population.7 While he states that
nationalistic tendencies can be non-ethnic and aimed toward acceptance
of cultural diversity, they are more often geared toward the dominance
of a specific group. Sugar states contrarily though, that nationalism "is
based on a set of organized beliefs and assumptions... that has to be inculcated
by education and propaganda into each member of each generation."8
Seemingly, this view downplays nationalism as something that can simply
be washed away by changing the mental assumptions which cause it to be
handed down from generation to generation.
However much they differ on terms, both Sugar and Gellner see the rise
of nation states as attempting the creation of monolithic states within
prescribed borders. As mentioned above, what Sugar called Frenchification
and Russification, the suppression or integration of lesser local identities
into a greater common national identity, Gellner described as "a territorial
political unit can only become ethnically homogenous, in such cases, if
it either kills, expels, or assimilates all non-nationals".9
While hardly meant as a blueprint for nation-building, he was pointing
out how established uniform nation states came to be as such. So while
it is unlikely that our senses of what "Nations" people see themselves
in conjunction with will not soon be as simple to read as the lines on
a map, without continued -ifications mentioned above, perhaps new senses
of nationhood will continue to develop to lessen the dependence upon maps
to demark where one nation begins and another ends. In pluralistic fast
changing societies where peoples senses of identities are up for grabs
to any with enough money, corporate promoted senses of identity, "Nike
Nations", team nations, fill-in-your-sponsor nations, may be the wave of
future brands of identity or, perhaps more accurately, the new branding
of and on us.
© 2005 By Jared DuBois
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