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Comment by lixtra | Hacker News Reader

A long text that comes to a trivial conclusion:

What is a nation? I argue that it is a group label that is invented and sustained in so far as it serves to further the goals of elites. Within an individual’s lifetime they appear unchanging, but from a historical perspective they are fluid and are frequently created, killed, or reborn as needed. When conversing about geopolitics we cannot ignore national identity, but we must keep in mind that in the long run nationality can be, and is, molded to suit political goals.

Nations are a political entity. What else would you expect. The same thing can be said about laws or morals or religion or ...

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The argument is that states are a political entity, nations are a cultural entity. I'm more attached to the English language than I am to any particular state.

Edit: Apart from language, I can't think of any other cultural attribute which is strong enough to define a nation.

Yet you have nations with members speaking different languages (Switzerland, Belgium) as well as people speaking a common language split into multiple nation state (Germany/Austria, Romania/Moldova).

Switzerland and Belgium are both states. I don't think it would be much of a stretch to consider the Flemish and Walloons to be different nations, although then I'd wonder if they'd merge with the Dutch and French instead.

If you'd consider the Dutch and Flemish to have enough difference to define nations, then what about other regions of the Netherlands, or the different counties of the UK?

Uhm, I read tasogare's response as an argument contradicting your original summary how language is a good criteria to define nations.

You now seem to be diving into their examples to, in essence, agree with them: language itself is not a good common property to define a nation.

Coming from Serbia and speaking Serbian (but not Croatian or Bosnian, though we'd understand each other as if we are speaking the same language ;)), even language is a term used for political purposes, but what you make of it in relation to defining a "nation" is up to you.

I think basically, we know what states are, and often use "nation" as a synonym for state. But some people try to use "nation" to mean something else, such as Wikipedia would have it: "A nation is a stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, history, ethnicity, or psychological make-up manifested in a common culture."

Although, personally, I'd find language to be the only thing there that I'd care about

I don't think that's right. I think, for the most part, we're familiar with nation states, so we've changed the meaning of nation to mean "the people of a nation state". But in other parts of the world, for instance in Eastern Europe, you have people who are clearly Russians but citizens of other post Soviet states. There, you have a question about a nation and a state that do not correspond.

States speak of administration; nations speak of common bonds. States seek to turn their diverse populations into a common nation because it will create stability. But when some of the people who are subject to your administration feel a common bond with hundreds of millions of people on the other side of a somewhat arbitrary line, this may be an impossible or undesireable task.

Yes, we also have situations where a group of people have decided that they are a nation and really want an independent state: such as in Scotland, Catalonia, the Kurds, or Tibet: supporters of the existing state may even accuse them of wanting to "split the nation".

The idea of nationalism, that states and nations should coincide, was only partly implemented. There are numerous groups, including indigenous peoples of the Americas and Pacific or the numerous groups of India which never obtained their own states.

> ormed on the basis of a common language, territory, history, ethnicity, or psychological make-up

Some of these elements are indeed needed but not all them at once. There is the flagrant example of Alsatians who chose in 17th century to integrate the kingdom of France despite speaking a Germanic dialect over a religious matter (they were Catholics and German speaking people Protestants).

I could ask, back when Yugoslavia existed, was it a nation? If not, how many nations did it contain? Perhaps there's no single answer, since it depends on which arbitrary method you are going to use to divide people into nations.

Officially, even then it consisted of people of deveral nations: constituting nations of the original Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes were, unsurprisingly, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, but plenty of other nations lived in it. Towards the latter stages, there was an attempt to make everybody a member of a "Yugoslav nation", but we all know how that turned out driven by many conflicting interests. Official polls had a large number of "Yugoslavs" (obviously a product of the state, but large here meaning probably 15-25%), but you had minority nations like Hungarians and Slovaks that lived in the area for centuries.

While I agree nation is a made up concept, for many a nation it goes back a long time, and it did usually start by differentiating by language (and religion was quickly added into the mix esp in the area). Still, the fact that we can track movement of "nations" between states (eg. large number of Serbs moved to Hapsburg monarchy as Ottomans invaded "Serbia", basically becoming a majority there, thus leading to seccesion movements that led to WW1), means that it can and has been defined for quite a while.

While German nation was practically defined as Prussia led unification efforts, there was a concept of Germanic tribes a long time ago.

And yes, language was the main denominator, but as civilizations developed, more was added into the mix. After all, language was certainly territorial to begin with, so it is a derived attribute by itself.

>have enough difference to define nations, then what about other regions of the Netherlands

There is a province called Friesland (Fryslan) with its own language, I think they can qualify as a nation.

But what's a language? Swedes and Norwegians and Danes can, basically, understand each other. Hindi and Urdu or Indonesian and Malaysian are the same day-to-day language but they have different technical and formal terms. Is there a language boundary between Scots and English, or is Scots a dialect?

Language is just as fraught politically as anything else.

I'm only attached to language for practical communication reasons, and mutual intelligibility is good enough. I don't care about accents or minor spelling variations.

Perhaps for you and me language is the only major attribute, but for many people there's also religion, and sometimes religion is even more important than language.

Perhaps you could speak of a Jewish nation, which is defined mostly by religion? But I don't think it's done in general: Catholics in Canada and the Netherlands aren't considered members of the same nation, they just happen to share a religion.

Thinking of nationality, I would guess it's easier to find cases in which religion divides people with a common language than cases in which religion unites people with different languages.

Yes, in theory it should be like this. But in real-life "Nation" is 99% used to describe a group of people who have the same passports. Which kind of ruins the concept of a nation to me. I feel more connection to people in the same industry, or the same hobbies then based on citizenship

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