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Comment by jimmyed | Hacker News Reader

There is something amiss in calling the US a nation. Maybe it's the absence of historical epics, the lack of a uniting identity thru the ages, the lack of mythical gods. Comparing against nations like India and China, USA seems to be without a soul.

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US citizens might not see how uniform the US is.

When I first came to the US, I was amazed how different it from Europe, they look similar on TV, but when looking at it with your own eyes, thousands of tiny details reveal it.

And later, when I traveled in different US cities in several US states on both coasts, I was amazed, how different part of the US are like each other. It might sound funny, the but same style of light switches in places thousands of miles apart struck me. Let alone, similar street signs, similar pavement styles, similar police cars, similar fire trucks, star-spangled flags everywhere.

The US has cultural codes, the identity.

I would even say that the difference for example between the US and the UK is larger than the difference between the UK and France.

So, like it or not, but the US is a nation.

Yep. I've lived in several countries, and from what I've seen, there's more cultural heterogeneity between many EU towns that are 100km or more apart in the same member state than there is across almost all of the US - not including obvious outliers.

I've lived in half a dozen U.S. states and have visited most of the rest, and the exact opposite has stood out to me.

The fact that places like Seattle, suburban Los Angeles, rural Maine, most of Nebraska, and Miami are in the same country seems almost absurd.

If your experience of the U.S. has been concentrated on cities, I can see how the regions may seem similar, but things that seem absolutely normal in LA (using Uber Eats to order delivery of roasted crickets because you want a snack, for an actual example that happened to me) make a visitor from nearly anywhere other than a few major cities feel like they're on a different planet!

> The fact that places like Seattle, suburban Los Angeles, rural Maine, most of Nebraska, and Miami are in the same country seems almost absurd.

Why? I can drive an hour away from where I currently work and experience more linguistic diversity (in terms of dialect intelligibility and actual language spoken) than I can in almost any region in the United States. And this is not, in any way, unique to where I live. Drive an hour outside of Taichung, Abu Dhabi, or Bangkok, and compare the differences in how people speak, live, &c. against Atlanta and rural Georgia.

The truth is that America is incredibly, incredibly homogeneous.

This seems like more of a distinction between urban and rural, which exists in almost all countries.

LA and Miami are similar and almost indistinguishable compared to European countries which lie only 50 miles from each other.

The UK consists of various countries though (4) which for example each compete in football (what Americans call soccer).

> which for example each compete in football

Depends on cont context. In the Olympics there is a UK football team.

They compete as team GB, further demonstrating the madness of trying to define a nation

Team GB is a trademarked brand name for the United Kingdom olympic team. (I think because "GBR" is the established letter code used so GB has some brand recognition factor in an olympic context.) It's controversial since "GB" can be seen to exclude NI although the team includes the whole UK.

It's even more than UK. Includes different Crown Dependencies like Isle of Man, British Ovsersea territories like Montserrat or Gibraltar. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Olympic_Association

With the British it's always complicated :)

UK isn't really made of countries in any internationally recognised sense. The "four nations" are really are just administrative regions with a trumped up sense of identity. Having different football and rugby teams is a a historical accident since those sports were invented here.

The same way the rest of the world most of the time considers the US as a whole -- yet this does not make the individual states disappear.

Exactly. The "countries" of the UK are in some ways more like the US states. Each very much real with their own identity, traditions, systems of devolved government etc. Just not countries.

How is that different from nation-states? It's an accident of history that some Karelians became Finns while others didn't. It's an accident that Finns and Estonians exist as separate nations. It's an accident that Savonians and Tavastians became Finns but Kvens and Tornedalians didn't. It's an accident that Izhorians, Livonians, Votes, Ludians, and Vepsians were assimilated by non-Finnic peoples. It's an accident that Finns exist as a nation instead of becoming Swedes or Russians.

Administrative borders shape how national identities evolve and endure. And when long-distance communication and travel became easier in the 1800s, administrative borders shaped the new wider national identities.

I agree that accidents of history led us to where we are now. The four parts of the UK are regarded as nations in a loose sense, but not as nation-states.

The four parts of the UK are called “countries” for purely historical reasons. There’s no actual concrete difference in political organization today that would let one claim that Scotland is a meaningfully different type of entity from autonomous regions of other unitary states (e.g. Catalonia).

Reminder that almost a quarter of Chinese citizens cannot speak Mandarin, and the percentage that can speak it fluently is apparently far smaller.

I haven't been able to find a good English source for the percentage of Indians who are fluent in Hindi, but it looks like it's around 53-70%.

Source:

- http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-09/08/c_136594961.htm

- https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=14771

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingualism_in_India

Edit: I mention this because the Oxford definition of a nation is "a country considered as a group of people with the same language, culture, and history, who live in a particular area under one government"

I think this applies to the United States. I don't know how well it applies to India or China, or even to most European states before the 20th century.

Mandarin is not the only Chinese language. It's the standard dialect, but there are a range of other dialects and languages spoken in the country that derive from Old Chinese, and which share a significant cultural heritage. This gets even murkier, because Chinese is not written phonetically, so even people who do not speak a common language or dialect can still communicate using the common writing system.

All this is to say that Chinese identity is not as closely bound to speaking Mandarin as one might think.

China and India are bad examples. These are deeply multicultural countries, despite the authoritarian centralisation under a Han Mandarin leadership in China.

If you said Japan or Hungary then you'd have a point.

The US has the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights form the basis of the US' civic religion. American nationalism is based on a set of civic ideals, and that fact allows people who have different religions and ancestry to identify with the country.

Probably because the modern, colonial boundaries of the USA, Canada, Mexico, etc, bear no relation to the historical national boundaries of the Native American peoples. Plus, the modern concepts of nation-states with fixed borders don't map neatly onto Native American traditions.

USA is people initially coming over to be independent from their home countries and from each other (not to form a nation), and then slowly merging (with some dragged-along without their will, like African-American slaves, and others coming from outside like post-US formation asian, european, etc immigrants) under the flag of freedom, opportunity, etc., in a period where a rising US global role tide lifted all domestic boats.

In the meantime a common US culture has formed too, but not one with any deep historical roots, and also one where many parts don't feel that close to now that the good times are not exactly continuing...

India isn't much a nation either. Its a good example of the post colonial federalized union of nations mentioned in the article.

While I agree that India is not a nation in the sense of the article, India had already been under varying levels of political union prior to colonisation, unless we consider the Mamluks, Mughals, etc. as colonisers in the broadest sense. In fact, I've often heard the truism that the post-colonial effect on the Indian subcontinent was not so much characterised by the artificial federalisation of nations, but rather their artificial separation—in India on the one side, and East and West Pakistan on the other.

Federalism doesn't contradict being a nation-state, India is clearly moving to a more nation-like model under the BJP.

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