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Comment by asteroidbelt | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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