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Comment by nephihaha | Hacker News Reader

All of Thailand's neighbours to the north fell to Communism. There was a major attempt to make Malaya (as was) Communist as well, which failed.

However, I'm sceptical of the term nation state. I don't consider France to be a homogenous nation, since it contains areas like Brittany, Alsace and Basque areas. Likewise, Thailand has some indigenous minorities.

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> Likewise, Thailand has some indigenous minorities

I don't think I've ever been in a country that doesn't have indigenous minorities so I'm not sure what that's supposed to prove. Maybe a very small country like Iceland could claim not to have any indigenous minorities? Otherwise they basically all do.

Put it this way. I am Scottish, and when people say somewhere like the UK is a "nation state", I'm sceptical. Scottish attitudes towards the UK range from total attachment to total alienation, but with the majority maintaining some level of Scottish national identity within that. I've met people from France who did not consider themselves French but to be Breton, Basque, Corsican etc as their national identity.

I don't know much about Thailand's minorities, but if it is anything like some Asian countries such as Nepal or the Philippines, its national identity is probably more complex.

You're right to mention Iceland, although by area it isn't that small! Remote island nations probably qualify better as nation states than conglomerates such as Thailand and France.

You can always break some UK laws and find out whether you are ruled from London. Expensive experiment for sure, but I'm certain of the outcome.

Likewise, the Catalans (a region in Spain) recently found out whether they belong to the nation state Spain. Their seditious "leaders" were thrown into prison by Spain.

Your example demonstrates that the UK meets the definition of a state but not necessarily the definition a nation (shared culture/identity).

The UK is a state, but arguable as a nation from certain points of view. It is not a federal system as some think it is. In fact, even the relatively recent UK supreme court may very well be unconstitutional.

France has been more heavy-handed with uniting its nation, but even it has issues. Spain is possibly looser than the UK, at least outside the sporting arena.

You are confusing two separate issues here. Apart from the fact Scotland has its own legal system within the UK, we are talking about whether it is a nation. In terms of people's identity, it is not really a full nation state. The Scots, and to a lesser extent the Welsh, have a complex relationship with Britishness. That's before we get to Northern Ireland which was arguably the most politically unstable region in western Europe within living memory.

The UK is not a federal system like the USA, and so there is very little that counts as UK law as such. Even within Dublin, back when it was in the UK, the Easter Rebels of 1916 were mostly processed within Ireland itself.

Portugal and Andorra have a better case for being nation states than Spain does. I definitely would not call Spain a nation state. Or China or Russia. Being able to throw people in a prison does not prove it is a nation state. The Catalans are a nation as are the Basques.

> The UK is not a federal system like the USA, and so there is very little that counts as UK law as such.

This seems quite far-fetched. Parliamentary sovereignty alone would be unthinkable in the US model, where US federal legislatures have fairly delimited powers that they cannot arbitrarily change. The Scottish government, for example, essentially exists at the whim of Westminster and (in this iteration) was only created a few decades ago.

Scots law is actually a separate issue from the current Scottish Parliament, in fact it was used as one of the arguments for having one. I remember it being set up: I voted for it.

The UK constitution, if it can be called such, is made up of numerous contradictory documents, but Scotland retaining its own legal system was one of those. It has some everyday features not found elsewhere in the UK like procurator fiscal, and until recently the "not proven" verdict. (I was at a murder case a couple of years ago where the panel (accused) was given a "not proven" verdict.)

It's a simple formula:

def do_i_belong_to(country):

    return this.army * this.commitment_level < country.army * country.commitment_level

>people from France who did not consider themselves French but to be Breton, Basque, Corsican

Corsicans, sure. But, in my experience, for Bretons and Basques it is very rare for them to deny their French identity in the way that plenty of Scots deny their Britishness. For whatever reason, the layered-identity model actually seems to work in France.

I think I should be more precise, a Modern nation state. One that imposes laws afar to all minorities/regions, establish some institutions (medical/education/tax/etc..) and raise an army (check some african countries armies or the lack thereof).

The reason why I mentioned the french is because they were the first to modernize at a significant scale (which enabled them to take over all of Europe?) during their revolution.

The French never took over all of Europe. Though they came as close as anyone did. France was a large state, but within easy reach of a number of much smaller ones such as the German and Italian states. The Russian and the British Empires managed to defeat them, although geography complicated things in both cases.

France did and does retain some odd ideas about its colonies. It took a long while to realise that most of the people in Algeria didn't consider themselves an integral part of France. Their Pacific possessions are seen as France as well.

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