What Makes A Nation?

I've been sifting through a lot of articles about nations and nationalism recently -and it's brought into sharp focus the problem of the very word 'nation' and what we think they do.

The statue of Hermann, Ostwestfalen-Lipp. Was he really 'German'?

'Nation' comes from the Latin 'natio', meaning (loosely) a people. It's also related to the matter of birth (natu, from where we get 'natal'), which implies that people are born to a nation: they cannot join one. For millenia the idea of nation was an ethnic distinction, but by 1800AD it was also a concept bound up with new ideas about government and the state -in fact, that's how we come by a new contortion of the 'nation' into 'nationalism'. The early nations of, say, Europe, were the political manifestation of an ethnic group - the English, the French, the Germans and the Spanish.

But if the 20th century taught us anything, it's that nationalism is a dangerous thing: it led directly to the two big, mechanised wars of the first half and spluttered out travesties like the Bosnian War in the second. We have been taught that nationalism is something to be overcome - a divider of our common humanity.

Recently people have begun to find fault with this reasoning, dismissed as unrealistic, utopian and 'liberal'. Scholars like Jerry Z Muller and right-wingers like Pat Buchanon and Kevin MacDonald insist that nations are still ethnic, still "ethnonationalist", and still divisive. As I've been trying to point out, this is wrong.

Nations and ethnicities are ever-changing. Those countries we think of as being unified cultural types (from the English to the Spanish) are recent constructions -very recent, and in fact, always evolving. Societies aren't static, their conceptions of their heritage aren't static, and neither of their ethnicities. To take a case in point: how many societies generally think they are God's elect? Extremely few. Go back about 500 years, and everyone thought so. The French are supposed to be all about freedom and democracy - but only from 1789. They were thought to be great masters of war - until 1871. They were thought to be a writhing mass of separate regional identities - until they were unified behind the Sun King.

It's convenient for right-wingers to invoke nationalism once again, and they're now advertising it as a social fact rather than something desirable. But it's wrong, and history knows it.