[doix]

Edit: the definition I had for "nation" in my head was incorrect. My comment is based on an incorrect understanding, leaving it up since there are replies that won't make sense if I remove it.

I find it very hard to make the mental leap between religion and nationalities. I think the correct thing to actually discuss is if "nations" are true. Nationality just means you belong to a nation, by definition.

If we stopped believing in nations, people would still form groups. Groups would organise and govern, nations are reborn again.

I think as long as humans are social creatures, nations are about as "true" as you can get. They are inevitable in my opinion.

Religion on the other hand, if people stop believing in it, it ceases to exist.

> As for philosophies, he’s referring to living your life by any particular philosophy, whether or not it’s “objectively” the best way to live.

Okay, I misunderstood that part. I thought they were talking about the study of philosophy. I agree that living your life by a philosophy does not make it true. But I suspect most people that follow a particular philosophy would not claim it is "true", but maybe I'm in a bit of a bubble.

[masswerk]

Ok, so I happen to be Austrian. A 105 years ago, Austria was a big, multiethnic empire. Still, being Austrian was a nationality, embracing what are now several countries and nations. (This is the nationality my grandparents were born into.) Back in the day, I probably would have identified as a German-Austrian. However, there are at least 3 major countries with a major population of mostly German ancestry. 32 years ago, there had been 4. But I do not identify as German. ("German" ethnicity is a construct, as well. In this particular case, according to a once famous Austrian saying, it's a mix of those left behind during the great migration.) Instead, I do identify as part of a community inhabiting a certain political territory. This territory has lost considerable parts, entire countries and nations, but it also has received regions and ethnicities from what had been the Hungarian part of the Habsburg empire. It even isn't the same political entity it had been not that long ago. Over the last century, it had been an empire, a small republic, part of the third Reich, and then a newly reconstructed republic. It had been located at the very outskirts of the Western hemisphere and is now right in the middle of a greater Europe. Still, there is identity, but this identity is undeniably fluid. – It's hard to not to observe some fluidity in the concept of nationality.

[imbnwa]

>I find it very hard to make the mental leap between religion and nationalities. I think the correct thing to actually discuss is if "nations" are true. Nationality just means you belong to a nation, by definition. > >If we stopped believing in nations, people would still form groups. Groups would organise and govern, nations are reborn again.

Well, nation-states didn't exist until the 19th century/late 18th century, so there's that.

Just for example, 'Italians' didn't exist until the late 19th century, and it took another 30 - 50 years for people in places like Sicily and Naples to see themselves as 'Italian': most immigrants from Italy to America spoke Sicilianu (featured in The Godfather and Boardwalk Empire) or Napolitano (featured in The Sopranos), not 'Italian', which IIRC is actually Tuscan, the language of Tuscany.

Similiar story in France, where a national identity only emerged after the Revolution and the top-down imposition of French-ness; people largely spoke their regional derivative of vulgar Latin like Occitan or Picard. Hard to talk about a 'nation' when there are around 20 regional languages spoken in your borders. 'French', as we know it, is the language of the ils-de-France urban center that was imposed on everyone else; like wise with 'Italian'.

So I don't think 'nations' are inevitable, they're a fairly recent and well-documented phenomena that we don't really have to guess about its causes and origin.

A kingdom is not a nation-state, a kingdom is a large piece of real estate whose legal identity is that of the monarch's body, or, where breaking the law is a personal attack on the King or Queen (hence, the King's peace). Even if you are King of all England, like Aethelstan was, you are not the leader of a nation because that is an altogether distinct entity, one where the law is ostensibly an expression of the unitary will and identity of the people irrespective of the offices of power (read: a constitution).

So if people don't see themselves as a unitary identity with others hundreds of miles away, the nation will cease to exist. The American Civil War was just such an incident.

[doix]

You're right, the definition of nation I had in my mind was wrong. Learn something new everyday :).

[cratermoon]

What nationality is someone born in Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia?

[hef19898]

Depenfs on the olace of birth, and especially in the case of Yugoslavia, his ancestry. The latter fought a couple a very nasty wars trying figure that one out.

Those people are either Czech, Slovak, Serb, Slovenes, Croat... Rather easy to answer.

[floppydiskette]

What does it mean to be Czech or Slovak? At one point, those countries were combined into the nation of Czechoslovakia. Was a person born in Czechoslovakia Czech, Slovak, or Czechoslovakian? If we’re going to take ethnicity or language into account, then what does it mean to be American?

Many of those Eastern European languages are more of a sliding scale than divided by country borders. Moldovan and Romanian are basically the same thing.

I met someone on my travels from Italy who was Italian, but only spoke German, as they do in parts of Northern Italy.

[hef19898]

Nationality is pretty easy, just look at someones passport. Ethnicity is much more difficult.

[cratermoon]

Did nations exist before passports? What is I don't have a passport? If I hold a passport for a nation that no longer exists, what nationality am I?

[hef19898]

Well, the idea of nation states isn't that old. Passport are pretty recent, in their current form at least. And a person can be nationless, in which case they would be eligible for a UN passport.