What is a nation?

The Blut und Boden (blood and soil) concept, and the idea that some races were historically bound to certain definite areas, contrasted with this. 

The nation is thus seen as a birthmark. People are born as Germans, Swedes, Frenchmen or Turks. People with foreign origins are considered a threat to national unity and purity and to a national culture which defines itself vis-à-vis “the other”. The common ancestry is the end of history and has to be protected against everything foreign.

Every people is not only entitled to its own sovereign state but it also owns a historical predetermined area once and for all time for its own exclusive use. Areas once inhabited by a national group should rightfully be returned to them, by force if necessary, and with the expulsion of the present inhabitants as the outcome. Anyone leaving this mythical fellowship is stamped forever with the mark of Cain. To this kind of nationalist, it is inconceivable that people with different national backgrounds could live together. Minorities are tolerated at best, but they are and remain second class citizens.

Myths about Race, National Unity and Purity

With few exceptions – Iceland for example – governments and peoples can not demonstrate a long, unbroken, historical continuity and ethnic homogeneity. The cradle of nations does not lie in a mythological obscurity, on the historical battlefields of Troy or Kosovo Polje but between the covers of history books. In many cases, nations were created by romantic nationalistic historians. They began looking for common denominators for a nation to be. Thus, history, language, national soul, “Volkgeist”, culture and race came to play their part.

The written language played an important role in creating a nation. Language did not therefore precede the nation. Instead the emerging national state created its national language in order to legitimize itself. According to a classic definition, the difference between a language and a dialect is that a language has a government and an army.

National conscription, compulsory education and the development of mass media with supra-regional distribution were the channels used by the architects of nations in the 19th century in order to create contact between the centre and the periphery, and borders that appeared natural on the basis of geography, language, ethnicity or religion. In particular, the emergence of national education systems and the mass media contributed to communicating a sense of affinity to a national collective, to extending the cultural horizons and getting away from provincial narrow-mindedness. The creation of national symbols and myths and re-writing of history were also part of the process of nation-building.

A nation can thus be described as an idea searching for a reality which a minority often violently forced upon a majority with standardization as a goal and with an iron glove as an instrument to eradicate previous diversity. Nations were thus constructed and invented. People felt that they primarily belonged to a province, a town or an empire rather than a national state, and they seldom protested when they were transferred from one kingdom to another. Eric Hobsbawn spoke of a mass production of nations in the 19th century, when cultural hallmarks were created for later presentation as authentic and ancient. The “real” aspects needed the “fake” and “foreign” in order to define themselves. The weakness and lack of credibility of the national identities which were proclaimed, meant that they needed polarization in order to take root.

The order of precedence of the factors that characterise a nation has always been subject to  discussion – ranging from mutual traditions and collective political awareness, common antecedents, affiliation to a tribe or people, joint territory, customs and language, culture and religion. Objections can be made to all these factors. The inhabitants of the USA are a nation notwithstanding their widely differing origins. The Swiss are undoubtedly a nation despite their different languages, religions and cultures, while not all those who speak the German language are members of the German nation.

Any attempt to give a content to the concept of the nation must therefore automatically imply a distortion of reality. Karl Popper, the philosopher, stated at the end of the Second Wold War that:

“It has been said that a race is a collection of people who are united, not by their origin but by a common misconception about their antecedents. Similarly, we can say that a nation is a collection of people united by a common misconception about their history”.

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* Ingmar Karlsson is a member of the High Advisory Board at the Global Political Trends Center.  Between 2001 and 2009, he was the Consul General of Sweden in Istanbul. The opinions and conclusion expressed herein are those of the individual author and do not necessarily reflect the views of GPoT or Istanbul Kultur University.

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