Why do people keep perpetuating the "National identity didn't exist before the 19th century" meme?

Because people are stupid. As long as people had contact with other tribes and countries, peoples and religions, they've formed an identity to distinguish themselves from others.

Depends on where you are. In countries with less developed nation building, sure.

>people don't trust strangers
>therefore the idea of common nationality doesn't exist

Protip: Villages didn't magically stop being suspicious of outsiders after some magic point in the 19th century where suddenly everyone realized that they were part of distinct cultural groups.

Do I detect a "no true villager" argument?

After people starting attending school where they were taught a standardized curriculum, such as language, history of the nation and relegion, people surprisingly developed a shared understanding. You know, a shared culture.
You can just go back in the sources and litterally see when academics started 'creating' the nation. Which was then taught to the people of said nation.

National identity follows government schools, it doesn't go the other way around.

Language purity doesn't indicate nationalism

>1 guy in the 1750s indicates that the entire people of Iceland had a created concept of Iceland and were devoted to it.
There were a few thinkers with nationalist concepts, but it wasn't until the 19th century, outside partially of Britain and France and to some proto-nationalist extent the Netherlands that it was a mass movement and hence a "national identity".

>Some academics redefined their common culture at a certain point in history in the past
>therefore common culture did not exist prior to then

Nation building performed by who?

Nations are a tool rulers use, like religion. The trick is that they pretend you share blood, rather than souls.

There wasn't a 'nationwide' common culture before that, other than shared religious believes.
Nation building performed by the elites. Do you think peasents knew about national heroes and national history before it was created by intellectuals in the 18th and 19th century?

Of course not. Nationwide common culture is invented by rulers and imposed.

>Do you think peasents knew about national heroes and national history before it was created by intellectuals in the 18th and 19th century?

Why would they? They had their own customs, destroyed by the process you're describing.

I know? But the discussion is whether or not nations were created in the 18th century, basically a product of the french revolution, or if it existed in the middle ages as well.

The way we mean nations was invented in the C18th, AFTER Westphalia, not BEFORE.

Before then we had continuums of culture that did not really end at manmade borders. Each village was likely closer to it's neighbors than any were to their official capital.

/thread

Because it's true

basically this. I think a "political nation" existed in many countries though. France had hundreds of dialects but all the political elite spoke French for administrative and political purposes. The same goes for the Polish and the Lithuanians, the latter of which were Polonized, who saw themselves as part of a nation greater than the areas that spoke their language. This likewise existed in Britain and many other countries.

You are confusing nations with states.
The Westphalia system is a state system. Nations later devloped within some of these states, but the borders has still changed a lot since Westphailia.
The idea of nation was something that was developed up to and during the French Revolution.

and also this elite existed for many centuries before nationalism

>A stranger comming to a village would be percieved with extreme suspicion, regardless of what language he spoke.

Why? A stranger who is able to communicate with them would be put in a different category than a stranger who is not.

I'm not.

You're confusing a smooth scale of cultural differences across a country, with no solid lines dividing them culturally, with the modern discrete nations of monocultures.

You don't get modern capital 'N' Nations without a government forcing their chosen monoculture on everyone in their borders, and typically expelling anyone who doesn't want to go along.

Because back then you were born in a village and you were most likely to die in said village as well. Or farm. You had no incentive to ever leave. And if you did leave you, it was most likely because you was a criminal or a witch. Therefore strangers was seen with suspicion.
Also, if you never leave your village, then you wont see yourself as a part of a larger community as abstract as the 'nation'. Why would you, unless you have been taught to? And that first started happening in the 19th century.

>Do you really think a farmer in 18th century Denmark had a national identity or even understood the notion of nationhood?

Why not? Do you think an 18th century village was completely barred from knowledge of the outside world? Biblical texts alone would make them know that there are different peoples in the world.

That's what I'm saying. But first the idea of Nation has to be created, before you can enforce such ideas, which was done through education in public schools. Who decides the curriculum in public schools? The king or the government.

Un. True.

You would not be likely to end up marrying someone from more than twenty miles from your place of birth.

But people routinely traveled hundreds of miles. Not EVERYONE, but PLENTY. It was common for the family to work the farm, and then the eldest men go and sell the goods next season. The market town might be a hundred miles away, might be two miles away.

Your surrounding area had a lot of languages. You could tell where and when anyone was born from a short conversation. Further away, you could have spoken one of the famous trade or education languages, like Latin.

Yeah, implying they would be able to read biblical texts. You are overestimating the basic knowledge of a 18th century peasant.

It was created by stops and starts. Urban culture converged, and was then exported.

The only great example of a nation in Europe before Westphalia would be the Jewish community in Western (not Eastern) Europe, and the Catholic Church (in certain modes). Then the best example of a nationality preceding the state is in Germany.

Yeah, but you wouldn't settle in villages a 100 miles away. MOST ordinary people didn't travel many miles outside their birthplace.

Now you are confusing Nation with Ethnie.

>And if you did leave you, it was most likely because you was a criminal or a witch.

Or perhaps you sell your produce on the nearest market. Or you're a pilgrim. Or a merchant. Or a journeyman (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnons_du_Tour_de_France ; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journeyman_years);

Meeting people who were not from your village was not that unusual, especially in the 18th century as mobility increased. Now if you live in an area close to a language border, it's likely that people differentiated between 'us' (those who we are able to understand and 'them' (foreigners). The Slavs called the former people of the word (slovo) and the latter, mostly Germans, mutes (nemci, now the word for German).

You can literally see how Herder, Fichte, Arndt and Jahn created the idea of a German Nation in the late 18th and 19th century.

Yeah differentiate between different ethnicities, not different nations.
And yes people who had errands traveled, but they didn't settle down in a strange village to find a job. If you did, you would be looked upon as a criminal.

How far? A hundred miles.

I'm really not. Ethnicity is the correct term for what you are calling nations pre-Westphalia.

One of the few nations to 'naturally' nationalize. Japan did too.

>Implying they didn't go to church

>implying the priest taught peasants nationhood
>implying the priest had a sense of nationhood

>nations pre-Westphalia
Is anachronistic. Ethnie and Nation isn't the same thing.

>Also, if you never leave your village, then you wont see yourself as a part of a larger community as abstract as the 'nation'.
Says who.

>[...]unless you are taught so.
Anthropologists.

They would hear them in church, you know.

Alright alright. But still, people knew where they and their loyality belonged to.

No, not NOW.

The term 'ethnicity' describes the same thing that the term 'nation' does, when talking about cultural groups in the pre-Westphalian world.

There are rare exceptions. Roman and Jewish are the best examples, island nations are bad examples, but you could say Irish, British, or Japanese as well. They were nations before they were states.

Ethnicity is the basis for most modern nation states. What's your point?

Yes, their families. Maybe village. You were forced into war. After nation building you went happily.

>nationalism didn't exist before the 19th century
What is the Iliad?

Not not now, nor never. ethnicity and nationality is two different things, and has always been. 'Nation' didn't exist before Westphalia.

How do you mean?

Italians all demanded that they be taught standard Italian one day?

>German Nation

That phrase is much older than that. It was already common in the 15th century.

That's what I said.

Norwegian upper class did not even use Norwegian language as their official language until the late 19th century. How do you think people from a shitty Norwegian village would they feel about this? They didn't fight for their country but for foreigner rulers.

So? Doesn't mean it existed. German nationalism was created during the Napoleonic Wars.

Fiction?
Also City States doesn't equal nations.

>In a decree following the 1512 Diet of Cologne, the name was changed to Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (German: Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation, Latin: Imperium Romanum Sacrum Nationis Germanicæ),[24][25] a form first used in a document in 1474.

nation = themes of modern nationalism now?

I see

I'm talking about the whole of Greece.

Fiction can't create a common identity? Do you know nothing of Greece?

National identity might have existed before the 19th century. What didn't exist before that was nation states.

What does nation mean?

It's an officially recognized culture of a state.

A common Greek identity? Hellenia? But they still waged war against each other internally all the time. Would you call that civil war then? No you wouldn't. They only teamed up to fight the fucking Persians, and after that the city states kept waging war again. Would you seriously catagorize Sparta and Athens under a common nation?

>its not civil war because I said so

The problem is that you're confusing "nation" and "state". Just because people are part of one nation doesn't mean that they can't form different states and fight each other. It happened many times in History.

When charles the bold impounded parts of southern germany in 1469 you know what happened? Habsburgian symbols of power in the new territory were replaced with brugundian ones. The villages got burgundian flags to make clear where they belonged to now.

The city of bern tried to manage the flow of information in it's territories starting in the 15th century. The cities office would gather news, edit them and send them to cities and villages in its territories through public announcers. That way the city could spread its own version of what's happening in the world.

Living in medieval europe doesn't mean you live in a vacuum. You may live in a tiny village where not much is happening but you certainly knew where that village belonged to if it there was a political power holding claim to it

language a nation does not make, kings a nations does not make, you can't have a true nation state before you create a sense of national community through certain lenses of looking at the past and a lot of propaganda.

You're right, but it wasn't created from scratch, that's why the idea of the nation was so sweeping.

No it isn't.
Here are some definitions for you:
Ernst Renan: the nation is based on a "daily plebiscite.

Benedicte Andersson: "an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign"

Anthony Smith: "a named population sharing a historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for its members"

And Anthony Smith on Ethnie: "named units of population with common ancestry myths and historical memories, elements of shared culture, some link with a historic territory and some measure of solidarity, at least among their elites"

I'm not confusing anything. They shared ethnicity, not nationhood.

But a political power isn't a nation.

They're describing ethnic groups. They're saying nations didn't exist in pre-modern times.

>at least among their elites"

And we can see the truth. Nationality is a culture imposed from above by a state.

yeah, if you re-define nations as "has to meet the criteria of modern nationalism".

Besides, even modern nationalism in Germany likely predates the Napoleonic Wars, Planert writes in Befreiungskrieg that it was already there in the 18th century.

>Nationality is a culture imposed from above by a state
Yes that's what I'm saying, and this first started happening in the 19th century.

You were disagreeing when I said it's a culture recognized by a state.

Yes, Herder wrote about the German Nation in the 18th century. And his ideas was used in the 19th century to define and distribute the idea of Nation.

They shared nationhood, the popularity of the Iliad is a testament to that. The creation of the Iliad is a testament to that.

They were just a part of their state first, then nation. Before states became important, it was tribe, brotherhood, and so on.

I don't agree that the authority who imposes the idea of nation necessarily has to be the state.
But historically this has often been the case.

>But a political power isn't a nation.
That's true and it's not the point I'm arguing form. I'm saying that the people from villages and cities knew they bolonged to a bigger political entity. They also knew they belonged to a bigger cultural entity. The mental and physical borders were drawn in a different way and didn't look like today. But the people weren't as isolated as the other guy made it look

Just because they had elements of shared culture, doesn't mean they were a nation.
Culturally Spartans and Athenians were very different.

So? They still both identified as Greek.

Any body that imposes things like that is the state by definition.

Nations may form as cultures naturally converge. But this is not the normal way nations form. It happened a few famous times; Rome, Jewish people in Europe, Germany, Japan; and the rest of the time it was imposed from the top, in France and Thailand it was massively successful, in Italy and Spain it went okay, in Yugoslavia it didn't work at all, and it's impossible to say yet about the nations Europeans invented in the Middle East.

So? I also identify as European, doesn't mean I'm part of a European nation.

hol up
so you iz sayin that the illiad makes greeks a nation?
ay yo
yo hol up
so the iliad makes greeks a nation, and the aneied claims romans wuz greeks
iz you sayin
WE
WUZ
GREEKS?

Europe is a continent, not a nation.

Greece had a concept of Europe vs. Asia, they just didn't like the rest of Europe much. Still European.

>different city states in close proximity shared similar cultural traits, specifically they heard the same oral tradition
>this means they're the same nation
>apparently France and Italy are the same because they were both Catholic and both read the same bible.

do you realize how retarded you are? a nation is a liberal idea, a sovereign of the people, by and for them. They follow the same government, learn the same things in school, salute the same flag, and they all heavily distinguish between members of their nation and members of others. None of this can be said of ancient greece, they were utterly independent of each other.

I think you're mistaking a kingdom for a nation. Athens is the closest you get before the French Revolution and that's just one city.

>Any body that imposes things like that is the state by definition.

I don't agree, and I have never come across such a definition before.

The state is the thing that uses violence to solve problems.

You can't force children to attend school without using force.

>a nation is a liberal idea
No it's not.
>apparently France and Italy are the same because they were both Catholic and both read the same bible.
No, it makes them both Catholic.
The Iliad brought together the oral traditions of many 'cities'. It's unifying.

That's an exceptionally simplistic definition of "the state".

How do you keep pimping the Iliad yet rejecting the Bible did the same thing for Christendom?

Christians from France to Italy to Hungary got together in church and listened to the same stories advocating the same morals.

If the Greeks are a nation, so is Christendom.

The Bible wasn't written for Europe or its tribes, the Iliad was written for Greece and its tribes.

Christendom is too global to be a nation.

It's the basic definition of it. You can't add anything to it that all states have, you can't lose anything from that some states don't.

States are the things that use violence to solve disputes.

They're both IDENTITIES. They're all IDENTITIES.

Nation is a specific kind of identity developed and used in the last few hundred years to develop the power of the state.

So militaries are states, and terrorists and militias etc. Or any entity that uses violence to solve anything.

Your definition is retarded.

>arbitrary division between a national identity and nationalism

They are part of the state. If there are no other institutions, they are the state.

You seem to understand this fine.

So you believe national identity and nationalism mean the same thing?