Would anybody on Veeky Forums know of any books that go into what it means to be or have a nation?
I don't mean nationalism. I mean I want to know what a nation is at its most basic level without tying it to politics or governance. I want to know what it means to be a "people".
>without tying it to politics or governance
Well I have an inclination to believe that nation is what a people have when the government is stripped away.
If anarchy befell the world then the Chinese would still have reverence for their ancestors, speak Mandarin and adhere to Buddhist/Tao/Confucian thought. Mexicans would still go to church, have fiestas, speak Spanish and make the same dishes. Tribes would know their allegiances and rules regardless of the old laws. The Kurds would fall back in with other Kurds, forgetting the government imposed borders because there si something to being a Kurd beyond civil law and borders. I assume that is where nation lies but I feel like i need to go deeper.
This is just how I see it and I want to test it against the thoughts of people who actually know what they are talking about.
Read any of the Torah (First 5 books of the Bible) or really just the Old Testament, it's all about the Jewish people and how God chose them.
Pic related maybe
>without tying it to politics or governance.
Tricky.....good luck with that. Try looking into the "sociology (yuck) of nationalism".
Rothbard, anatomy of a state
Berebby, Us & Them
A history book
>Well I have an inclination to believe that nation is what a people have when the government is stripped away.
no that would be culture. a nation is the union of state+culture.
It's an economic entity
Though wouldn't that be a nation state?
This talks about the atmosphere of the Italian Risorgimento. Beautiful.
Agamben has a great essay, "what is a people?"
it's here people.ucsc.edu
the role of the state encompasses that I feel
are 'nation' and 'nation state' different concepts?
This is a pretty well understood definition that is considered to be basic in any political science courses and is something that should be understood at the 101 level.
Now I have a question: is /pol/ quietly trying to astroturf us with all of these threads asking about nationalism etc?
You are so ignorant about the cultures you mention.
>are 'nation' and 'nation state' different concepts?
I think? I assumed a nation state was what t was when a nation became self governing and independent of others. But im not sure.
>You are so ignorant about the cultures you mention.
I never said I was particularly literate in individual cultures. I know that those are very reductionist, and it was mostly throwaway descriptions to get a point across. However shittily.
There is reductionism, and there is being wrong.
"The Chinese" don't even speak the same language across their whole "nation".
How do you not know what a nation is?
Are you retarded?
Just read Heidegger.
I became a nationalist/communitarian after reading Heidegger and MacIntyre.
I'm heading in the same direction at this point. It's such a shame that he ruined his reputation by projecting too much of his ideas onto the Nazi regime in its early stage. I don't think there's anybody else who understood the existential anxieties of nations.
What do you guys think of Arendt in regards to questions of nationhood and citizenship?
Whats a nation user?
Whats a state?
I mean you can only astroturf so hard if you've got competent advocates of different points of view.
But in general yes, there's some astroturfing (or endemic shitposting) going on. The point of departure is the attempt to link the nation to genetics via repetition and putting "t. cuck, t. libtard" etc. whenever they want to actually support that point.
Best I can say is, if a /pol/ock wants to have a discussion, by all means we should discuss. If he wants to use his buzzwords to club his opponent he can go fuck himself. (Again, always trying - and failing - to be that confrontational)
What a beautiful painting!
>If anarchy befell the world then the Chinese would still have reverence for their ancestors, speak Mandarin...
Leaving aside the errors here, you're saying that culture would persist in the absence of a state and maybe that hypothetical is true. But surely you recognise that these cultural traits are 'Chinese' in the first place because of the presence of a state. E.g. there's a historical reason that people in North Korea don't speak Mandarin, while similar people just across the border from them do.
Obviously there are also cultural traits that do transcend borders, like religion. But precisely because of that fact, those traits are not 'national'.
Try starting here:
theriskyshift.com
...and go for the primordialists and maybe ethno-symbolists.
user I did a shitty undergrad thesis on this with a focus on Heidegger and Arendt. I'll try to put it in just a few paragraphs.
Nation implies a collective of people. What are they bound by? Language? Soil? Race? A lot of that is extremely abstract. The genetic composition of a society does not play a significant role in the cultural manifestations of that society.
'Race' as it is conceived of, does not give us automatic harmony with others of a similar genetic makeup.
Language is closer - since at the very least mutual intelligibility seems foundational to co-operation and co-existence. Plus language does conform much better to how we see states forming.
Consider how much detail we are losing with these reductions. Does 'Being American' capture your life as you live it, your system of values? Does your language do it as well? Both are gross oversimplifications. The real content of your life comes from your environment, and how your culture influences your interactions with that environment. That is the real core of the nation, of the 'volk' in Heideggarian terms.
The basis of the nation is in a common experience of reality for all its members, which in itself creates intelligible myths, legends, values, roles, etc. It is from the soil and our day to day life that we build the fundamentals of culture - which always belongs to individuals rather than amorous collectives, yet is always influenced by how our social structure codes us.
I am concerned that 'wider nations' built along broad alliances of ideological agreement are primarily shallow and damaging nature. Wider capitalism, communism, nazism - all mobilize based upon the relationship to labor, class, or race, and all obliterate the nuanced differences in culture found by different adaptations to different social and geographic environments.
Amorphous, not 'amorous', fucking typo
At the risk of seeming like an autist -
anyone saying you can exist separate from a state misunderstands the concept of a state. The state is simply the final monopoly on force, at ANY scale. Without a government it falls to the local warlord, the tribal elder, or at the most basic level, the head of household. Power structures are inescapable - what many anons might mean would be a removal of all administration.
Fukuyama
>But surely you recognise that these cultural traits are 'Chinese' in the first place because of the presence of a state.
That is also true. I know that in the case of the U.S. what defines an american rests almost entirely in the civic/government realm so the nation and government become one and the same. It just sometimes seems to me that what appears to have the traits of a nation sometimes exist despite government structure and that where I am getting my ideas from, though I could be wrong. I understand that this issue is not one which lends itself to particularly clear definitions. I mostly tried to separate it from government to avoid this becoming about 20th century nationalist and fascist movements.
What is a Nation?
Ernest Renan