> State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Of course, Nietzsche wrote this before companies with "no I in team" and whatnot :P
> What's wrong with having an independent sovereign government
Nothing, but "nationalism" to me implies some sort identification with a symbol, rather than interacting with reality. Sufficiently developed individuals don't "belong to" groups, it's the other way around. Tribalism is a great method to stop that development dead in its tracks.
> The emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an acceptance of reality.
In so far that is the case for what you would consider nationalism, carry on. To me, a sense of responsibility towards the place where you live and towards the people that live there is just that,
while nationalism adds more and only bad things to it. I generally see it used as crutch or excuse.
>Nationalism is a political, social, and economic ideology and movement characterized by the promotion of the interests of a particular nation,[1] especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining the nation's sovereignty (self-governance) over its homeland.
> A nation should be ruled from their own land and by their own people
Leftists sometimes consider nationalism 'good' when it is nationalism of a small nation against an imperium (or minority ethnicity against a nation state), but 'bad' when it is a powerful nation trying to conquer its neighbors (or opressing its ethnic minorities). But in facts, both of these nationalisms are based on the same toxic concept of ingroupness based on shared ethnicity, language and culture, in contrast of ingroupness based on shared commitment to universalist ideas like freedom, rule of law and democracy.
OTOH, it is likely that the real reason why countries really work is because of some level of nationalism, as commitment to universalist ideas is primarily a thing for elites, while ethnicity-based tribalism is much more primal concept.
> Nationalism isn't normal, countries are a completely artificial construct.
Compared to what? Being a primitive mammal? Sure you could claim that the 'nation' didn't exist long enough to support this but devotion to a local city or tribe feels the same to me.
> A nation state is a state in which a great majority shares the same culture and is conscious of it. It has been described as a political unit where the state and nation are congruent. It is a more precise concept than "country", since a country does not need to have a predominant ethnic group. [1]
>Nationalism trumps economic interest at the end of the day. History shows this to be true.
I interpret history as "nationalism used to trump economic interests". A lot of has changed since. Most countries are representative democracies, and it's more difficult for leaders to go into a war.
As for the tribal argument, I think the "nation state" is dying. Tribes are subcultures these days[1]. The internet connects me to my subcultures (like Hacker News), and it matters less every year what country I happen to physically live in. There's also the argument that the world is more united these days (particularly thanks to the European Union and somewhat because of United Nations).
> it's often a group of people with a shared history, culture, and language, what's often referred to as a 'nation'
But nationalism applies to a specific territory -- as defined by a government. It just seems arbitrary to love people of a certain territory and not another due to a border established by a monopolistic force on violence.
> Well, yeah I'm talking about "nations" but you can't have nationalism without a nation.
Correct, basically.
> And you can't have a nation without the idea of citizenship or borders right?
Wrong: citizenship and, especially, borders are features of the association with and territorial limits of the jurisdiction of a state.
A nation is an identity group which may or may not have a state, a state is a political unit which may or may not be tightly associated with a nation. The modern nation-state system is one in which there is a norm that states tend to be coextensive with nations, and where that isn't the case either nations try to carve out states or states try to create new national identities.
>The internationalist world has produced freedom, security, and prosperity at orders of magnitude beyond what humanity ever experienced before.
- wouldn't be possible without being under the wing of the US
- most of them wouldn't even exist as independent states if they didn't have a nationalist period
all that distaste for nationalism would vanish the moment some tanks had showed up on their borders.
>Nationalism has a horrible track record, creating war and poverty, and the underlying curse, hate - arbitrarily, purposefully created - often by leaders using nationalism for their own power: 'be loyal to the nation, and I am the nation, I make the decisions'. Many, including Churchill, blamed nationalism for WWII (which is why the survivors built the UN and the predecessor of the EU).
every country in both world wars was nationalist. even the USSR had toned down commie stuff for the duration of WWII - which they called "The Great Patriotic War" in defense of "motherland", by the way.
Tribal is my best guess at his meaning, but ingroup is related, or perhaps partisanship when applied to American politics. Nationalism feels incorrect, especially when he chooses examples of beliefs that are against their own nation (skip to the heading “negative nationalism”), or examples that are not much to do with nationality (political Catholicism, Antisemitism, Pacifism).
Another theme is blind loyalty (authority figures) versus freethinking. As a geek I try to avoid succumbing to geek groupthink, although HN doesn’t always help that goal.
> concept of ingroupness based on shared ethnicity, language and culture, in contrast of ingroupness based on shared commitment to universalist ideas like freedom, rule of law and democracy.
Is the latter not also nationalism, if you believe that those ideals create a group that is worthy of self-determination? Maybe it deserves its own qualifier, such as ideo-nationalism, to distinguish it from ethno-nationalism, but does the motivation fundamentally change what it is?
> OTOH, it is likely that the real reason why countries really work is because of some level of nationalism
I think you're probably right here. The question I have is if you can make that nationalism about something other than ethnic groups?
Don't confuse the nation with the state - the two are very different things.
The nation is a body of people bound together by tribalistic xenophobia. The state: a heap of parasitic machinery hitching a ride.
Nations seldom possess anything more consistent than a sort of diffuse Zeitgeist, and maybe (sometimes) something approaching a sense of shared interest.
States are bureaucratic machines, dedicated to self-preservation, operating under the pretence of service to the nation; in actuality extracting as great a toll in human blood, misery and suffering as the nation can bear without collapsing.
Both entities are evil, brutish and disorganised, but of the two only the state is capable of operating with a (distant) semblance of directed, intentional action, so if you must anthropomorphise, do it to the state, not to the nation.
> The concept of nation usually revolves around having a common cultural background.
Sure but the idea that "nations" ought to be coterminous with sovereign governments ("states") is a fairly novel one that's never been all that well followed (except that since it became popular, states have tried really hard to create the idea of a coterminous nation as a means of inspiring loyalty.)
How new a state is has no relation to whether the state corresponds to a nation; there's plenty of nations that have never had a state, and states that have been around a long time that don't correspond particularly well with a single nation.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Of course, Nietzsche wrote this before companies with "no I in team" and whatnot :P
> What's wrong with having an independent sovereign government
Nothing, but "nationalism" to me implies some sort identification with a symbol, rather than interacting with reality. Sufficiently developed individuals don't "belong to" groups, it's the other way around. Tribalism is a great method to stop that development dead in its tracks.
http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat
> The emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an acceptance of reality.
In so far that is the case for what you would consider nationalism, carry on. To me, a sense of responsibility towards the place where you live and towards the people that live there is just that, while nationalism adds more and only bad things to it. I generally see it used as crutch or excuse.
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