Ever since I was a teenager I've always been amazed by the artificiality of countries. I live in the Netherlands and it always strikes me as somewhat miraculous that people speak Dutch on one side of the border with Germany and German on the other side of that imaginary line on a map, just a few meters away...
source: YouTube
It seems as if countries have always been here. Like I suggested in yesterday's post, our identities are for a large part defined by our stories, and the stories of our countries are some of the most powerful, as we're taught them at school, read them in books and see them on the silver screen. That's why the country, with the nation of people inhabiting them, and the state ruling over them seems so natural to us, like it's always been this way. But, like I said in the introduction of this post, when you stop and think about it for a few seconds, there's a strong sense of artificiality about the imaginary lines that separate our countries. In fact the truth is that the nation state as we know it, is an invention of the wealthy people who have claimed the highest positions of authority within the geographical boundaries we now know as countries.
In the below linked video it's explained why "nation state" is a much better description of our current national reality than "country". A country consists of two separate entities; the nation, which is the community of people that share a common national identity, and the state, which holds the dominant position in the "social contract" between the people and its governing bodies. Like every other contract within capitalism this social contract is perceived to be a voluntary exchange in which the people voluntarily give up some of their liberties in exchange for protection from the state which has the sole right to the legitimate use of violence. The only problem is that this contract isn't voluntary at all. And the shared national identity isn't natural to begin with, but instead cultivated by the wealthy white men who were the only ones with the right to vote when our western democratic experiment began.
Speaking Dutch on this side of the border, and then suddenly speaking German a few steps further east on the other side of the border isn't the "natural" state of affairs. People spoke many different highly localized dialects with a gradual transition from Dutch to German dialects while traveling eastward. And there was no unity of nation and state; the wealthy men of the state created that unity through public schooling and domination of the printed press in which they wrote one standardized national language. Later they invented their of crests, flags and national anthems. In reality, the countries or nation states as we know them are fairly new, an invention of the 1800s and 1900s. Now, in the 2000s, the nation state is losing its appeal. Let me correct that: the state is losing its appeal and its power over the nation. While at first glance this may look a positive, it's really not, and we once again have capitalism to thank for that. You see, we now have entities even more powerful than the nation state, and that's the multinational corporation. Biden's new proposal for a global minimum tax rate for those corporations is in fact a sure sign of the weakness of modern states: they have to work together in their attempts to limit the power of those multinationals. And with the state losing power, nationalism is rampant, with all the isolationism and xenophobia that comes with the retreat into the national identity of the people. Pleas watch the below linked video about the origin and history of the nation state; I promise it's highly interesting and maybe it'll change your feelings next time you go out to cheer on your favorite national sports heroes...
How Countries Were Invented
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