How Countries Were INVENTED

00:29:49
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8rL9vgsT6g

الملخص

TLDRThis video delves deep into the meaning of countries, specifically focusing on the distinction between 'nations' and 'states'. It explains how nations, understood as imagined communities, differ from states, which are structures of political authority. The discussion takes historical context into account, explaining how concepts of national identity and state sovereignty have evolved. Key events, including revolutions and the rise of print capitalism, have transformed how people identify with nations. The video also challenges the perception of nations and states as natural entities and contemplates the implications of globalization on these traditional constructs, especially concerning rising nationalisms and corporate power.

الوجبات الجاهزة

  • 🏖️ The English Channel marks the boundary between national jurisdictions.
  • 🌍 Countries are not natural phenomena; their existence is a social construct.
  • 📜 The concept of 'nation' is an imagined community, distinct from a state's political structure.
  • 🔍 Historical events like revolutions shifted legitimacy from monarchs to nations.
  • 📚 Print capitalism helped birth modern national identities by standardizing languages.
  • ⚔️ Nations often become rallying points for states during conflicts.
  • 🌐 In the modern era, states struggle against the influence of multinational corporations.
  • 🕊️ The current state of nationalism shows both resurgence and contradiction in global dynamics.

الجدول الزمني

  • 00:00:00 - 00:05:00

    The video begins at a beach in Devon, England, highlighting the invisible lines that define jurisdictions in international waters, reflecting on how the division of countries has shaped human organization and laws throughout history. The speaker invites the audience to ponder the origins of countries and their significance in our lives.

  • 00:05:00 - 00:10:00

    The speaker introduces the concept of a 'nation-state' to better understand what a country is, distinguishing between the nation, which is a community of shared identity, and the state, which is the political structure. They discuss various definitions of a nation and how this concept intersects with culture, history, and the idea of community.

  • 00:10:00 - 00:15:00

    The video continues to discuss how national identity is constructed through culture and community, acknowledging that these identities, while deeply felt, are ultimately imagined. It emphasizes that the existence of a nation gives rise to expectations around nationality and shared interests, although these can mask inequalities within the community.

  • 00:15:00 - 00:20:00

    Moving to the 'state,' the speaker elaborates on its political functions and legitimacy through the monopoly on violence. The discussion includes historical contexts where nation and state have not aligned seamlessly, illustrating examples where nations exist without their own states and vice versa, highlighting the complexities of modern governance.

  • 00:20:00 - 00:29:49

    Lastly, the speaker shifts to the historical evolution of the nation-state, examining significant events like the Peace of Westphalia, and how revolutions in America and France helped transform concepts of state legitimacy from monarchs to the people, paving the way for the modern nation-state concept we recognize today, while also teasing future implications for states and national identities.

اعرض المزيد

الخريطة الذهنية

فيديو أسئلة وأجوبة

  • What is the difference between a nation and a state?

    A nation refers to a community of people with a shared identity, while a state is a political organization with governance over a specific territory.

  • How did the concept of nation-states evolve?

    Nation-states evolved through historical events such as revolutions and the growth of print capitalism, which fostered a sense of national identity.

  • Are nations and states always aligned?

    No, there are many examples where there is a disconnect between nations and states, such as in Scotland, Catalonia, and Northern Ireland.

  • What role do nations play in wars?

    Nations often provide a sense of identity and shared purpose, which states leverage to rally support for wars.

  • What is the future of nation-states?

    While nation-states remain prevalent, there is a discussion about their waning power in the face of globalization and multinational corporations.

عرض المزيد من ملخصات الفيديو

احصل على وصول فوري إلى ملخصات فيديو YouTube المجانية المدعومة بالذكاء الاصطناعي!
الترجمات
en
التمرير التلقائي:
  • 00:00:00
    I’m currently on a beach on the south coast of  Devon in England. And this body of water behind me
  • 00:00:06
    is the English Channel. Now, if this video had  a slightly higher budget, what I’d do now is
  • 00:00:12
    jump into some kind of speedboat and zip out 12  nautical miles at which point I would tell you
  • 00:00:18
    that we had reached an invisible line. For as  long as we remained this side of that line,
  • 00:00:23
    we would remain in the jurisdiction of the United  Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland;
  • 00:00:30
    cross over that line and we’d be  bobbing about in international waters;
  • 00:00:35
    bob too far and eventually we’d  cross over another invisible line
  • 00:00:39
    and find ourselves in the  jurisdiction of the French Republic.
  • 00:00:44
    The existence of these invisible lines and  the division of the world up into different
  • 00:00:48
    countries with different laws and customs is  so foundational to so many aspects of our lives
  • 00:00:55
    that we often fall into the trap of assuming that  is has always been this way; that countries and
  • 00:01:01
    borders are some kind of natural phenomenon. Yet,  as soon as we take a moment to think about it,
  • 00:01:07
    this obviously isn’t the case. Archaeological  evidence shows that human beings have lived in
  • 00:01:14
    this area for somewhere between 40 and 45 thousand  years and few people would argue that those early
  • 00:01:21
    humans would have referred to this patch of land  as England or themselves as English. In fact,
  • 00:01:29
    as we’ll see shortly, you wouldn’t have to  travel anywhere near as far back in time
  • 00:01:34
    to find a period in which the very concept of  a country (particularly in the specific way we
  • 00:01:39
    use it in the present) would be outright  baffling to whoever you were talking to.
  • 00:01:44
    There are plenty of videos and channels on YouTube  which tell interesting stories about countries,
  • 00:01:50
    customs, maps and borders. In this video, I want  to dig deeper to explore what exactly a country
  • 00:01:57
    is, the process of their evolution and invention
  • 00:02:02
    and, finally, what might  happen to them in the future.
  • 00:02:22
    So, before we can begin to discuss the  emergence of countries as a means of
  • 00:02:26
    organising the world around us, we first need  to unpack precisely what a country is. And,
  • 00:02:32
    in doing so, I think it’s helpful  to replace the somewhat vague word
  • 00:02:36
    “country” with the slightly more technical term  “nation-state”. For, the phrase “nation-state”,
  • 00:02:42
    in all its hyphenated goodness, helps to  articulate the manner in which what we often think
  • 00:02:48
    of as a singular phenomenon—a country—is usually  actually comprised of two separate phenomena.
  • 00:02:56
    Let’s begin by getting a handle  on each of these ideas—the nation
  • 00:03:00
    and the state—individually. Firstly, what is  a “nation”? Steven Grosby defines a nation
  • 00:03:07
    somewhat wordily as ‘a community of kinship,  specifically a bounded, territorially extensive,
  • 00:03:14
    temporally deep community of nativity’. For our  purposes today, however, it’s perhaps enough to
  • 00:03:20
    borrow Benedict Anderson’s description  of a nation as an ‘imagined community’.
  • 00:03:26
    The nation thus refers to the community of human  beings that we think of when we think of “the
  • 00:03:32
    Polish” or “the Japanese” or “the Swazis”. It  is the sense of commonality and camaraderie
  • 00:03:39
    that often exists between people who consider  themselves to share a nationality. We see this
  • 00:03:44
    expressed fairly clearly in international sports  where people are willing to pay huge sums of money
  • 00:03:51
    and travel thousands of miles to cheer on athletes  who they have never met but who they nonetheless
  • 00:03:57
    feel an attachment to due to their considering  themselves to belong to the same nation.
  • 00:04:02
    Now, many right-wing, political nationalists  view nationality as one and the same as
  • 00:04:08
    ethnicity or race. Others have instead viewed  the nation as a more voluntary association—what’s
  • 00:04:14
    often referred to as “civic nationalism”. The  19th-century thinker Ernest Renan, for example,
  • 00:04:20
    wrote that a nation was not simply ‘a group  determined by the configuration of the earth’
  • 00:04:25
    but, instead, ‘a spiritual family’  based on a shared feeling of having
  • 00:04:31
    ‘common glories in the past’ and  ‘a common will in the present’.
  • 00:04:36
    It’s this more voluntaristic, civic view of the  nation which we often see invoked by liberal
  • 00:04:41
    politicians, such as in descriptions of America as  a ‘nation of immigrants’. Either way, the imagined
  • 00:04:48
    community of the nation is given substance by both  the sense of a shared history described by Renan
  • 00:04:55
    and the notion of a shared culture: the songs,  stories, food, attitudes, character traits and
  • 00:05:01
    anything else that might come to be described  as “French” or “Argentine” or “Madagascan”.
  • 00:05:08
    This sense of community and identity provided  by nationality is deeply important to a lot of
  • 00:05:14
    people. In fact, it’s pretty much taken as a given  that all of us should feel ourselves to be members
  • 00:05:19
    of one of these imagined communities. As  Anderson writes, it is simply assumed that
  • 00:05:25
    ‘in the modern world everyone can, should, will  “have” a nationality, as [one] “has” a gender’.
  • 00:05:34
    Despite this, these communities are (and can  only ever be) imagined. Even in a tiny country
  • 00:05:41
    such as Nauru, with its estimated population  of just 9,770, no individual can ever hope to
  • 00:05:48
    have a meaningful relationship with every other  person who considers themselves to be Nauruan.
  • 00:05:55
    Furthermore, the perception that  the imagined community of the nation
  • 00:05:58
    is an expression of shared interests elides deep  inequalities and exploitation between its members.
  • 00:06:06
    Before we go any further, however, it’s useful to  introduce the second aspect of our nation-state
  • 00:06:12
    formula: the state. If, in relation to our  everyday understanding of what a country is,
  • 00:06:17
    the nation refers to the “ideas stuff” of  community and culture, the “state” refers to the
  • 00:06:24
    political apparatus. Depending on which country  one has in mind, the state might include the
  • 00:06:29
    parliament or congress, the monarch, president  or supreme leader, the court system, the police,
  • 00:06:36
    the army, schools, the civil service, the  tax office; in some cases the press and/or
  • 00:06:41
    religious institutions. As that list suggests,  states can take many, many different forms.
  • 00:06:49
    The defining feature that all states share is  that, as the German sociologist Max Weber put
  • 00:06:54
    it, the state is ‘the only human community  that (successfully) claims a monopoly of
  • 00:07:00
    legitimate physical violence for itself,  within a certain geographical territory’.
  • 00:07:07
    By this, Weber does not mean that all states  are constantly engaged in physical violence,
  • 00:07:12
    but that the state is defined by its ability to  settle disputes through arresting, imprisoning and
  • 00:07:18
    otherwise inflicting violence on people  without having to answer to a higher body.
  • 00:07:24
    I would wager that, when most people think of a  country in the present day, it is a nation-state
  • 00:07:29
    which they are thinking of: a political unit in  which a single state governs a single nation.
  • 00:07:36
    This is in spite of the fact that, when we look  around the world, we find numerous examples in
  • 00:07:41
    which there is not such a clean alignment between  these two phenomena. In Scotland, Catalonia and
  • 00:07:47
    Quebec, to name but a few, we find examples  of nations which do not have their own states.
  • 00:07:53
    In a slightly different mode, Northern Ireland  is presently governed as part of the United
  • 00:07:58
    Kingdom, yet many who live there consider  themselves to belong to the nation of Ireland.
  • 00:08:04
    Across the world (and for many different reasons),  we see similar disconnects between nation and
  • 00:08:10
    state. Yet, these exceptions generally only go  to show how ingrained the idea that nations and
  • 00:08:17
    states should go together is. For, in each  of these places, we find movements demanding
  • 00:08:24
    (through various means and with varying degrees  of success) a shift towards that perceived norm.
  • 00:08:30
    There is a lot to be said about  how states and nations interact.
  • 00:08:34
    We could, for example, foreground the  fact that, when a country goes to war,
  • 00:08:39
    it is generally because it is in  the interests of the state to do so.
  • 00:08:43
    Nevertheless, few people are willing to  lay down their lives for the tax office.
  • 00:08:48
    The state will therefore lean on people’s  identification with the imagined community of the
  • 00:08:53
    nation to present a given war as an opportunity  for the nation to claim glory, settle scores or
  • 00:09:01
    act as saviour to the oppressed; all of which  are far more appealing invitations to enlist.
  • 00:09:08
    We’ll certainly touch upon some of the ways in  which states and nations interact a little later
  • 00:09:13
    in this video. For the most part, however, I  want to focus on how these two phenomena came
  • 00:09:18
    to be seen as so inseparable. Which I guess  means it’s time for a little history lesson.
  • 00:09:29
    The first thing we need to establish in trying to  tell the story of the nation-state is: which came
  • 00:09:35
    first? I think the manner in which modern states  so heavily dress themselves up in the iconography
  • 00:09:40
    of the nation often leads us to assume that it  was the nation. In fact, states regularly actively
  • 00:09:46
    work to convince us that this is the case. Go to  a country’s national museum or look through their
  • 00:09:52
    school curricula and you will often find that they  begin telling the “story” of their nation many
  • 00:09:57
    thousands of years ago. Such narratives can lead  to a perception that the nation in question has
  • 00:10:04
    always been there; a notion which is particularly  problematic in settler colonial states.
  • 00:10:11
    On a broader scale, this kind of thinking can  lead us to assume that the concept of the nation
  • 00:10:15
    is an eternal one: that people have always  considered themselves to be members of nations
  • 00:10:21
    and that the state merely emerged as a  means for nations to govern or be governed.
  • 00:10:28
    Some scholars have argued that this is the case.  Subscribers to a view of nations referred to as
  • 00:10:33
    “primordialism” hold that, as Umut Özkirimli puts  it, ‘nationality is a “natural” part of human
  • 00:10:40
    beings, as natural as speech, sight or smell, and  that nations have existed since time immemorial’.
  • 00:10:47
    Others, collectively known as “ethno-symbolists”  argue that, whilst it is wrong to describe nations
  • 00:10:53
    as a “natural” phenomenon, nations have existed  in one form or another for a considerable amount
  • 00:10:59
    of time. Anthony D. Smith, for example,  argues that ‘we find in pre-modern eras,
  • 00:11:04
    even in the ancient world, striking parallels  to the “modern” idea of national identity
  • 00:11:10
    and character’. Today, however, we’re going  to take what’s called a “modernist” position
  • 00:11:16
    which seeks to stress that, whilst there might  have been parallels to nations throughout history,
  • 00:11:21
    the forms of collective identity which  existed in the ancient and pre-modern
  • 00:11:25
    worlds were not quite the same as that which  we describe as nationality in the present.
  • 00:11:32
    What’s indisputable is that states have existed  for some time. Different researchers propose
  • 00:11:37
    different societies as having developed the  first state. Francis Fukuyama, for example,
  • 00:11:42
    awards this title to the Qin dynasty following its  establishment of a centralised government in China
  • 00:11:48
    in 221 BCE. James C. Scott places the date much  earlier, locating the earliest states in the
  • 00:11:56
    “southern alluvium” of Mesopotamia, near  modern-day Basra, in around 4,000 BCE. Such
  • 00:12:02
    disagreements are partly a result of different  definitions of what should count as a state.
  • 00:12:08
    But the matter is also complicated by the  fact that, after their first appearances,
  • 00:12:12
    it still took many thousands of  years for states to really catch on.
  • 00:12:17
    See, viewing things from the present day, most  people probably view the emergence of the state
  • 00:12:22
    as an undeniable good; it’s certainly unlikely  that you would be able to watch this video (or
  • 00:12:27
    that I would have had the tools to make it)  had our ancestors not taken that first step
  • 00:12:32
    towards a more complex way of living. This  view is encouraged by the “social contract”
  • 00:12:38
    theories of governance forwarded by Jean-Jacques  Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes which imagine our
  • 00:12:43
    being governed by states to be the outcome of a  voluntary trade-off in which we decide to give
  • 00:12:47
    up some of our liberties in return for safety  and stability. In reality, as Scott argues in
  • 00:12:54
    his 2017 book Against the Grain, early states  were founded on coercion and exploitation.
  • 00:13:00
    They were often politically chaotic and  were breeding grounds for disease. In short,
  • 00:13:06
    if given the choice (and many people weren’t),  submitting oneself to the jurisdiction of a state
  • 00:13:12
    would have rarely seemed like a good deal in  comparison to less formalised ways of living.
  • 00:13:17
    It’s for these reasons, among others, that states  didn’t become a truly dominant presence in the
  • 00:13:22
    world until around the 1600s. One key event  often highlighted by historians of Europe
  • 00:13:28
    is the “Peace of Westphalia”, a set  of two peace treaties signed in 1648
  • 00:13:33
    to bring an end to the Thirty Years’  War. A key cause of that conflict,
  • 00:13:37
    which led to somewhere between 4.5 and 8  million deaths, was the manner in which
  • 00:13:42
    political and religious jurisdictions in Europe  often overlapped and conflicted. On top of this,
  • 00:13:49
    countries were constantly trying to interfere  in the domestic affairs of other countries,
  • 00:13:54
    particularly with regard to religious matters.  In order to address this, writes Daniel Philpott,
  • 00:13:59
    ‘Westphalia […] made the sovereign state the  legitimate political unit’; it established
  • 00:14:05
    the precedent that states had the exclusive  right to set laws within their own territory.
  • 00:14:11
    Whilst the sovereign states of the 17th century  may have begun to resemble modern-day states,
  • 00:14:15
    however, they were not yet nation-states. See,  across the globe, the states of the 17th century
  • 00:14:21
    were largely monarchies or empires. If there  was an identity which accompanied the state,
  • 00:14:27
    it was simply that of the King, Queen, Emperor or  Empress. While some people might have supported
  • 00:14:32
    their ruler and recognised themselves as living  in their territory, that monarchical identity
  • 00:14:38
    isn’t one that anyone other than the monarch and  their family are able to feel a cohesive part of.
  • 00:14:46
    The dominant mode of communal identity in  this period was instead that of the religious
  • 00:14:51
    community. Whilst this might have manifested  physically in one’s local place of worship,
  • 00:14:55
    in terms of mental conception, these communities  took little heed of national borders.
  • 00:15:02
    To be a Christian, Muslim or Buddhist,  regardless of sect or denomination,
  • 00:15:06
    meant imagining oneself as part of a near-global  community which was open to membership by anyone,
  • 00:15:13
    no matter where they were born. To consider  the birth of the modern country, then,
  • 00:15:18
    we have to take into account  the invention of the nation.
  • 00:15:24
    But… uhhhhh… before we do zat… I must first tell  you about today’s video’s sponsor Surfshark.
  • 00:15:30
    Actually, it’s just me… Tom... I was acting…  but I do want to tell you about how you can
  • 00:15:34
    take control of your identity and privacy  when surfing the web by signing up to the
  • 00:15:39
    fantastic VPN services of Surfshark. Head  over to surfshark.deals/tomnicholas to
  • 00:15:45
    get 83% off a 2-year plan and  an extra 3 months for free,
  • 00:15:49
    allowing you to securely and privately  browse the web for just $2.21 a month.
  • 00:15:54
    Surfing the internet these  days can be kinda eerie,
  • 00:15:57
    it often feels as though every website you  visit knows exactly who you are and where
  • 00:16:02
    you are. Surfshark allows you to get back in  control of what websites (and your Internet
  • 00:16:07
    Service Provider) can see about who you are  and what you get up to through essentially
  • 00:16:12
    creating a private internet connection to keep  you safe and secure whenever you’re online.
  • 00:16:18
    Surfshark has tons of features.  One aspect I love is the ability
  • 00:16:22
    it gives you to convince websites  that you’re in… ozer countries.
  • 00:16:26
    This is particularly great when used with  streaming services as it can either allow you
  • 00:16:30
    to get access to region-locked platforms such  as BBC iPlayer and CBC Gem or unlock tons of
  • 00:16:36
    extra content through letting you use different  countries’ versions of Netflix and the like.
  • 00:16:41
    So, if you wanna take advantage  of that time-limited offer of 83%
  • 00:16:44
    off a two-year plan and an extra three  months for free, you can support the
  • 00:16:48
    channel by letting them know that I sent you  through heading to surfshark.deals/tomnicholas.
  • 00:16:54
    Now… errrr… back to zat stupid English man, yes?
  • 00:17:00
    It took the interaction of several trends  and events in the 18th and 19th centuries
  • 00:17:05
    for monarchical and religious identities to be  replaced by the imagined communities of nations.
  • 00:17:11
    The most abrupt of these events were  the revolutions in America and France
  • 00:17:15
    during the late 1700s. The former saw a group of  people gain their independence from a King and the
  • 00:17:21
    latter saw a group of people execute one. Unless  they were to install new monarchs, this left them
  • 00:17:27
    with a quandary. See, the state sovereignty which  we discussed a moment ago was invested directly in
  • 00:17:33
    the monarch or emperor; hence us sometimes  referring to such figures as “sovereigns”.
  • 00:17:40
    Where was a state to gain its legitimacy and its  identity from if not from an individual ruler?
  • 00:17:47
    Well, in both America and France, we begin to see  some interesting language being used to describe
  • 00:17:53
    the post-revolutionary settlement. The United  States Declaration of Independence declares that
  • 00:17:59
    ‘Governments are instituted among Men, deriving  their power from the consent of the governed’.
  • 00:18:05
    In France, the Declaration of the  Rights of Man and of the Citizen
  • 00:18:09
    asserts that ‘the nation is essentially the source  of all sovereignty’. In both instances, then,
  • 00:18:16
    we find the idea that, rather than stemming  from a monarch, a state’s sovereignty (and
  • 00:18:21
    legitimacy) comes from “the people” or “the  nation”. Who was included in that “people”
  • 00:18:27
    or “nation” and whose consent to be governed was  actually taken into consideration was, of course,
  • 00:18:32
    another matter; it would be another 87 years  before the abolition of slavery in the United
  • 00:18:38
    States and women didn’t gain the vote in France  until 1944. Nevertheless, in these declarations,
  • 00:18:47
    we find the germ of the idea that, rather than  being identified with an individual ruler and
  • 00:18:52
    their dynasty, the state might the political  expression of something called a “nation”.
  • 00:18:59
    Of course, a handful of rich guys declaring that  such a thing as a nation exists didn’t suddenly
  • 00:19:03
    mean that everyone felt a deep connection to the  national imagined community of the territory in
  • 00:19:09
    which they lived. That process, in America, France  and elsewhere, took much longer and was influenced
  • 00:19:17
    by several other political, religious and  economic trends. One such trend, which pre-dated
  • 00:19:23
    these revolutions, was the growth of what Benedict  Anderson calls ‘print-capitalism’. See, where the
  • 00:19:30
    early publishing industry had mostly printed books  in Latin for the wealthy and educated, from the
  • 00:19:35
    16th century onwards, they began to print more and  more volumes in vernacular languages (those which
  • 00:19:41
    people actually spoke in their day-to-day lives).  This had a couple of important effects. Firstly,
  • 00:19:48
    it led to linguistic standardisation. Previously,  a single country could contain dozens of different
  • 00:19:55
    dialects; Eric Hobsbawm highlights that, at  the time of the French Revolution in 1789,
  • 00:20:01
    ‘50% of Frenchmen did not speak [French] at  all’ and ‘only 12-13% spoke it “correctly”’.
  • 00:20:09
    The printed word, however, contributed to the  promotion of one language as more important
  • 00:20:14
    within a certain territory whilst, at the same  time, standardising how that language was written
  • 00:20:20
    and spoken. Secondly, the production of  books for a certain linguistic community
  • 00:20:26
    (or proto-nation) contributed to the  cultivation of a shared national culture.
  • 00:20:32
    Ernest Gellner highlights that the development  of this shared culture was rarely democratic.
  • 00:20:38
    Instead, he writes, it most often manifested  as ‘the general imposition of a high culture
  • 00:20:44
    on society, where previously low cultures had  taken up the lives of the majority’. In short,
  • 00:20:50
    he suggests that the localised, folk cultures  of ordinary, poor people were often wiped out
  • 00:20:56
    as political and economic elites established their  own cultural preferences as those of the nation as
  • 00:21:02
    a whole. This is perhaps a simplification, however  Gellner’s foregrounding of the power dynamics at
  • 00:21:08
    play in who got to decide what the shared national  culture looked like is instructive. For, among
  • 00:21:15
    other things, Gellner points to the shift towards  a ‘school-transmitted culture’ rather than ‘a
  • 00:21:20
    folk-transmitted one’ as being another key force  in the development of nations. During the 18th
  • 00:21:26
    and 19th centuries, many countries in Europe began  to establish some form of state education. This,
  • 00:21:33
    again, helped to establish a greater degree  of cultural consistency across a territory,
  • 00:21:39
    but also ensured that it was the state (and, by  extension, those wealthy enough to be allowed
  • 00:21:44
    to vote) that got to decide how a nation’s past,  present and future were taught, which artistic and
  • 00:21:51
    literary works were included in syllabi and, thus,  what the substance of the national culture was.
  • 00:21:59
    In fact, where, earlier, I suggested that there  was an inconsistency between the idea that the
  • 00:22:04
    source of a country’s sovereignty was “the people”  and the limited number of those people that
  • 00:22:10
    actually got a say in how a country was run in  this period, Hobsbawm suggests that this might be
  • 00:22:16
    the whole point. For, while such ideas were useful  to the emerging bourgeoisie in legitimising their
  • 00:22:23
    overthrow of monarchs, when the dust settled,  they turned out to be far less keen on sharing
  • 00:22:29
    power with the working class than their initial  pronouncements might have suggested. The idea of
  • 00:22:35
    the nation, argues Hobsbawm, thus became a manner  in which the state (which, again, operated in
  • 00:22:40
    service of its wealthy electorate) could ‘maintain  or even establish the obedience, loyalty and
  • 00:22:47
    cooperation of its subjects or members, or its own  legitimacy in their eyes’. Alongside guiding the
  • 00:22:55
    development of already emerging processes, then,  Hobsbawm suggests that there was also a fairly
  • 00:23:00
    naked trend of inventing traditions as a means  of further fostering allegiance to the nation.
  • 00:23:06
    Thus the vogue for adopting national anthems  and national holidays during the 19th century.
  • 00:23:13
    Nevertheless, the idea of the nation turned out  to be more than a passing fad. With startling
  • 00:23:19
    velocity, the nation-state became the accepted  ideal for what a country should look like
  • 00:23:24
    and how it should operate. We see this in the  anti-colonial movements which gained momentum
  • 00:23:29
    during the 20th century, most of which expressed  themselves in national terms. Where the British
  • 00:23:36
    had usually referred to India as a subcontinent,  for example, the struggle for independence
  • 00:23:42
    was led by the Indian National Congress.  Partha Chatterjee warns against assuming that
  • 00:23:48
    previously colonised countries merely mimicked  the national forms of their former colonisers.
  • 00:23:54
    He writes instead that ‘the most powerful as well  as the most creative results of the nationalist
  • 00:24:00
    imagination in Asia and Africa are posited not  on an identity but rather on a difference with
  • 00:24:07
    the “modular” forms of the national society  propagated by the modern West’. Nevertheless,
  • 00:24:13
    these movements did operate on the broad  assumption that an independent state should
  • 00:24:18
    draw its legitimacy from its relationship  with the imagined community of the nation.
  • 00:24:24
    And, this scenario has pretty much continued  into the present day. A sentiment that runs
  • 00:24:29
    throughout the scholarly literature on nations and  nationalism is that belief in both the existence
  • 00:24:35
    of nations and the idea that nations and states  should be congruent is so widespread that it
  • 00:24:41
    almost goes unquestioned. But let’s close out  this video by briefly exploring that “almost”.
  • 00:24:54
    For the most part, in this video, I wanted  to focus on the history of our contemporary
  • 00:24:58
    understanding of countries and how we got to where  we are today. Nevertheless, I always like to end
  • 00:25:04
    with a bit of a provocation; and so I thought I’d  wrap things up by saying a few words about the
  • 00:25:09
    future of nations, states, sovereignty, borders  and countries. In 2018, The Guardian published
  • 00:25:17
    an essay by Rana Dasgupta who wrote that ‘the  most momentous development of our era […] is
  • 00:25:22
    the waning of the nation state: its inability  to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces,
  • 00:25:29
    and its calamitous loss of influence over  human circumstances’. He suggests that,
  • 00:25:35
    despite a resurgence in nationalistic posturing  by figures such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin,
  • 00:25:41
    Narendra Modi and Viktor Orbán, the nation-state  is an increasingly impotent force when compared to
  • 00:25:47
    multinational corporations such as Walmart, Amazon  and Shell. In fact, he frames the right-wing
  • 00:25:53
    nationalisms of those figures almost as the  death throws of the nation-state, a final hurrah
  • 00:25:59
    by ‘governments […] so desperate to prove what  everyone doubts: that they are still in control’.
  • 00:26:05
    This is not an unpopular assessment; and there is  a great deal of truth to it. For one, we live in
  • 00:26:11
    a world of gigantic corporations. If Walmart were  a country, it would have the 26th largest national
  • 00:26:17
    economy in the world, with its annual revenue  exceeding the GDPs of Thailand, Nigeria, Austria
  • 00:26:23
    and Ireland. Such companies have also become  adept at playing countries off against one another
  • 00:26:29
    in order to secure the best deals with regard to  taxation and regulation. This has led, at time of
  • 00:26:35
    writing, to the Biden administration pushing for  the adoption of a global minimum corporation tax.
  • 00:26:41
    The need for states to work together in such  a way further highlights that their individual
  • 00:26:46
    powerlessness. In more formalised models  of international collaboration, such as the
  • 00:26:50
    European Union, we find an even clearer ceding  of sovereignty to supranational institutions.
  • 00:26:57
    Whilst such analyses ably summarise things as  viewed from the perspective of the state, however,
  • 00:27:02
    they elide the view from below. For, whilst  capital and people living in the Global North can,
  • 00:27:08
    pandemics aside, move around the world in  an increasingly frictionless manner and
  • 00:27:13
    thus imagine themselves to be living in an  interconnected cosmopolis, that experience
  • 00:27:18
    and that imaginary are not open to all. To point  to one very basic way in which this is true,
  • 00:27:24
    regardless of their personal feelings about  nationality, people who are legal residents of
  • 00:27:29
    many countries in Asia and Africa will simply find  it much harder to cross a national border due to
  • 00:27:35
    the passport that they hold. Furthermore, many of  the resurgent nationalisms that Dasgupta suggests
  • 00:27:42
    reveal the weaknesses of the state have led to  increasingly authoritarian and violent policing
  • 00:27:47
    of borders. We thus find ourselves in a position  where the world looks increasingly borderless and
  • 00:27:52
    cosmopolitan to those at the top, whilst, for  those at the bottom, it remains anything but.
  • 00:27:59
    More broadly, we have to acknowledge how  resilient the nation-state form has proven.
  • 00:28:04
    People have been predicting its downfall  almost from the moment of its birth,
  • 00:28:09
    and yet still it remains central to the way  in which we think about the world around
  • 00:28:13
    us. Whilst it is likely that the nation-state  form will persist for some time, however, we can
  • 00:28:19
    all benefit from being far more critical about the  “naturalness” of nations, the legitimacy of states
  • 00:28:26
    and the manner in which both those phenomena  are weilded in our collective discourse.
  • 00:28:33
    Thank you so much for watching this video,  I hope it’s been worthy of your time.
  • 00:28:36
    If you’ve found it interesting or enjoyable in any  way, then I would be grateful if you’d consider
  • 00:28:41
    sharing it with a friend (either online or off-)  who you think might also get something out of it.
  • 00:28:46
    Thanks as ever to J Fraser Cartwright, Richard,  Kaya Lau, David Brothers, Max DeVos, Allan Gann,
  • 00:28:54
    Luke Meyer, Gary, Dylan Gordon, Diccon  Spain, Greg Miller, Bill Mitchell,
  • 00:28:59
    Al Sweigart, Z.C. Reese, Brent Cottle, Shab  Kumar, Collin York, Anil, Alexander Blank,
  • 00:29:06
    Niels Abildgaard, Sophia R, President Dwayne  Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, Sergio
  • 00:29:13
    Suarez and TwoBR0TwoB for being signed up to the  top tier of my Patreon. If you’d like to join them
  • 00:29:18
    in getting Early Access to videos, copies of the  scripts to them and more, then you can find out
  • 00:29:23
    how to do so at patreon.com/tomnicholas. Thanks  once again for watching and have a great week!
الوسوم
  • nation-state
  • identity
  • politics
  • nationalism
  • history
  • globalization
  • sovereignty
  • community
  • culture
  • borders