I wish people would stop using the term “nation-state” incorrectly. A nation means a people, a group relatively homogeneous in language, culture, ethnicity, etc. “State” is generally synonymous with country. Finland is a nation-state; Hungary is a nation-state; Japan is a nation-state. When I employ a phrase I sometimes do, “the ethnic states of Europe”, I’m talking about nation-states.
“Nation-state” is not synonymous with “country”.
Pan-Arabism presupposes an Arab nation residing in the countries of Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Iraq, most of which have non-Arab minorities.
The United States is not a nation-state. It never has been. Neither are India, Syria, Iraq, Mexico or Brazil. China is trying to decide whether it is a nation-state or or a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional empire. That’s not good news for the Uighurs, Tibetans, or any other Chinese people who aren’t Han Chinese.
I don’t think I necessarily disagree, but I can see the other side that the United States is a nation in the sense of shared language, culture and long-standing institutions, but most importantly in the sense of sharing a common creed.
This post was inspired by an article asserting that Syria was a nation-state and that its survival was evidence refuting the notion that the importance of nation-states was declining. But Syria is not a nation-state and its survival provides evidence that multi-ethnic, multi-confessional states are not just going away.
Yeah, I agree with that. Nation-states have been very successful organizations in many places and are useful internationally to assign places to a people in order to have governments that represent those places and people.
But nationality is identity and is personal. I believe Pew polls show that people in the Middle East tend to identify primarily as Muslim. About half of the Muslims in France identify as Muslim, the rest identify as French.
The US was an English/Scots nation state until immigration from other European countries began in the early 1800’s. Most of the European immigrants sorta assimilated, but the original WASP culture died out. However, with a population that was 85% or more white European, and Christian, the US might have become a nation state. The immigration act of 1965 ended any hope of that.
Your use of nation-state was the common understanding as late as the 1960’s when I was taking a course in polisci.
The current insistence of the Progressive Democrats on identitarian politics is tearing the country apart, actually Balkanizing it. From now one, everyone has to vote their race and religion, and the other people living on American territory be damned.
In 1790 just a little over half of the U. S. population was English, Scottish, or Ulster Scots Irish. 20% of the U. S. population was black; another 9% was of German ancestry, another 5% was Dutch, and the balance other European nationalities. In the several decades after that most of the immigration was Irish, the second most numerous German. And that doesn’t include the American Indian population which wasn’t even counted until much later.
The U. S. was never a nation-state. We have always been highly diverse.