This business about Russia, Ukraine and NATO has led Your Humble Blogger to think about the modern nation-state, and more than that, to wonder what other people think about the modern nation-state.\r\n
I think most Americans, on a gut level, think that European countries are \u201cnormal\u201d countries, and also that European countries are \u201cnatural\u201d countries. I could totally be wrong about that, because I often am wrong about what Americans think, so I\u2019m curious if any of y\u2019all feel like we have at idea in our cultural mindset.\r\n
Specifically, I think: People in the US have an idea that France is the place where there are French people who speak French; Germany is the place where there are German people who speak German; England is where there are English people who speak English, etc, etc, and that we think that that is pretty much normal for a country: a political boundary enclosing a single language and cultural group. And that other countries that comprise multiple ethnic or language groups\u2014Switzerland, let\u2019s say, or Iraq, or the old Yugoslavia, or \u2014are not \u201cnormal\u201d countries, to the extent that they differ from that idea.\r\n
Now, obviously, everyone even in the US knows that not everybody<\/i> who lives in the boundaries of France is cultural or ethnically French (vaddevah dat means) and grew up in a French-speaking home. There are individual exceptions. Most of us, probably, could even acknowledge that \u201cnormal\u201d countries are not ethnically or linguistically homogenous\u2014that there are regions of Spain where people call themselves Basque or Catalan rather than Spaniards. But I think\u2014again, on a gut level, rather than on an analytical level\u2014that we tend to think of that as an aberration, rather than as a normal part of a nation-state.\r\n
Even people who know a lot of European history tend (I think) to find it hard to think of France, f\u2019r\u2019ex, as the place where people lived who historically spoke French, Occitan, Breton, Basque, Alsatian\u2026 and were ethnically Burgundian, Angevin, Savoyard, Breton, Norman, Lotharingian\u2026 That \u201cFrance\u201d is as much a made-up nation comprised of long-standing ethnic groups with centuries of wars against each other as \u201cYugoslavia\u201d, or as \u201cThe European Union\u201d. That \u201cEngland\u201d is the same way, and \u201cSpain\u201d and \u201cGermany\u201d and all the rest of them. And, obviously, \u201cUkraine\u201d.\r\n
And I think that\u2019s important to keep in mind when we think about \u201cRussian-backed separatists\u201d in Ukraine, or when we think \u201csovereignty\u201d and other concepts.\r\n
I don\u2019t mean to say that I don\u2019t think we in the US or in NATO should not defend Ukraine from a Russian invasion, if there is one! Or that they should. I think that if Russia invades, it will be a terrible result no matter what. But I think it\u2019s harder to think about what is actually going on if we maintain the gut feeling that there is and of right out to be a think called \u201cUkraine\u201d, and that it is properly a nation that naturally rises out of the ethic group called Ukrainians who speak Ukranian and are therefore distinct from ethnic Russians who speak Russian (or, I suppose, ethnic Poles who speak Polish).\r\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n[\/raw]","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger also thinks its interesting that people in the US don't think of the US as a normal country, really, but many pretend is it one anyway.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20710"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20711,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20710\/revisions\/20711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}