Save The Nation!

The word "nation," like many words, has multiple meanings. This inspires some people to make what they think are logical arguments based on insisting that only one selected meaning is valid. I believe I have given the example before of a guy who claimed that the entire concept of organic food is meaningless because "organic" means "carbon compounds" and all food consists of carbon compounds. Always stop and check yourself if you start making an argument based on the definition of a word. We've had the same problem here with "socialism." Somebody finds one or another dictionary definition and claims it has to mean that, which makes it impossible to discuss what some person really means by it. That isn't clever, it's actually idiotic. It's also important to remember that dictionaries often give differing definitions of a word, that word meanings change over time, and that they are also affected by context.

Anyhow . . . A true fact about the planet today is that almost every square inch of land, with the exception of Antarctica, has to be within the boundaries of a particular nation. (Of course some boundaries are disputed at some small pieces of land are considered shared or neutral.) The "nation" in this sense is whatever political entity has, or claims, ownership of that land. (Dominion over nearby ocean comes with it.) Unfortunately, and much to their discredit in my view, Oxford gives the first definition of "nation" as "

a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory." This simply does not apply to most of the internationally recognized nations today, in fact it describes scarcely any of them, although such entities have existed. A better definition for most practical discussions today is "a territory where all the people are led by the same government." That's what it means to the UN. 

 

A third meaning of the word is "people united by common descent, history, culture or language" without reference to shared territory. Sometimes some people who constitute this definition of a nation, who don't have a shared territory, want one. They want to become the first definition of a nation. A paradigmatic example of this is Zionism, which led to the creation of the nation of Israel. There was an obvious problem in that people who are not Jewish already lived there. I don't intend to discuss the propriety of this situation today, but I do have to note that not only are there Moslem and Christian Arabs living in Israel, Haifa is also the location of the headquarters of Bahai Faith, so Israel doesn't even meet the first definition, although some people might want it to. 

Another example -- and again, I'm not raising this to draw a comparison, that's not the point of this discussion -- is Germany. For most of their history, German speaking people lived in many small principalities, and some of them were in parts of linguistically diverse nations or empires such as Austria, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia. The Prussian leader Otto von Bismarck managed to unify those little principalities in 1871, creating the nation of Germany under a monarch called the Kaiser. 

 

Hitler, who came to power in 1933, had some very specific ideas about what it meant to be German and what the nation of Germany ought to be. He claimed that being German didn't just mean speaking the German language and living in Germany. He thought that Germans constituted a "race," people with a common descent, who were genetically superior to other people. He called this the Aryan race. He thought that all Germans should live in one domain, or reich, which led him to conquer Austria and Czechoslovakia, and then expel the non-German people from the conquered lands. He also wanted to eliminate non-German people who were already in Germany, specifically by exterminating the Jews and Roma. These were not good ideas, not any of them.

 

The United States, like almost all nations today, is of the second kind. People of a vast variety of descent live here, with cultural differences, different histories, and some linguistic diversity as well. But nations need unifying ideas, and if you don't have an ethno-nationalist state like Nazi Germany, those have to be principles of governance that incorporate respect for diversity. People who want to turn the U.S. into a nation of the first kind have a very bad idea, but arguing from the dictionary is not a valid defense.