I’m serious. I don’t understand why humans draw imaginary bidders. I don’t understand why humans fight and lose their lives defending those borders. It’s not “cultural identity”. For example, people in either side of Punjab are more similar to each other than say people in the South of India. And further, i don’t understand how countries can be bought and sold like the “Louisiana purchase”. I mean who’s paying for what? It would be great if someone could recommend some books about the idea of nationhood.
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I think in reality, a country is the boundary of civil right. Within this boundary, people respect each other’s rights and privileges, either regulated or enforced by law, or by a collection of social agreement that we know as “culture”.
This doesn’t seem to hold true across the boundary of countries. Country A’s people simply have less/no inclination and is less/not required to treat Country B’s people equally as A’s own citizens. So for each country’s people who want to treated appropriately according to their standard, they must isolate them from the people that don’t. This is how new countries are formed. Mistreatment, disagreement, conflict, escalation, civil war, finally, independence.
1. Collect taxes. A fairly common system of production and distribution.
2. Enact and enforce laws
3. Provide social welfare and social structures (education, health, infrastructure…)
4. Defend the borders – both physical, diplomatic and economic.
These are the broad characteristics of what makes a country a country. Cultural similarity is not one of those characteristics although culture can be inherited and gradually incorporated into the peoples of the country.
It’s the end result of an incremental process. As nomadic hunter gatherers, we learned which areas were more productive and better hunting grounds, and being an inherently selfish and short sighted species, we drove off any family groups or tribes we viewed as competitors. When we moved on to early agrarian societies the same thoughts applied. This is our land and our crops and our cattle, and you can fuck right off if you think you’re going to take it. These societies formed borders, evolved into feudalistic type cultures, some merged and amalgamated others, and the idea of “fuck off, this is ours” was really only internalised by the ruling class. A peasant doesn’t really give a fuck who his overlord is, providing he gets treated the same, but the tribalism remained ingrained in the common people. Foreigners were seen as inferior, barbaric, stupid, rude etc, and this is still obvious even within homogeneous societies today. Nearly any country in the world will have some level of “the next town over is full of criminals and crackheads” or some level of “country folk vs city folk” and the attitude just gets turned up to eleven when it’s people from another country.
There have always been borders. A farmer had a bit of land and a border of some sort indicated where that was. A similar thing happens with villages, town, etc. Once you start getting someone that’s more than a few people, you are going to need someone in charge. That could be some tribal elders or a king or a democratically elected council, or whatever. Once you have a border, borders need defending, because if you don’t, someone is going to take it away or come onto your land to steal things or kill you. So we ended up with areas of various sizes, and eventually these formed countries. Sometimes you had two countries with very similar people and sometimes you will have countries with very different people. Over time countries joined together or split apart for various reasons. For example, Alaska was sold to the US from the Russians, the states of Yugoslavia became separate countries, and so on.
In some cases borders were formed by geographic features such as rivers, mountains, etc, and in some cases they were man made. An example are the countries around the Sahara. As it was all desert without anyone living there – except nomads, the borders were decided to be straight lines. So, countries are not a permanent thing. It is simply a convenient grouping for administration and government. But countries usually have long histories with people living in the same area for centuries. As such they have developed custom, religion, architecture, cuisine, etc that is particular to that region.
Finally, a country is usually described as sovereign. It runs it’s own affairs, it protects it’s citizens, it makes and enforces the laws, etc. But because of the history and common experience of it’s inhabitants it also gives it’s citizens a sense of identity and place in the world.
Human psyche functions a lot with needing “in-groups” and “out-groups”. Has to do with being social animals and agressive apes. Its not bad in itself, but sucky people always drive things to the suckiest possible ends.
Over time it expanded to the idea of a nation, as you could have an organized group to supervise it, and build a more defined overarching “in-group”. Not everyone buys into the concept much.
“Buying” a country is more of a “Buying the influence over that plot of land”. Capitalism is good at selling and buying, and extending it to concepts.
Any abstract entity or concept—be it currency, laws, or nations and borders—requires two things:
* Recognition and acceptance from all parties affected
* The power and will to *enforce* said recognition and acceptance, and/or defend against those who disagree
Different groups of people often have different wants, needs, and values. And oftentimes, these groups and their wants/needs/values clash. Even before nations existed, one group of primitive people would drive off competing groups from their claimed territory. Over time, these groups would come to an agreement: “We stay on this side of the river, you stay on your side, and if we can both do that, there will be no more bloodshed.” This eventually gave rise to recognized territories, then recognized nations.
But times change, wants/needs/values change, and this sometimes creates disputes despite previously agreed-upon borders. If disputes can’t be resolved peacefully, then one nation may invade another nation, either to topple the latter’s leadership and install a friendly regime (aligned with their needs/wants/values), or to seize the territory and impose their wants/needs/values onto the seized territory and its populace.
If the war drags on too long and both sides decide to talk again, they hold a conversation over a map: “On this side of the line is our land, and on that side is your land.” If both sides agree where those lines should be drawn, and neighbors accept that agreement (they have an interest in this, because current/future disputes affect them as well) then the borders are recognized and accepted.
Nations generally hold onto a territory because it has value to them. But sometimes, they decide that a certain territory isn’t as valuable to them anymore, and/or they would rather have money to do something else.
So France sold Louisiana, so Napoleon could raise money to fight the British. And Russia sold Alaska, because the Tsar wasn’t in the mood to negotiate with Great Britain and/or have the latter taking that territory, and found a willing buyer for Alaska in the United States. (Thus denying Alaska to Great Britain.) When this happens, national borders are redrawn, then recognized and accepted. (Sometimes grudgingly.)
*Edits: For brevity/clarity*
It evolved over time.
You had the Roman Empire, which was civilized people who paid taxes, used roads, ate grain and had armies vs the barbarians, who we know little about.
Then you feudalism, monarchy, then nation states, then groups of nation states, so you abstract farther and farther from a family unit or tribe.
As trade becomes more complex, you need these abstractions to get things to work.
If you had subsistence farmers who had little in the way of trade or infrastructure, nations would be largely irrelevant
I would argue that is only one half of human nature in society. Yes, there are the protectionists and isolationists. But societies also produce explorers and traders; people that see the value in different people and diversity.
I think this is what is so magnified in our global politics today. Half of us feel “protecting our own” is the most important function of government.
The other half believe “welcome all” will deliver new ideas and skills that will make us all better in the long run.
Both approaches are valid, but are destructive when taken to extremes. Successful cultures find a way to co-exist and reap the benefits that both approaches can produce.
For people to work together they need rules. Rules say things like “This is how we do things, this is what’s allowed, this is what’s not allowed, these are things people in our group have to do”.
Government is the way very large groups of people make the rules to organize what we do together.
And not every group of people wants the same rules. So this group of people has one set of rules and another group has a different set of rules.
It makes sense for the rules to be tied to a place and not just the group of people. For instance, one simple rule is which side of the road you drive on. Imagine if two groups of people lived in the same town. One group makes a rule that you have to drive on the left side of the street. The other group makes a rule that you have to drive on the right side of the street. Driving in that town would be VERY dangerous!
So we draw lines to divide where each group makes the rules.
A country has it’s own rules, and within it there are often smaller units that follow those rules and get to make more their own way, like states and towns.
It’s like a family, but bigger. The artificial borders are like your family’s property lines. Each family its own rules/customs/procedures, even if the neighbors have very similar approaches
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