Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Definition of Nation
The other day in class we discussed what exactly it means to be a nation. They split up the territories of India based solely on their languages. Is that what it should be based on? Nations are thought of as one shared culture. Language is definitely a major aspect of a culture. In some ways, this split could be thought of as more understandable than if the territory was actually just split up by natural divisions such as rivers. It's hard to define what makes a nation a nation. My younger sister came home from school the other day with a paper that had the pledge of allegiance on it. However, each word that would be considered tough for a second grader had a flap and under the flap was a simpler and more understandable word. The world for nation was simply country, but as we discussed in class, there is so much more to the meaning of nation than that. What do y'all think it means to be a nation?
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4 comments:
I like that you brought this up B! I remember this being brought up in class, and i had the same thought as you. I thought that it was reasonable to split up a country by language, if you were going to split them up at all. It is easier to work with others if you are able to understand them. I also think that if India would have been split up by landmarks, as Belin suggested, then the two groups of people would either fight each other until only one remains or they would live peacefully together. We have learned enough history over the years to make an educated guess about what might happen then. I think that when they did split up India, they put some thought into it.
When the pro-Pakistan separatists wanted to carve out Pakistan from India, they split it for allegedly religious purposes, arguing that the Muslim population (about 1/4 of the total Indian population) should be a nation on its own due to its different culture. A lot of the supporters must have genuinely believed that what they were doing was right, but there was extreme violence on both sides of the conflict, resulting in a tragedy that historians have estimated to involve 1 million deaths.
On one hand, you have the pursuit of individual freedom and seeking self-government as a nation with a distinct culture. But on the other, do you think that the separatists really did what they did for freedom and cultural preservation, or was it just another power grab that happens so often in history? You can see extreme corruption in both India and Pakistan's governments today.
Is it even worth a million lives to split a country into two hostile countries with different belief systems?
Funny story about nations and countries. Yugoslavia was established as a nation in 1918 as a result of World War 1 ending. The nation dissolved in 2006. My great grandmother was born in 1918 and died in 2009. At her funeral my grandfather made a comment about how she outlived everything, including a country, the nation of Yugoslavia.
This is more of a personal opinion post than a fact one, but I think a nation really does not have to be based on any of these things (Religion, language,race, etc.) I think what makes a nation a nation is diversity and the ability to learn from one another. It's definitely not fun to live with people that are exactly the same as you, and never get to experience anything new. In my opinion, it takes all kinds to make things interesting, and although a nation is definitely not based off of this opinion, historically speaking, I think it's definitely becoming more of a modern definition. America, for example, bases itself on diversity and, although America definitely has its problems, I think it's important to note that *for the most part* the country supports/accepts all people.
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