No. of Recommendations: 4
So I think it would help if you could summarize the argument for how the "nation forming around identity" principle is a myth for states like Slovakia or Pakistan or Armenia.
I already did this by reference to the "Italian" nation. The idea that the people of the Italian peninsula and neighboring islands were a common people with a shared language and culture then only needed Garibaldi to unify them into a single nation is a myth. While Garibaldi did assist in creating the modern Italian state, the idea that he helped unify what already existed culturally, historically, and linguistically is a myth. Italy is a polyglot society comprised of dozens, if not hundreds, of regional dialects and cultures. Each dialect is derived not from "Italian" but rather from Latin, Greek, and Arabic. The Sicilian dialect is nearly incomprehensible to Ligurian or Lombardian. It continues to exist in Sicilian villages and families even as the Italian project has actively work to extinguish it through teaching the "Italian" language and "Italian" history in the national schools. The only reason there is an "Italian" language is because Dante wrote in the Florentine regional dialect and, through writing (and eventually printing) this dialect was adopted by Italian nationalists as "the" Italian language. The creation of the modern Italian "people" was premised on the ascendancy of the cultural and language of one region and its imposition on all the other regions. The creation of the Italian nation inevitably involves the subordination, and even extermination, of other "indigenous cultures" present in the territory claimed by the emerging ethno-nationalist state project.
Each region also has it's own history, often unrelated to other regions on the peninsula. The creation of a nation-state involves the creation of a mythology of nationhood rooted in essentialist claims about a common people with a common history and culture. It is no accident that Italian nationalism, especially in its fascist form, venerated Rome and turned to Roman history as the origin of the Italian culture, language, history, and people. Nevermind that Rome was a polyglot empire with fluid borders, and even within the "core" of the Roman empire centered on the Italian peninsula there were people who spoke other languages and whose roots were in other cultures than those of the Latins and Etruscans. The city of Naples, for example, was a greek city (Neo-Polis) with Greek being the principle language spoken. To this day, the Neopolitan dialect has a lot of greek in it. Despite their cultural differences, Neopolitans were Romans once they became citizens of Rome. Indeed there is growing evidence that some Jews were citizens in Rome.
My point here is that the nationalist and fascist mythology of the unification of the "Italian people", in which the common cultural and historical origins of this imagined nation rests in the common history of Rome and the latin language that unites all Italian people, is untrue even for Rome itself. The entire project is a fiction. A story told by nationalists to justify the political authority of the emerging modern state, and to claim legitimacy for this state authority over the people in its territory by asserting their ethnic belonging to the newly created political community. The nationalists are only bringing together what already existed.
This is bullshit. Every nation state is founded on these kinds of origin mythologies. They serve to unify the people in the newly established territory of the state, to define who has civil and political rights within this state, and in so doing, to create others who are a problem for this mythology either because they reject it or because they cannot be forcibly assimilated to this new "national identity". Every nation building program encounters its Ainu, and every nation building project has its "Indian Question" or "Bantu Question" or "Rohingya Question" or "Palestinan Question". The question is always the same--what to do about these indigestible bits of nation building mythology? In some cases it is ethnocide (forced assimilation), in others it is ethnic cleansing (expulsion), and in others it is genocide.
The modern nation state has been a human catastrophe, and it remains one where ever the question of "who belongs" is the principle concern of the state. The problem with Zionism is that it remains wedded to this nineteenth century nationalism, rife with the questions of inclusion and exclusion and how to digest the indigestible. We face the same problem in America today as we once again return to definitions of citizenship intended to exclude and deny human beings basic civil and political rights. What is going on in the US today is not just disgusting. It is criminal. However it doesn't (yet) border on the genocidal.
