nations - capitalist forms?

[manic expression]

The modern nation state is a product of capitalism, and a relatively recent phenomenon, which has only been in existence for a few hundred years. In the Middle East it is a much more recent phenomenon basically since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the after WWI.

I can personally remember meeting an old man in the boarder region who when asked what nationality he was replied that he spoke Kermanji, Zaza, Turkish, Farsi and Arabic.

Of course in a communist society people wouldn't all speak the same language or other things that you suggest, but I don't think that their could be nation states.
Not nation states, of course. But the nation and the nation state are not the same: the nation goes beyond the nation state, and the capitalist nation state suppresses genuine national self-determination. A nation, to be brief, is made up of people who share a common language, a common geographic region, a common history and a common cultural identity (border regions are what happen when multiple nations meet...surely the man you mention was not Persian and Arab and Turkish and more equally at the same time). These entities predate capitalism by a very, very long time. They will not and cannot disappear through the abolition of class. Remember, you can't be an internationalist if you don't recognize nationality.

[Devrim]

Not nation states, of course. But the nation and the nation state are not the same: the nation goes beyond the nation state, and the capitalist nation state suppresses genuine national self-determination. A nation, to be brief, is made up of people who share a common language, a common geographic region, a common history and a common cultural identity (border regions are what happen when multiple nations meet...surely the man you mention was not Persian and Arab and Turkish and more equally at the same time). These entities predate capitalism by a very, very long time. They will not and cannot disappear through the abolition of class. Remember, you can't be an internationalist if you don't recognize nationality.

The nation is an artificiality created community. If we think that these 'ethnic' groups that I mentioned are real, the man that I referred to almost certainly had Kurdish, Persian, Arabic, and Turkish ancestry. If you look at people who trace back their family roots in Ireland, which is an 'isolated' place on the edge of the Euro-Asia landmass, you find all sorts of different roots particularly from Atlantic Europe. How much more so at the 'crossroads of the world'.

The definition that you give of a 'nation' is absolutely full of holes. It would completely rule out nations such as Belgium, and Switzerland, that are based on more than one 'language group', but even the idea of a language group is not something that has always existed as a standard definition. The major languages today are the direct results of the formation of the modern state. Prior to that what existed were a host of different local dialects, and minor languages.

If we take English as an example in Britain two centuries ago their were four distinct languages, English, Gàidhlig, Welsh and Cornish (though today Cornish is effectivly extinct and Gàidhlig is being pushed that way). A little earlier the English language itself was not a unified language as such, but a collection of local dialects, each of course comprehensible to its neighbours. Even today the accent of English spoken in East Anglia is said to be mutually comprehensible with the Frisian spoken in the islands off the Dutch coast, which in turn is said to be mutually comprehensible with the low German dialects spoken locally.

The process of formation of national languages was one of immense cultural assimilation and destruction of culture. A good example of the process can be seen in Turkey, which embarked on this process relatively recently in the period after the First World War. Today only 33 native languages are spoken in Turkey. The biggest four all have at least 1,000,000 speakers, and the next six over 1,000,000. The rest have much smaller numbers. Until recently, the vast majority of these languages were illegal, with a mandatory six month prison sentence for speaking them in the privacy of your own home.

Far from the 'Turks' being a group 'who share a common language', this group is a number of desperate language groups forced into 'Turkishness' by a deliberate state policy of cultural, and at times physical, genocide.

The whole idea of some sort of 'pure' divided ethnic groups is a fabrication used in the building of the modern state, and let's be clear, the process that took place in Turkey is the same process that took place across the world, though perhaps a more barbarous and extreme example than most. I have friends though who were beaten as children for speaking Welsh, in the 'mother of democracies', and I am sure that speakers of virtually every minority language can tell similar stories.

Generally people are a pretty mixed lot, and the dividing lines of nation are something that the modern sate has forced upon people. If we look to the British Isles again, the 'nation of Ireland' is essentially a modern creation, which certainly didn't exist before the rise of modern nationalism.

One final example of what national identities actually mean in practice from Turkey, In 1923 after the Turkish War of 'Liberation', there was an act of massive ethnic cleansing which is generally referred to as the 'population exchange', in which 2,000,000 (500,000 from Greece the rest from Turkey) people were forced out of their homes made refugees and 'exchanged'.

Possibly the majority of 'Greeks' who were exchanged, but at least a sizeable minority were actually Turkish speakers, who spoke not a word of Greek. Why then were they expelled for being 'Greeks'. Basically Greek was taken to mean Orthodox Christian. However, in the vast majority of South-Western Anatolia villages were mixed, and intermarriage was extremely common. All families would have relatives who were both Christians or Muslims, which remember means in the parlance of the time 'Greeks' and 'Turks'. It was common for girls to be born of one 'nationality', and upon marriage convert to their husbands religion, and then become the other 'nationality'. People changed 'nationalities' in their own lifetime despite the fact that they stayed members of one linguistic community. Of course, the great-grand children of those 'exchanged' are now Greeks and members of a different linguistic community. Interesting too is that in the Pontus (the Black Sea coast) where those expelled were on the whole 'Greek' speakers, the refugees arrived in Athens to find that Pontic Greek was not mutually intelligible with modern Greek anyway.

This is what a 'people who share a common language, a common geographic region, a common history and a common cultural identity' means in reality.

Devrim

[ComradeOm]

I don't think it is about 'stripping out everything that is enjoyable or fun from society'. It is about the fact that you can't have international football without nationsSo are you going to ban club football then? Obviously you can't have all that violence after local derbies... :glare:

As for the concept of nations, and this is really a debate for another forum, the reality is that any post-revolution society is going to have borders - certainly administrative and probably cultural. Regardless of your preferences and regardless of the means of their formation, the reality is that nations exist. I see no why why they should or will simply fade away in this era of mass communications. Nor do I believe that a return to the alternative - regionalism/provincialism - is particularly desirable. Although, as we can see in Ireland, neither way precludes competitive sports

[Devrim]

So are you going to ban club football then? Obviously you can't have all that violence after local derbies... :glare:

The article started like this:


In the future, in a real human community, there will surely be football. The elimination of economic and military competition from the basis of society does not imply that people won't still want to play team games, and football has proved itself to be the most compelling team game of all.

I don't see where you got the impression that I was anti-football in anyway. It is actually something that I enjoy immensely.

The idea of professional football though will be outdated in a world without money.


Regardless of your preferences and regardless of the means of their formation, the reality is that nations exist.

States exist yes, but the nation is a false recently constructed community.


Nor do I believe that a return to the alternative - regionalism/provincialism - is particularly desirable

I don't think that that is desirable either. I don't see it as the only possible alternative.

Devrim