No Nation

What is the nation? What are its foundations? What is the source of huge surges of patriotism I see from time to time on the TV, in the movies, in books and even myself? What makes people happy to see a compatriot win laurels at world stage, whether it is sciences or economics or even music? And what makes my company distribute sweets when a particular cricket team wins.

The psychological foundations are quite easy to analyze. The needs addressed are primarily twofold: identity and simplification. The first, identity, is the need to define oneself. As Huntington says “people do not live by reason alone. They cannot calculate and act rationally in pursuit of their self interest until they define the self.” One way the individual provides a more concrete definition to the self, is by identifying himself with the nation. But whenever we say that "this is me", "that is not me” also follows. So we divide everything in our experience into two: us and them. The same need which makes me divide everybody into: nerd and not nerd, men and women, middle class and not middle class, my country and theirs. Us and them. That is the magic spell. Cast it and everything divides into two. And like the magician who brings rabbits out of his hat, you too have a magical identity to display. That the reality of the identity is as genuine as that of the rabbits is another matter. And though we may have created a name for ourselves, but unknowingly the “other” is also created.

The second purpose, simplicity, is a more general trick of our mind. We, being finitely intelligent beings, with ambitions to understand more than our mind can assimilate, continuously simplify the world around us. Hence generalization and categorization helps maintain our sanity. Makes life more tractable to our logic. The way to do this is to categorize everything around us and assign labels to the categories. Take the case of human relations. We keep meeting new people all the time. To simplify the task of continuously trying to understand them, we might assign one-time labels. From then on one can remember the person from the particular set of labels without needing to remember each peculiarity of the person. Now we don't need to observe or remember the peculiarities of all people we meet. Instead we just need to remember the labels we have assigned them. And each label will automatically bring forth the attached bundle of thoughts, feeling and emotions along, making the job of dealing with the world that much easier and automated. Same is the case with nationalities. Easier to remember that a person is an American and hence informal and forthright, or a Japanese and probably diplomatic and disciplined, rather than trying to see the specifics, even as we still know that not all American are like cowboys, nor are all Japanese samurai warriors. All this simplification may add to a certain convenience in our dealing with the world. But danger arises when we forget that the simplification was just a tool providing us with an erroneous approximation to reality. I personally feel that, although we might differ greatly outwardly, but as everywhere else, appearances are deceptive here as well. The individual, whether he belongs to India or China, Denmark or Africa, is still the same. He still suffers from the same greed, jealousy, egotism and cowardice. And in spite of these the same selfless nobility shines forth from time to time. Not that I am denying the existence of culture. Culture is present, not only in outward form of appearance and behavior of individuals, but also in to an extent in the superficial thought habits. But at a more fundamental level, the psychological construction of people hardly differs across races and continents, much less across nations. The diverse values may differ in emphasis across cultures, but they are still essentially unchanged.

What about the reality of nation in itself, that is, outside the mind. Whether we look at it geographically or socially or culturally, the nations appear to be just a perpetually changing result of historical accidents. Slightly different throws of the historical dice might have resulted in quite a different world map, but it still wouldn't have changed the scenario too much, either for better or worse. The people of different nations would still get bloodthirsty for each other from time to time, because of real or imagined threats. Still at war, or threatening it, as in the present. Jingoism is a necessary distraction, both for politicians and people, and shapes or sizes of countries do not matter that much.

So is the extant and nature of a nation a result of circumstances derived by its geography? If so, you may have expected the nations to have well defined natural barriers, which would somehow imitate the thick black lines on the map, as we see it. We know however, that it is certainly not the case. In fact, most of the times, both the people and geography are usually very similar immediately across border of most nations. The climate and landscapes change slowly with distance and this holds on the borders too. In fact the change is so slight and gradual, that it is usually very different to ascribe any boundaries. Same is the case with culture. Switzerland lies in the midst of the Alpine range, which extend to both the north and south of it. The northern part of Switzerland is mostly German speaking, and southern parts speak French. Yet if you ask, all of them would be proud Swiss. It only takes a line drawn on the map to make you German or Swiss or Austrian. Is culture then the determining factor? Though we may want to perceive (and sometimes impose) it differently, cultural variation is a continuous function of distances and it holds as much within the boundaries of a nation as without. People of Pakistani Punjab are quite similar to Indian Punjabis and north sri-lankans have much in common with the Indian Tamil folk. And this is no exception. Rather the rule.

The answer to the source of patriotic emotion, the love of country and flag is still unanswered. Nations worldwide do not seem to have any other justification to be called a unit, except for being brought together by the sheer force of historical circumstances. And kept that way by highly centralized governments and armies of the nation-state, whose form is itself an accident of history. Seeing this, we can now explore the reason for existence of the nation state. The nation-state has its seeds in the dependence of modern societies on institutions for their survival. Civilization brings forth the need for people to associate for mutual collaboration and comfort. So we have schools and courts and armies and so on. The nation can be considered as one of the institutions brought forth for such an endeavor. What make it unique is it’s scale, and consequently the power that it holds. Not that there are no other institutions on a similar scale. There are international bodies like UN, which resolve political issues for all the nation of the world, multi-national companies that employ hundreds of thousands of employees and span scores of countries, social work organization etc. However these institutions, unlike nations, have a their scope of activity limited to one sphere of our life. Either entirely commercial, or social, or political. They have very limited power to control our lives, much less our characters and beliefs. This, however, is not a limitation for nations. The immense power the nations can control helps them direct much of our lives. And among other things, this power is used to making us love them in turn. The nation-state controls the educational institutions, the media and most other sources of information to some extant. This is even true in highly democratic countries. And they can, and do, use those institutions to repeatedly fill us with the facts about our uniqueness or superiority. And feeling good about ourselves comes easily to everybody. Again the same need for identity coming into play. Even the private media, the newspapers, the filmmakers (let us not forget the song writers from where we started) join in this avalanche of self-praise. Starting from childhood textbooks, right though our growing years and our mature life, we hardly get a chance to think otherwise. So much of our patriotism is just a form of inculcated automatism.

It must however be admitted that nations are still a good arrangement (even if an entirely artificial and arbitrary one) for taking care of the individual’s need from the society. The question arises; are they the best possible arrangement. Is the possibility of a world-state a better alternative? Is it even feasible? As for the purpose of providing physical and economic security and helping collaborative enterprise, it seems very likely, that the world-state can do a better job of providing these. What about satisfaction of psychological needs? Remember the “Us and Them” need. If there are no them, it becomes increasingly difficult to define us. The need for identity fails to be fulfilled. I am not too sure of the world-state on this front. But living in India, I would wager that people could find easy solutions for this problem. The “us and them” works at many levels, and if it fails at the nation level it can be invented at a more localized level. Does this mean more internal strife? Maybe yes. But it surely won’t be any worse than the wars and armies we have to maintain at present. Lots of police yes. But we won’t need a army. What do you think??
And what should be the name of such a world state. I know that everyone would have his/her own suggestion for the name, but I am sure that Colonel would heartily agree with the name I am going to put forward here: "Germarael"