News & Politics

How Nations Make Up National Identities | NYT - The Interpreter

by The New York Times

📚 Main topics

A relatively new ideaNational identity—the sense of belonging to a country alongside millions of strangers—is a modern construct, unlike older ties to family, religion and local communities. 0:00
How national identity emergedMigration to cities, new communications and transportation, mass warfare, and governments’ competition with religion helped create the conditions for national identity. 1:06
Identity and powerNationalism helped shift political authority toward the people, while also encouraging militarism and leader worship. 1:38
National identity todayDisputes over who belongs persist, from backlash against the European Union to political appeals to reclaim a country. 4:15

✨ Key takeaways

National myths unifyNations often tell stories of a shared past and common identity, even when language, ethnicity and borders have not historically aligned. 1:06
Group identity shapes self-esteemResearch involving Rocky IV suggests that people who strongly identify with their country may feel personally uplifted or diminished by its perceived victories and defeats. 2:40
Threat can fuel hostilityFeeling threatened can encourage people to demean outsiders, and nationalism can contribute to war and discrimination against minorities and migrants. 3:10

🧠 Lessons learned

Shared identity has risksNational belonging can foster solidarity, but it can also enable exclusion, racism and violence when a narrow national myth defines who belongs. 3:42
A civic ideal can fall shortThe idea that anyone can belong through shared values such as freedom and hard work is appealing, but racial, religious and linguistic definitions of American identity have persisted. 4:15

🏁 Conclusion/next steps

Creating a new common storyBuilding a world around shared values requires creating a new identity myth—and making it feel as compelling as the national identities people have long been taught to embrace. 4:47

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Transcript excerpt

0:00 Nationality feels so powerful. We fight for our country. We cheer for it. We draw our values from it. It’s a big way many of us describe who we are, but it didn’t used to be. Up until really recently, our identities came from stuff immediately around us — clans, religion, family. If you think about it, nationality is weird, the idea that you identify with millions of strangers just based on borders. That’s because national identity is made up.

0:34 “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” “And then [INAUDIBLE] scores!” National identity is the myth that built the modern world, but it also primes us for dictatorship, racism, genocide. And today, we’re fighting over whether to keep that kind of national identity. To understand why, you have to see how new this idea is. So you think you know what France is. It’s a place united by the French language and the French ethnicity, right? But as of the French Revolution, half of the people

1:06 there could not speak French. Only one in eight spoke it well. These are the languages that people spoke, just a patchwork that didn’t line up with borders. We know from modern genetics that ethnicity didn’t line up with borders, either. National identity became the idea that language, race, and borders should add up to a country. Nations can’t admit they’re made up, so they invent a national mythology that says they’ve been like this forever. The modern era brought four big changes

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