Lesson 3 - Page 1 - How does nationalism bind people together?
Objectives: In this lesson, your team will:
- Interpret the role of place in the emergence of collective national identities.
- Analyze examples of nationalism in different places.
General Tips: Here are a few suggestions that can help your team complete this lesson together:
- Click the
 icon to open a new window with instructions for completing the lesson's collaborative learning activities (listed as Step 1, Step 2, and so forth).
- Your team should use the Group Discussion Board (located in the Communication area) to discuss questions that appear in blue boxes.
- Important vocabulary terms are defined in the Glossary (located in the Documents area).
- Complete this lesson according to the schedule provided by your instructor. Doing so will ensure that your team learns together.
- Elect leaders for each local group who can help coordinate the efforts of the entire team.
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How does nationalism help to explain the emergence of new states?
In the first lesson, your team analyzed the complexity
of national symbols. Many of those symbols are representations of an
idealized national culture. Sometimes national symbols communicate a
message of inclusion or multiculturalism. In other cases, national
symbols are used to exclude members of different cultures for the
purpose of preserving the ethnic identity or political ideology of one
community.
In the second lesson, your team studied important
concepts that geographers use to interpret political events related to
nations and nationalism. Take a moment to review some of the key ideas
from lesson two:
Nation - a group of people sharing the same cultural or historic
identity
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A nation is a "community of people whose members are bound
together by a sense of solidarity rooted in an historic attachment to a
homeland and a common culture, and by a consciousness of being different
from other nations." (Johnston 2000).
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A nation is an imagined community, for three reasons (Anderson
1990):
- It is imagined to have a larger sense of communion among its individuals
- It is imagined as limited in geographical reach by finite, if elastic, boundaries beyond which lie other nations
- It is imagined as community based on a relationship with a particular place
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A nation is not confined to a particular geographic area, nor is it
recognized by states as being sovereign. Instead, a nation is often
geographically disperse:
Members of a nation recognize a common identity, but they need not
reside within a common geographical area. For example, the Jewish nation
refers to the Jewish culture and faith throughout the world, regardless
of their place of origin (Knox and Marston, 2004).
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We also defined the concept of the state as an
independent political unit with territorial boundaries that are
recognized by other states. Notice the importance of the territorial
definition in the concept of state. Whereas nations are "people" or
more precisely "an imagined community," states are political
constructions with well-defined borders that are recognized by other
states and strong institutions (government) to manage internal affairs.
Finally, we defined nation-state as an ideal form
consisting of a homogeneous group of people governed by their own state
(Knox and Marston 2004). However, scholar Stuart Hall argues
"nation-states are not in fact unified, culturally. Most of them are the
result of conquests, invasions, settlements, and empires, and contain
within their borders people of different cultural and ethnic origins"
(Hall 1995). Moreover, the impact of international migration and the
process of globalization challenges even further the idea of the
nation-state, calling into question whether nations can ever achieve
sovereignty in a homeland only for people who belong to their imagined
community.
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