Nation why not

What struggles, victories, desires, and processes seem to overlap, and where do they differ? How have these parallels or disparities impacted interracial solidarity in the United States, and what does this look like in the current day? Dunbar-Ortiz writes critically about the false symbolism of the Statue of Liberty. What other memorials, museums, or cultural practices can you identify that promote similarly harmful mythologies about the United States?

How does this process tangibly impact those who are indigenous to the United States? How does it skew popular conceptions of Indigenous history? What does this claim reflect about the importance of the narratives we construct around immigration? Given the existing archival silences and given that immigration stories, by nature of the processes of immigration, are, too, often left from the record, reflect on the processes by which history is made, recorded, and remembered.

How can we combat these silences? Films, paintings, speeches and activities can invoke national heroes and national myths, which in turn can induce a sense of commonality and belonging. All of this is routine and familiar, on one level. As we shall see further below, nationalism has a dark side.

It involves inevitable shoehorning of a people under a simplified set of cultural or other characteristics. The degree of this shoehorning and the way it is carried out are important. It is not necessary to specify which traits define a group seeking self-determination. One advantage of conceiving of national identities in subjective terms, and jurisdictional units in terms of the area on which the national group resides, is that it avoids the problem of contested definitions of what really constitutes a nation.

One consequence of this view is that imagination and symbolism become essential for defining a nation in the mind of its potential members. Before turning to the issue of nationalism as a political ideology, I want to say something brief on this critical point.

I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community. Anderson, , pp. One might argue that a nation not only imagines itself, others imagine it too, and offer constructions or representations of it as a friend or as an enemy.

There are regular flights to the capital, Hargeisa, from Dubai and Addis Ababa. The city — a scruffy, sprawling town of cinderblock houses and potholed roads — feels coated in a fine film of desert dust. Food stalls crank out steaming, heaping plates of chewy camel meat not bad and thick, frothy camel milk nauseating — to me, anyway.

From other stalls, money-changers dispense grimy, faded bricks of shilling banknotes held together by rubber bands. Nowadays, most people are more likely to pay for basic goods and services by transferring cellphone credit. Hargeisans will tell you, with some ironic pride, that their city is one of the few places in the world that was bombed by planes that took off from that same city.

The entity that today calls itself the Republic of Somaliland owes its existence to two main factors: its proximity to Yemen and its abundance of sheep. In the late 19th century, Britain with the support of Italy and France with the support of Russia were locked in a struggle for control of the Nile.

As a means of both countering French influence and ensuring a regular supply of mutton for its garrison at the Yemeni port city of Aden, Britain signed a series of agreements with tribes in northern Somalia. Whereas Somaliland had been considered a backwater by the British, and therefore left mostly to govern itself through the existing clan structure, Italy considered Somalia an integral part of its short-lived ambitions to build a north African empire that also included modern-day Libya and parts of Egypt.

There is evidence from studies of regions of India and other parts of Africa to support the notion that postcolonial countries where colonisers had a lighter touch turned out better in the long term.

As Somalilanders will often remind you, it was, in the past, an independent country, fully recognised by the international community, including the UN. But this halcyon period lasted less than a week. On 26 June , the former Protectorate of Somaliland became fully independent from British rule, its independence recognised by 35 countries around the world, including the US.

The next day, its new legislature passed a law approving a union with the south. On 1 July, Somalia became independent from Italy, and the two were joined together. It is a decision Somaliland has regretted almost ever since. Difficulties emerged almost immediately, and just a year after independence, voters in the north rejected a new constitution. The marriage was off to a rocky start. There are six main Somali clans, with dozens of subclans.

The vast majority of those living in what is now Somaliland come from various branches of the Isaaq clan. The south is more heterogeneous. And yet we made a similar rush to judgment in the mids: we forecast the death of the nation-state, without allowing for its capacity to adapt and rebound.

And the nation-state has adapted to new conditions, in ways that have preserved its capacity to control territory, people, and events. Consider what has happened to the Internet. In the s, this new technology was heralded as a powerful way of circumventing and challenging state authority. The capacity of the state to counter new forms of opposition is often underestimated. For example, some people argued that the Internet would make it easier for officials to leak sensitive information and hold governments accountable for abuses.

And the leaks themselves proved to be less threatening to the established order than expected. It was a similar story with regard to the alleged capacity of the Internet to enable powerful new forms of social mobilization, such as the anti-globalization and Occupy movements. In some respects, the new millennium is a golden age for nation-states, precisely because of technologies that were expected to undermine them. The anthropologist James C. The ability of developed nations to engage in this sort of mapping and surveillance was already well-developed in , but it has improved dramatically since then.

Because financial transactions are digitized, economic activity is easier to monitor. Similarly, the behavior of citizens can be analyzed through the vast streams of data that are produced by surveillance cameras, license plate scanners , cell phones, computers, Internet service provider records, television set-top boxes, automotive telematics systems, and other devices.

As Scott observed in , legibility matters because it is a precondition for social and economic regulation. The more that a state knows about its domain, the better its ability to govern within it. Even in the sphere of international affairs, states have maintained their influence.

Meanwhile, countries such as Malaysia and Argentina have resisted IMF pressure to adjust their domestic economic policies. Even in Europe, the nation-state continues to put up a fight.

The response was yet another strengthening of enforcement mechanisms — first by regulations adopted in , and then by treaty in , and again by regulations adopted in Once again, nation-states insisted on having the last word. Of course, there are other ways in which nation-states have asserted themselves.