I don't understand how nationalism is a modernist thing.

>>1021553
Did it originate in the ancient or medieval eras? No? Then it's modern.

What's wrong with striving to improve your country over others?

You sound like a cuck to me.

That's like saying feminism isn't modern because there were amelioration of women's societal status through history.

Because nation states are a modern concept
You think french speaking people gave a shit if they payed taxes to a German king in the 1300's?
It's not like the state fucked around with their business much beyond that

>>1021553
The idea that a state is bound to its people is an inherently liberal idea developed by the French Revolution

Can you elaborate?

>>1021565
I never said there was anything wrong with it. Didn't people always want their nations to be the best?

>>1021553
Because prior to the French Revolution nobody in any society on Earth ever felt any kind of loyalty towards any group larger than their own village.

>>1021598
What about their homelands?

>>1021614
That was their village
At best you could find solidarity between coreligionists when confronted with people of a different denomination or religion. Even that wasn't a guarantee though

>>1021614
I was joking. People who act like nationalism just appeared in France one day with absolutely no precedent are retarded. Modern nationalism is a fairly new thing, but plenty of people throughout history have felt loyalties to wider cultural and political groups, though it was generally stronger among the elite (as opposed to modern nationalism which is a mass movement). Yeah, they usually felt stronger loyalties to their villages, their families, their religions, and so on, but that hardly means a loyalty to a larger group didn't exist anywhere, and it's hardly any less true today either.

>>1021661
Fuck off retard

>>1021676
Kek. Did I hurt your memes?

Loyalty to your country was not really a thing in ancient or medieval history.
You were loyal to your local lord or local king or local ruler whatever his title may be. You paid taxes to him, fought for him, and did what he said.
Now often this local ruler would be loyal to someone higher up on the totem pole but often the individual peasants were just following orders, they didn't usually feel too much obligation to the king of the king beyond what their immediate king told them to do.

As the idea of a nation expands beyond that and actual identities actually start existing beyond the scope of simple ethnic groups into what we call nation states you start seeing loyalty to the king of kings himself by the peasants themselves. Even then local lords still held a lot of power and a lot of loyalty, this is extremely true in Medieval France and Germany.
Globalization is ultimately what created Nationalism as we know it. When your world is limited to this village and the one next to it, national affairs aren't even considered.
When you're trading your crops to a guy who's taking them 50 miles to port to ship overseas to a different country things change a bit. Whoah, there's a bunch of people called the Spanish over there, they sure are different than us English.
Hey, look at those Germans, they sure aren't French! And people will go with what they know versus what they don't, so national identity grows as inter country trade grows. When everyone you know is the same you don't expect anything different and don't want anything different.

When you've got some people that are kinda different but they look like you, speak like you do, and eat what you do and then you see those people that look similar but speak different, eat different, and act different you want to stick with those guys who at least cook the same things you do.

>>1021661
Good post.
Even before that, Roman society was very nationalist.

>>1021758
Yes and no.
Romans were proud of being Roman, but the majority of people in the Roman Empire weren't Roman. The reason Rome held onto power for so long was they let most of the conquered peoples retain their local identities and local customs so long as they provided tribute and troops. Many were Romanized but just as many were left largely to their own devices.

>>1021784
The majority of people living in the British Empire weren't British, that doesn't mean British nationalism wasn't a thing.

>>1021790
Of course not, but they too kept power largely by letting the locals to their local customs provided they weren't too barbaric.
Also by then Europeans had fully adopted the idea of Nation States and Nationalism was in full swing, so not the best comparison to make.

>>1021784
Yeah yeah but that doesn't change my argument.
Romans, at least citizens, were nationalist. Of course this was tied with citizenship, but still, I think it evolved beyond that.

>>1021734
>they didn't usually feel too much obligation to the king of the king beyond what their immediate king told them to do.
t. pagan heretic

>>1021758
No it wasn't

>>1021804
It was odd that the Romans evolved culturally in such a way, even the Chinese did not have half the nationalist fervor the Romans did. Really, nobody had such a strong cultural identity as the Romans until the Renaissance happens.
I've never really thought about that before, but I bet someone has. Maybe I can find some books on this subject specifically.

Nationalism happened when common people stopped acknowledging the kings and elites as a personification of their country and started worshiping the abstract idea of what that country represents to them as a whole

>>1021859
Yes it was

>>1021896
It wasn't

>>1021899
Was

>>1021567
>You think french speaking people gave a shit if they payed taxes to a German king in the 1300's?

Yes, they probably did, they probably would have prefered to pay taxes to a French King even if it was the same amount of taxes and the king was as much abusive. This is how human nature works, we are a tribal, ethnic species that want "our team" to be on the top, and you better don't live in a human society being part of an ethnic minority.

You are relativizing history and pretending that the "peasantry" only cared about their bread and their taxes, an extremely inaccurate and patronizing way of looking at historical societies.

In fact I would say that your understanding of society from a simplistic, cynical and materialistic perspective is more modern than anything.

Nationalism is just tribalism on steroids, which predates everything.

>>1021912
n't

>>1021862
Well, Romans tied religion to politics.

Citizens of city-states also had something kinda like nationalism on a smaller scale than a nation-state but bigger than just tribalism. They would've had tutelary deities so religion also played a role there.

Some could say the Jews went further and went on to consider their national war god THE God and themselves to be the chosen people. This identity united the different tribes.

>>1021915
Nice post that lacked any and all substance /pol/
No they didn't care

>>1021923
>if you challenge my outdated and simplistic view of medieval period you're a Nazi
Take it easy man.

The left liked nationalism in the XIXth century because the contemporary traditional empires were controlled by a conservative elite of aristocrats, clergy and military men.

The left dislikes nationalism in the 21st century because now they control the global networks of power and influence which seek the establishment of an one-world government ruled by left-wing intellectuals, so nations stand in the way of their power project.

It's really that simple.

>>1021923
Apparently you know the opinion of every french peasant in the 1300's.

Time-travelling must be a side power of your congenital super autismo.

>>1021758
Roman society was patriotic, there's a difference.

Nationalism is a modern concept because the idea of a state being associated with an ethnic people is a modern concept.
People before nationalism were loyal to their countries, not to their nations.

>>1021945
So nationalism is just a convenient tool for lower classes to maintain cohesion and have a chance at successfully overthrowing their rulers?

ITT: people who don't understand the difference between nationalism and patriotism.

>>1021950
So Romani nationalism doesn't exist because there's no Romani state?

>>1021958
No. Nationalism is significant because like it implies that a state must be defined by the people who live in it. This is why it's a pretty classical liberal idea (all men are equal and such) and why it really can never exist among the ruling classes.

>>1021980
No, it exists because there's a romani nation.

>>1022000
What's a nation?

>>1022020
na·tion
ˈnāSH(ə)n/
noun
a large aggregate of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory.
"leading industrialized nations"
synonyms: country, sovereign state, state, land, realm, kingdom, republic; More
a North American Indian people or confederation of peoples.

Source: Google

>>1021915
lmao your claim is absolutely baseless

>>1022031
>a large aggregate of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory.
And this didn't exist before the French Revolution?

>>1021565
>actually wishing to work on behalf of people who might share a fraction of your DNA and even die for an arbitrary line in the sand.

Damn, what a cuck!

>>1022049
>nation
yes
>nation-state nationalism
no

>>1022050
>nations are about genetics
>nations rely on defined boundaries

>>1022104
Well, that's what I've been trying to say. Nationalism itself isn't new, just modern nation-state nationalism as a mass movement.

>>1022049
Obviously the ideas have been around for a long time. The most obvious ancient example I can think of is the Jews/Israel

File: 12182776_892540847524771_5006384253069412123_o.jpg (201KB, 2048x1221px) Image search: [Google]

201KB, 2048x1221px

>>1021553

See back in the dark ages, religion and tribes unified people.

There was the King of France, but he had to deal with powerful nobles. The people under the nobles didn't answer to the King but rather the nobles. People's loyalty was to their liege not the state.

When the kings centralized their power in the 1500's and 1600's people now were loyal to the kings and then the kings started espousing nationalism to make their people more loyal, but it wasn't really until the 1800's when people began to see themselves as citizens rather than subjects.

>>1021565
>Dying for an abstract concept

>>1021553
What's wrong with nationalism? As long it isn't extreme nationalism where you hate every race but your own, I don't see the issue. Everyone should take pride in their country.

Nations are best when they strive to achieve within laws and rules that are articulated from their own culture. When you throw in the semantics of too many parties you get a loud zoo that needs to have additional rules put in place to stop the animals from killing each other.

But this is just a really shitty summary of something broader.

>>1022554
>dark ages
>not saying Middle Ages

Into the trash it goes.

>>1021949
wew lad

Peasants didn't typically a) care for whom they were lorded over by (unless it effected them physically or stood to take away their life source- the land) and b) have the political or educational mobility to know about ideas or theories of "nationalism".

Typically, you were considered to be a mere subject of which other big dude (tyrant, king, oligarch) happened to rule in the area and you never really came into contact with other ethnicities because geographical mobility didn't occur too often.

The stages are quite interesting in how nationalism being tied to the nation-state manifests. It starts with the Treaty of Westphalia and the definition of what a sovereign state is and then moves to the French Revolution in which there is an actual proper attempt by the state to encourage national vigour and actually create a national interest that speaks to the common person.

For example Napoleon was the first to gear his entire nation towards fighting war economically, militarily and through propaganda. This encouraged all Frenchmen to fight for whatever concept of France he was pushing instead of the previous methods of a) simply being a monarch and impressing the locals to fight for you through force or b) the locals fighting to defend their own immediate possessions.

Therefore placing ideas of "Nationalism" on say, the Roman Empire, is quite anachronistic. You can sort of find vague connections, but it's not truly the same.

>>1021915
> they probably would have prefered to pay taxes to a French King
There was no such concept of France though, and even less concept of a French people. There was literally no solidarity between a Parisian and a Breton.

>>1024686
that certainly seems to be the case when the regal nobility had more in common with their cousins in the land over yonder than their shitty serf peasant folk

>>1024277
>not dying for the thinks that doesn't ever give back

Literally the highest virtue anon. Hegel knew this.

>>1021553
Nations as entities with some sort of quasi personality haven't been around that long. Regionalism was a thing but for example the only thing holding Flanders and say Brittany together was the office or person of the French king.

Think about the anthems for a while, it's typically long live the queen or king or whatever.

>>1021553
That's because you haven't read enough about the world before nationalism