No. of Recommendations: 3
I'm not sure why you are dismissing the example of Italian state formation as I think it explains the problem I'm raising with the nation state and nationalism very well.
Because you're suggesting that these problems are universal to the nation state and nationalism generally, and the way that the Italian state formed isn't an especially representative example. There are some European states that did form that way - Germany, the UK, Italy. Accumulations of disparate individual political states into a larger kingdom or republic, and a national identity was forged later in order to unify them. But there are a lot of countries that absolutely did not form that way. The notion of being a "Dane" or an "Armenian" or a "Slovak" predates by many centuries the formation of the nation-states that were built around those peoples/nations. They don't follow that model.
You are asking me to give you an example of the formation of a state with political authority over a territory in which all the people share a cultural, historical, and linguistic identity.
No, I'm not. No one pretends that there exists any nation-state where 100% of the people share exactly the same identity, down to the last single individual.
What I am pushing back on is the idea that the national identity is an imaginary one, created out of whole cloth to serve the nation-state or as part of the creation of the nation-state, rather than something that actually existed prior to the creation of the nation-state among most of, or perhaps nearly all of the people. There were Danes before there was Denmark, Algerians before there was an Algeria, Bengalis before there was a Bangladesh, etc. These identities are not universal down to the last individual. But those nation-states were created to give autonomy and self-determination to the peoples that were already there, and the identities those nation-states foster and give self-determination to pre-date the nation state.
Not every nation-state was formed like Italy was, or how Benedict Anderson models them. Not every nation has to be the multi-cultural, multi-lingual amalgamation that you appear to esteem. In fact, quite a few modern nations formed because the multi-cultural, multi-lingual amalgamation goes horribly wrong. So while I wholeheartedly agree that this would be ideal:
Equal civil and political rights should be granted to all people living in a territory claimed by a state regardless of culture, religion, language, or presumed natural rights to occupancy of the land, and all people should be given access to the means necessary to live fulfilling and meaningful lives within that territory....
....the reason we have countries like Armenia (who were brutalized by the Turks) and Bangladesh (who were brutalized by the Pakistanis) is because that ideal is not often met. In fact, the reason we have most countries is because most peoples/nations strongly desire autonomy and self-determination without having that desire subject to the willingness of a larger majority. It's why Pakistan broke away from India - the majority Muslim community did not want to be subsumed into a larger entity with the much larger non-Muslim (mostly Hindu) community.
Those self-identifications of groups of people much larger than a primordial village (again, borrowing Anderson's description) are not imaginary. And the nation-states that were created around them are in service to those identities, not an imaginary one.
