Understanding Nationalism

A man rides his bicycle past volunteers of the Hindu nationalist organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) taking part in the "Path-Sanchalan", or Route March, during celebrations to mark the 

Vijaya Dashmi or Dussehra in Mumbai, India, on October 11, 2016.

Countries are the building blocks of the modern world. Nearly two hundred make up the globe as we know it today. They vary in population and size: China and India are home to more than one billion people, while Vatican City and Monaco are smaller than a single square mile.

The world also comprises a large number of nations.

While the terms country and nation are often used interchangeably, they have subtle, but important, differences. Nations are groups of people united by ethnic, linguistic, geographic, or other common characteristics. Countries, on the other hand, refer to places with governments that are internationally recognized and have the power to oversee what happens within their borders (often in theory rather than in practice).

Like countries, nations come in different shapes and sizes. But unlike countries, nations are not always reflected in borders on a map. Some nations span multiple countries, such as the Kurdish nation, whose approximately thirty million people live in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. The Kurds, importantly, do not have a country of their own and are a minority in all the countries that they inhabit.

Other nations exist primarily within one country. Belgium, for example, is largely made up of two different groups of people—the Flemings and Walloons—which have distinct languages and cultural identities. Few members of these two nations live outside Belgium. Sometimes, a nation does neatly overlap with the borders of a country. For example, in Japan, 98 percent of citizens are of the same ethnicity and nearly all speak Japanese and share national traditions.

Groups of people working to advance the interests of their nation, country, or would-be country is known as nationalism. Often, nationalism is invoked by groups pushing for independence, especially when they are ruled by perceived outsiders. But nationalism doesn’t always mean being pro-independence. It can also entail people promoting their culture, asserting their religious beliefs, or organizing for greater political power.

In certain contexts, nationalism can serve as a basis of unity, inclusion, and social cohesion for a country. But when taken to extremes, nationalism can fuel violence, division, and global disorder.  READ MORE...

Sovereignity

Sovereignty is the bedrock of international relations. The concept lays out basic rules for how countries are allowed to interact with one another. In principle, it means countries get to control what happens inside their borders and can’t interfere in what happens elsewhere. This protects countries from being invaded over internal matters.

But the concept of sovereignty doesn’t play out perfectly in reality. There are limits to the control a country can exercise over what happens inside its borders. In the case of grievous human rights abuses like genocide, many countries argue breaches of sovereignty should be allowed on humanitarian grounds. Meanwhile, dozens of countries around the globe choose to give up a degree of sovereignty to join organizations like the European Union and the World Trade Organization.

Today, as the world grows increasingly interconnected, what constitutes a violation of sovereignty is up for interpretation—and world leaders have to decide how to tackle problems like climate change and terrorism that know no borders.

Nationalism can unite people—but also divide them, to destructive ends.  Countries that respect one another’s independence are the building blocks of our modern international system and learn what it takes for groups of people to form a new country.

Questions:

• Why countries as different as Poland and Germany would give up some sovereignty to join the European Union?
• Is a country’s sovereignty justifiable to protect human rights, such as the NATO-led intervention in Libya in 2011?
• Why some countries breach each other’s sovereignty for non-humanitarian reasons leaving other countries and governments deciding how to respond to such actions?

Online, we see sovereignity this way:  Sovereignty is the supreme authority within a territory.  Sovereignty entails hierarchy within the state, as well as external autonomy for states.  In any state, sovereignty is assigned to the person, body, or institution that has the ultimate authority over other people in order to establish a law or change an existing law.  In political theory, sovereignty is a substantive term designating supreme legitimate authority over some polity.  In international law, sovereignty is the exercise of power by a state. De jure sovereignty refers to the legal right to do so; de facto sovereignty refers to the factual ability to do so. This can become an issue of special concern upon the failure of the usual expectation that de jure and de facto sovereignty exist at the place and time of concern, and reside within the same organization.