[DRAFT] Countries and Nations [IN PROGRESS]

When someone asks you "Where are you from?", you don't think twice before delivering the right answer, or some answer. There seems to be some generally accepted names that are reasonable answers to this question. We are in principle answering the question "Which officially recognized country are you from?". Many years ago if someone had told you that she is from Bosnia, you would have probably gone further and asked her more questions eventually forcing her to admit that she is from Yugoslavia. At that particular point in time there weren't so many people in the world that knew where Bosnia was.

Today, Bosnia is a recognized country and few people question that fact. Whatever that glued Bosnia to the old Yugoslavia is not there anymore and the chances for going back to the old times is definitely zero. Creation of Bosnia (which I am using as an example) was not cheap. Many lives were lost, many were raped, and many got tortured, many family stuctures were torn apart, and many many more lost their homes. Whether the whole thing was worth it or not could be seen from different angles. Some of those who lost their dear ones may think the price was too high and some others would think it was worth the cost on the whole. However, future generations who never saw any of the mess would never think about these questions. For them there will be a Bosnia and some old stories about some heros and some butchers.

Yugoslavia was a concept that lost its meaning. Borders and geographic names are conventions and regulations that change. To see the change you need to see things from the right perpective. The question always is what this right perspective is. Sometimes the right perspective is selection of the right granularity of time, centuries, years, months, and so on. Some other times taking the right perspective means selection of the right granularity in some other cooridinate. That is all I want to say about the right perspective at this moment.

Let´s go back to the nationality issue. Consider me for example. I was born in Qorve (also written as Ghorveh), a small town in Kurdistan, Iran. My mother is originally from the city of Bijar (also in Kurdistan, Iran) and her mother tongue is Persian. My father is originally from Qorve and his mother tongue is Turkish (that is, a Turkish speaking Iranian not a Turkish speaker from Turkey). Until a few years ago most of the people in Qorve spoke Turkish and we did the same at home. So my mother tongue is Turkish. I am thereby related to Persians, Turks and Kurds. I learned Turkish at home and Kurdish when playing with other kids and also working in my father's radio and electronics shop which had many Kurdish customers from the villages around Qorve. Although my mother's mother tongue was Persian she never spoke Persian to us. We learned Persian at school just like many other kids in Iran.

So looking at things from a rather abstract point of view, I am half Persian and half Turkish. But is that really the case? How do I know that my mother is 100% Persian or my father 100% Turkish? I don't. For most of the population of Iran (and for that matter, the world) it is hard to trace back more than a few hundred years. And most important of all: do I feel half Persian? Or half Turkish? Or is it 50% Turkish, 40% Persian and 10% Kurdish? Or is it another distribution of the percentages?

Just to make things a bit more interesting or complicated, take into account the fact that I have lived most of my life in Sweden. How much of me is Swedish? What about my kid who are born in Sweden?

Clearly, the concept of a country seems to be subject to international agreements and treaties. And the list of countries is subject to slow but constant change. The number of countries in the world has been increasing for some time now and this will probably continue for some decades. The efforts of most governments in the world is to try to create a one-to-one correspondence between the concept of a country and its nation. This is usually called the "nation building process". For example, in such a process, the Russian speakers of Latvia become good Latvians, the Serbs of Croatia become good Croatians and the Kurds of Iraq good Iraqi citizens.

Not so many people seem to know how this process of nation building should look like. Even some of the most democratic countries of the world seem to suffer from the lack of knowledge how this should be done. United Kingdom, for example, with its long history, is nothing more. These kindoms apparently never became really one. And if the EU was not created, probably Wales and Scotland would have become independent countries.

But what does the word nation mean. Here are some candidate definitions:

• People that live in a geographically well-defined part of the world, internationally recognized as a country: for example, Welsh, French. But what about Palestinians? They don´t live in a well-defined part of the world.
  
  
• People with a common language: But that is not enough. Just consider Brazil (Portugese) and Portugal (Portugese), or England (English), Australia (English), USA (English).
  
  
• People with a common religion: Well that won't work.
  
  
• People that are born in a geographically well-defined part of the world that is recognised as a country: This definition on its own doesn´t seem to be sufficient, but it does capture quite a bit of the truth.
  
  
• People with a common past: How far away in time do we mean? If we go far back to the beginnings, then we would all belong to the same nation. It is not such a bad idea, but it is not a practical definition.
  
  
• People with a common future: Do we have the same future? This depends on the perspective we take. We could argue that we all live on Earth and there is no reason to believe that a substantial number of the Earth population will leave Earth and live somewhere else, so at the end we all have the same destiny. So again, we are all members of the same nation with a shared future, however, this is not a practical definition either and therefore irrelevant in today´s world.
  
  
• People who feel they are members of a particular nationality: This sounds like a promising definition. I can not say anything negative about this.
  
  
• ...
  

So, I am going to adopt the last definition I just gave. That is, you are of the nationality that you care about. If you think you are American, then you are American. If you feel you are a French speaking Canadian, then you are indeed a French speaking Canadian and should not be mistaken as a French. If you are an Egyptian who moved to the USA and feels both Egyption and American, then you have double nationality and nobody can take that feeling from you.

So, nationality, just like religion is a personal thing.