Word: nationhood
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...sheer and pervasive fervor, the love of nationhood has no equal among contemporary political passions. Independence is the fetish, fad and totem of the times. Everybody who can muster a quorum in a colony wants Freedom Now-and such is the temper of the age that they can usually have it. Roughly one-third of the world, some 1 billion people, have run up their own flags in the great dismantlement of empires since World War II, creating 60 new nations over the face of the earth. In the process they have also created, for themselves and for the world...
Their troubles are particularly instructive, for most of the world's new nations do not have anything approaching even the modest resources of Ghana, Nigeria or Indonesia. Most of them are poor, primitive and ill-equipped for so much as the basics of nationhood. Some have capital cities that are not cities at all and government ministers who have not learned to administer. Government, in fact, is usually the biggest, and sometimes the only, industry in many new countries-and corruption is a way of life. Many of the new nations do not have minimal communications and transportation...
...suggest that perhaps the U.N. might want to reconsider its criteria for admission in view of what he tactfully called "the recent phenomenon of the emergence of exceptionally small new states." Former U.N. official and Columbia University Dean Andrew Cordier puts it much more bluntly: "The concept of nationhood will be extended to absurdity," he says, if what he calls the "microstates" become full-fledged nations...
What constitutes a nation? Among political scientists, definitions differ. Johns Hopkins' Dr. Vernon McKay says that "a nation is a group of people who have a feeling of nationhood, based on common historical tradition, common cultural interests and, usually, common language." Rutgers Professor Neil McDonald suggests that the measure of a nation is "its capacity to maintain some kind of autonomy-political and economic-against its environment." The most sensible test of a nation's viability would seem to be economic sufficiency: the ability to support its people without massive outside aid. Such is not the case nowadays...
...Walter Bagehot observed, political man is a highly imitative animal. The subjugated peoples of the empires resented and rejected colonialism, but they assimilated and accepted much of its trappings, casting about for the same status symbols that their masters had. This deep psychological need to cut the figure of nationhood for all to see is responsible for the imposing government palaces, the parliamentary maces, the conspicuous Rolls-Royces, the Western-run "national" airlines and the gleaming chancelleries that exist in many young nations that can hardly afford to print money on their...