ESSAY: NOTIONS OF NATIONS

Different ways of looking at the things we think of as unitary countries.

As the US and China circle around one another trying to determine if they are seeing friend, foe, former friend, future foe, or perhaps even rising existential threat, both sides are alike in viewing the other as a monolithic entity.

China does this, the US does that. It’s not just journalistic shorthand to attribute the attitude and actions of a government to an entire nation, it’s the way we look at nations, even though we know nations contain multitudes.

So, how best to describe a living, breathing, multidimensional, interactive, dialectical entity that is multifarious and ever-shifting, ever-changing and resistant to unitary description? 

There’s a tradition in journalism, writing and film to see a nation as a large number of individuals, but at best it’s a poetic attempt to hint at diversity rather than delineate it.

Jules Dassin’s gritty 1948 film about New York called Naked City memorably concluded, “There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them”

Even eight million is impossible to personify, let alone 300 million or 1.4 billion. So for practical purposes, the US and China are impossibly big, complex and so amorphous as to beg being generalized about. In everyday speech it is easy, if not unavoidable, to talk about countries as unitary entities even though we know they aren’t. We just don’t have the words to do descriptive justice to a large community of individuals without making cardboard categories and leaning into stereotypes.

Nation states, “Imagined Communities” in Ben Anderson’s memorable turn of phrase, are largely mental constructs. They are too big to be grasped by anything less than a leap of creative thinking, and though the infrastructure, information pathways and laws of the land may stop at artificially-designated borders, they contain multitudes within. Nationhood is a compelling idea and the identities that go with it persist and tend to be resistant to erasure.

Of course, nations can be broken down into smaller conceptual units, such as states and provinces, and counties and townships, but even these units are beyond the ken of any individual to grasp in their full complexity. The readiness by which the self-proclaimed members of a nation state cite regional identities and regional pride serve as a reminder that there’s nothing monolithic about any nation, even in the eyes of the nationalists. Seen from within or without, nations are imagined categories.

Other constructs, such as ethnic identity, linguistic affinity and social class also defy easy definition and are no less durable for being largely ideations in essence.

Ditto for diversity of affiliations within states, provinces, cities and villages, too. Whether it’s the other side of the tracks, or the other side of the Pacific, imagination of the other is not the same as the reality of the other.