What is a Nation?
I remember years ago talking to several Greek acquaintances in a cafe in town. They were telling me about how while Cyprus was partially occupied by Turkey, Cyprus was historically a part of the Greek nation, because of the culture Greek people shared there and how historically the two countries had been linked. This got me thinking about what these things really were, and I came to the conclusion that a nation was a matter of opinion.
A country, you can define quite objectively. It’s a piece of land where a particular government has a monopoly on the use of force within its borders, where they can arrest people and the like. And culture you can also define with some level of objectivity, by looking at language and the way people interact with each other, and so on. Culture is more fuzzy because multiple cultures can exist within a population or even within a person, collections of cultural traits may not be universally practised by everyone who considers themselves part of that culture, and it bleeds across borders between countries. But still, it’s possible to measure it.
Nations are something else again. Two people can disagree about what borders constitute a nation; to some Turkish nationalists, parts of Hungary belong to Turkey by right, and Syria, and Cyprus and Greece as well. You can back this position up by arguing history but it really comes down to subjective opinion – how far back do you go? Do you go as far as the Ottoman Empire? Or further, to when the Greek-speaking Byzantines ruled Anatolia? Those opinions over where the borders stop, those attempts to make fuzzy culture into a hard national distinction, can conflict between people in a way that is irreconcilable.