My country isn’t a nation (2021)

An article by Bret Devereaux where he argues that the US is technically not a nation, by a certain definition:

the idea of the ‘nation’ has always been fixed around the notion of a common birth or more correctly the myth of common birth. There are other elements in defining a nation of course: the group typically needs to be large, inhabit a shared, recognizable territory, and share common elements of culture (especially language) and a common history. But it is no accident that the common birth, the natio of nation, is central. A nation, precisely because it is supposed to share a common culture and history, is an entity that is imagined to extend both into the past and into the future, recreating itself, generation to generation; it is through the common birth that the common culture and history are supposedly shared. After all, a common history assumes some commonality stretching back to a prior generation.

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Now we ought to be clear here that we are stressing the word ‘myth‘ in ‘myth of common origin’ quite strongly. As demonstrated by the work of folks like Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities (1983)) and Azar Gat (War in Human Civilization (2006)) the nation in this sense is not a social or political form that exists in the wild, but is instead a thing that humans can invent and is usually the product of state-building rather than an organic cultural expression (for instance, the uniformity of French is a product of the government in Paris’ efforts to make it so, not an organic feature of the ‘French people’).

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And this doesn’t apply because there is no common origin (even a mythical one) for anything close to a majority of Americans:

While stories of the American founding tends to focus on the role of English settlers, only around 20% of Americans claim British ancestry and about half of those hearken back to Irish immigrants who arrived well after the founding. Needless to say, the ‘common history’ may not seem quite so common for those whose ancestors arrived on slave ships, or many decades after the founding, or the 13.7% of Americans who are foreign born, or, of course, those whose ancestors arrived over the Bering Ice Bridge perhaps twenty thousand years ago.

He contrasts Native Americans with immigrants:

To speak of Native American nations is thus not empty rhetoric, but simply correct usage of the term. Consequently almost everything I say about America and the nation needs a caveat that it doesn’t necessarily apply the c. 1.5% of Americans for are Native Americans, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians or Pacific Islanders; a truly national identity is still an option for those folks if they want it.

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[T]o be an American means that someone, somewhere in your heritage (likely many someones) broke the chain of connection between you and whatever mythical notional nation you may have otherwise been part of (mind you, not all Americans’ ancestors were given a choice in that rupture). Of course many Americans may still feel a connection to ‘the old country’ (wherever that may be), but the vision of ‘shared destiny’ that in theory unites a nation is shattered by adopting a different land, a different state and in most cases a different language and culture. Often at considerable personal cost. To be a United States citizen is fundamentally to have abandoned the nation as an organizing principle.

(I suppose this is usually summed up with the phrase “a nation of immigrants” except that, by this definition, there is no such thing?)

Therefore, attempts at US national unity have to be built on citizenship:

[W]ith no national core, it is the legally defined identity, citizenship, which forms the core of the United States. In this, the US has something in common with the Romans whose core identity, as we’ve been seeing (and will continue to see) was heavily dependent on citizenship as the key identity-marker over other ethnic, religious and cultural signifiers.

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Successful efforts to actually unify Americans are thus likely to focus not on national identity (which we do not share) but on citizen identity, which we do and which lends itself to many other shared things: an attachment to the country’s laws and stated principles, the documents which set out those principles, the institutions we maintain together and on the community of interest that shared ownership of a polity create.