07-11-2022, 02:27 AM
(07-10-2022, 07:58 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:(07-09-2022, 11:26 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The United States of America is not a nation-state. It is a nationality of convenience. This is an empire, even if it is (long may it so stay) the Empire of Liberty. We have great diversity in what it means to be an American. Very old Hispanic communities in New Mexico and Florida are just as American as descendants of residents of what were the original thirteen colonies and states. If having been stripped of any cultural connection to a foreign country except genes that place one's ancestors (or enough of them) in sub-Saharan Africa so that they could do back-breaking toil under brutal management and having to create a culture in America that belongs only in America, then what is?
Interesting point. I think we can call The United States of America a nation state. Such a thing is not necessarily composed of one ethnic group or "nationality", although activists in the 19th and early 20th centuries thought so. All nations contain diverse populations. The USA has always had more diversity than most nations. A nation is an area with a common government. Ours is a federal nation, which means it has states that are governments within governments that have some authority. Which should have more is always a contentious issue in a federation like ours.
"descendants of residents of what were the original thirteen colonies and states" is what I and my family are. Only my paternal ancestry line originally came from a southern state, Virginia. A former contributor to this forum (the old version established by the authors of T4T) had done research into ancestry in that region, and thought my Meece ancestors must have lived in the eastern VA peninsula, since I know I probably had Meece ancestors in that area. My earliest known direct paternal ancestor was born in the 1780s and got married around 1804 in Franklin County in central Virginia, and was mentioned there in the 1810 US census. By 1840 this ancestor, Peter Meece, is listed in the US census as living in the township in Indiana where my Dad (Peter's great great grandson) was born, along with Peter's son, and they had no slaves. So if the Meece line ever had slaves, they had been given up.
But all of us in the USA have ancestors that came from somewhere else, whether 13,000 years ago, 350 years ago, 170 years ago, 120 years ago, 60 years ago, or 10 years ago. We are all Americans living in the United States.
If I understand the term empire, which is kind of vague I admit, the USA's imperial aspirations reached their limit in The Phillippines, Guam and Puerto Rico. We had already bought Louisiana, conquered most "indian" land, and half of Mexico, bought Alaska, and absorbed Hawaii, but we let The Phillippines go. The USA later asserted its right to determine by invasion the governments and laws of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. We failed in the former two, at least, and after much travail may have succeeded in the latter. We had a few smaller allies in these projects, too, including some natives in the first two cases, who proved unworthy.
Could it be that the definition of nation-state has evolved from long ago? As I understand it, nowadays we use sovereign state to refer to the top-level political entity (the one shown on passports). We evolved from the old nation-state model where ethnicities were tied to land to a model determined by law / global agreement via the UN.
There are advantages of the current model but it does really make me think of what will happen should nature reclaim some of the lands via climate change that people currently live in who will be forced to relocate. What will it mean to be X-ian/ese if country X is underwater or otherwise totally uninhabitable? Also, once the people of those lands do relocate elsewhere, do they just lose their sovereignty? Is there a way to preserve it? If not, our system of what defines sovereignty/nationhood has a gap as up until now it assumes the land and people living there are fixed in place. This may become a real concern for some Pacific island countries in our lifetimes (especially Millennial/Zoomer/Alpha) as some of them are expected to be the first impacted by climate change later this century.