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J Seabolt: You agree that the term race as used by your Yugoslav friend is defined loosely and is actually more like the term ethnicity because when your Yugoslav friend uses the term he is really referring to the whole bundle of characteristics normally associated with ethnicity.

Actually, I see your point about ethnicity now, as well. In fact, I'm not terribly sure why I didn't get it in the first place. Yeah, the Yugoslav perspective was more about the loose bundle of associations described by ethnicity than the more concrete set of biological characteristics that go into, say, American race discrimination. Determining the place of race in Yugoslav ethnicity is a complex thing, and I probably overstated its importance to some degree.

So, now we have a "Yugoslavian" who defines "nation" loosely and "race" loosely then makes them synonymous in his head.

I don't know if they really defined "nation" loosely. While Yugoslavia was still a viable political body, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, etc. seem to have conformed to the definition of fourth-world nations -- that is, nations imbedded in a larger political body. Although, I'm not terribly sure how that status would play out, since technically any communist nation falls automatically under the category of second-world nation. At any rate, all of the nations subsumed under the republic of Yugoslavia had precise geographic boundaries and their own governing bodies, including their own presidents.

I can think of only one reason for this -- you have the "race" meme embedded in your mind, and it is trying to replicate.

Damn memes.

I'll grant you your original point, but this fallback position was given a pseudo-scientific boost and became influential over a range of political and ideological topics (so called Social Darwinism was just one aspect of the misapplication of evolutionary thinking).

I don't know that the point is really worth arguing. I brought it up only as a suggestion for tracing the idea further back than Darwin. In fact, it seems to me that "On the Origin of Species" itself has the tendency of blurring the sort of distinct categorical divisions necessary for a hierarchical structure -- the early chapters, in fact, question the validity of "species" as a natural category -- such that some adjuct become necessary to explain the hierarchical features of social Darwinism. But that's rather incidental to your point -- it doesn't so much matter where the hierarchical structure of social Darwinism comes from so long as we can reasonably assume that social Darwinism was a contributing factor to political policy during the formation of the Middle East. I'd just like to see more evidence to that end before drawing any conclusions on its impact.

Loricat: So all of those factors -- culture, religion, biology, history & geography -- are part of any given national identity.

Yeah, they can be, and part of why I raised the whole question is that I want to understand how a given group decides on which factor to emphasize in building their national identity, and why it sometimes works, and why it sometimes fails. More generally, I'm interested in what kind of thing a nation is if it can be constructed around any of these things.

With distance of time and space, we, intellectualizing, can see the distinctions, but those in-the-moment are less likely to analyze what aspects of their nationhood are under siege.

I don't know. My impression of the formation of Germany as a nation is that the people involved were pretty clear on choosing German folk culture as the focal point around which to organize the new, discreet political body.

In Korea & Japan, biology seems to be the primary focus of nationalistic spirit -- everything else is important, but their culture, for example, is crucial because of their racial identity.

I can't speak much for Korea, and you seem to know enough about it that I'm safe in deferring to your judgment, but from what I know of Japan it seems to me that culture is significantly less important than race in determining their national identity. This has become increasingly more obvious in the years after World War II, from which point the Japanese were increasingly willing to co-opt their traditional culture in exchange for prominance in the international community. But at the same time, they remain discriminatory against the races whose culture they've co-opted.

I see your point, though. When culture is important, it's important because they've linked it to the issue of race.

Unlike Canada (and other countries...Australia, the USA, and??), where if you're born here while your parents are on vacation, you get Canadian citizenship. Geography, then, is the fulcrum of our national identity, on which balances our hodge-podge of ethnicities, captured under two official languages (and loads of 'unofficial' ones).

I'm not sure. That looks like an argument for geography, but I'd say that our ideals play into it a great deal. The loopholes for gaining Canadian and American citizenship seem designed, in some instances, to deny the accidents of birth in determining a person's access to American and Canadian ideal -- liberty, for instance, or justice.

Could we say then that part of the problem in the Middle East is perhaps a cacophony of competing elements in their national identities?

Hmm. That's a suggestion that warrants more scrutiny, I'd say. For the moment, at least, I'd say that the problem isn't so much that Middle Easterners can't decide on a focal point for national identity but rather than the focal points that they would choose don't necessarily mesh with the national identities imposed on them by foreign powers in the period described by Fromkin's books. Even where there are points of agreement among the nations of the Middle East, their national histories over the past 80 years or so serve to disrupt those agreements. They may be saying, in effect, "Hey, we'd love to join forces on the strength of our shared religion or culture, but you guys did this to us 30 years ago, and we're not ready to forgive that without some bigger concessions."

But that's just conjecture at this point. I really need to know more about the history of the region before I settle on an explanation. Fortunately, we're already reading about that.

Starting a new book today, I had one of those mental clicks that you get occasionally when you struggle with ideas like these. The book is "The Challenge of the American Revolution", by Edmund S. Morgan, and the click came from reading the first paragraph of the introduction, as follows:

Every nation needs a history. Without the collective memory embodied in history a people would lose their collective identity in the same way that an individual suffering from amnesia loses his personal identity. But collective memory, like the memory of an individual, is apt to be faulty; it suppresses some events and reshapes others, and because it fades with the passage of time it often needs refreshing. "The Challenge of the American Revolution", p. ix.

The thought that occurred to me, reading this, is that all of the various centers that we've talked of as serving as the focal point for building a national identity may all be limited expressions of a mutual history. What is necessary in building the idea of a nation, then, would be some sense that a people are united through their shared past, in whatever sense that's possible.

Further, each potential nation picks a limited historical viewpoint by picking some particular element of culture or myth. It's a form of suppression, really, that says, we're going to pay attention to what happened at this time but not at that time. So, when the Germans built their national identity around shared folk culture -- particularly the kitchen stories compiled by the Brothers Grimm -- they were drawing on a limited shared history and ignoring, say, the history of inter-tribal conflicts. The Serbians drew on a different aspect of culture, and thus created a different historical focal, but drawing on the myth of their long persecution as a people. But in both cases, it's the past that serves as the anchor for national identity, and some form of history is necessary for securing that identity.

In the wake of that mental click, I also thought about the chapters in Mircea Eliade's "The Sacred and the Profane" in which he discusses the concept of sacred time. Religious conceptions of identity also depend on a historical elements, one that highlight's the divine nature of a particular moment in the past (whether real or imagined) while simultaneously ignoring or suppressing historical events of equal standing.

Welcome to the fray, Luis. I hope you'll be contributing more.

I think you make some interesting points here. One thing that occurred to me in reading your point was that the Sublime Porte failed to foster any sort of national identity among its people, and in some instances worked against any national identity that might have arisen naturally. The deportation of Turkish Armenians, for instance, or their suspicion against the refugee Jews living in Pakistan. Surely it would have been more in their interests to discriminate less, particularly against social groups that could have served as allies. Pride seems to have been a negative factor here, leading to chauvanism of all varieties.

If Fromkin's analysis is correct, we might also deduce that the Ottoman's inability to distance themselves from their conquering past is part of what limited their willingness and ability to breed national feeling among their subjects. The Saracens cut a swath through Spain in the Middle Ages, but their vastly more tolerant attitude towards their conquered subjects allowed for a kind of solidarity that the Ottoman Empire apparantly lacked.