By South China Morning Post | Created at 2025-03-28 12:31:29 | Updated at 2025-03-31 08:59:39
2 days ago
US President Donald Trump’s seeming conviction that the world is but a real-estate stage may have attracted ridicule, but the uncomfortable reality is that “nations” are a much more slippery concept than most of us like to admit, and the ingredients of nationhood or citizenship tricky to define.
But the reality is that for most of the past two millennia, national boundaries have been in flux, vulnerable to belligerent or power-hungry neighbours. A cynic could say that in comparison to Vladimir Putin’s bloody efforts to reclaim Ukraine for the Russian “motherland”, Trump’s expansionary ambitions have been positively polite.
Countries such as China, India, Iran, Japan and Mexico proudly claim a national coherence stretching back thousands of years but their national boundaries have advanced and retreated, sometimes quite radically. The late Anthony D. Smith, a pioneer in nationalism studies, defined a nation as a community conscious of its autonomy, unity and particular interests. Past experience suggests it is more complicated than that.
Those wanting to rebut Trump’s imperial claims with clear, simple, inalienable rights have found it frustratingly difficult to pin down irrefutable grounds on which to send him packing. Clearly, claims to historic roots in a particular geography have never provided a guarantee that predatory outsiders will not one day sweep populations aside and claim the geography as their own.
Likewise, rights based on lineage or a common culture and history, or language or religion have provided no defence. Look at Ukrainians today, Kurds in Turkey, Catalans in Spain or aboriginal populations in Australia or New Zealand – or, for that matter, Canada.
