From our perspective in the early twenty-first century nothing could be more natural than to see the world as a tapestry of nation states. View a map of the world and you will observe a four-color patchwork of individual countries. Except for expanses of open ocean and the empty ice sheet of Antartica the rest of the globe is dutifully allotted to one of the several hundred currently-existing sovereign states. What could be more natural?
If we think about this a bit, it will become apparent that this state of affairs must necessarily be of recent origin. Choose a country at random. Let’s pick Germany. For Germany to be a country there must necessarily be a central government somewhere that is able to exert influence over all of the territory and all of the inhabitants of that patch of color on our world map. But a government with those abilities could not have existed, just to make my point, 10,000 years ago.
Whoever the inhabitants of that piece of real estate were at that time, they were completely lacking in the technical ability to measure and establish national boundaries, let alone the organizational abilities to administer and defend its extent.
At some point, this became possible, but it was surely within the last 10,000 years. This may seem like a long time, but we know that fully modern humans have existed for at least 100,000 yes and there are archaeological records of human habitation in Europe that go back way more than 10,000 years.
Just to complicate matters, Germany was until quite recently two separate countries. Of course before 1945 it was a single country, but its territory had been expanded by conquest to include areas it was forced to cede after defeat in WWII. We also know that much of the area we now know as Germany was added to previously-existing Prussia following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
My point here is not to pick on Germany. A similar exercise could be undertaken for every other country currently shown on our world map. Any history text is filled with names of countries like Assyria, Carthage, Babylon, and Sheba that ceased to exist long ago and other countries like India, Pakistan, Etruria, and Bangladesh that have sprung into existence during our lifetimes.
I want to suggest to you what you may find as a radical idea. Countries are completely imaginary. They have no existence outside our brains. Country-like entities presumably have been around for a long time, but they also flit into and out out existence. They are ALL temporary and short lived. Some currently-existing countries claim long, near-perpetual pedigrees. Upon closer analysis they are found to be ephemera.
There is not a single country on a contemporary world map that a sensible person could expect to reliably still be in existence 100 years hence. Yet, on an hourly basis people will glibly give their lives for a figment of our collective imaginations that has no corporeal existence whatsoever.
Further reading:
Benedict Anderson, “The Nation as Imagined Community”
