People and Nations, Nations and People

 

Joseph Ernest Renan: L’essence d’une nation est une plebiscite de tous le jours

People and nations, are we talking about the same thing? The use of the two terms is at times interchangeable, sometimes inadvertently, but mostly purposefully.

“People”, as a group, refers to the political totality of a group individuals living together and share a political destiny. The term encloses all the members of a given political community. The diversity and homogeneity is not a determining factor: the political aims are. The transformation of feudally-controlled regions into a consolidated state between the 16^th and 17^th century was accompanied by the crystallization of a common political identity of the individuals residing in the centralized, modern state, irrespective of the cultural, linguistic, or geographical differences.

A nation however transcends the political and economic boundaries of a state and the people. People convert into a nation because they are made conscious of their own and specific cultural identity and want to confirm their existence as an independent and concrete unit. People become a nation after an act of consciousness, and not in an irrational and casual manner.

Indeed, nationalism is an artificial rather than natural phenomenon that surfaced in the 18^th century. Nationalism was accepted as a central and indispensable component on the modern state. Countries across Europe started unifying on the basis of nation, such as Germany and Italy. The "nation state" was a model adopted in post-Ottoman regions, many of which attempted to unite under the national rational, but failed amidst imperialist arrangements.

It is clear that a nation is not the state. The nation is a group of people who, owing to common grounds such as culture and history, form a common sociological identity that aims (in general) at being a specific political unit. The moment that this specific sociological unit becomes a political unit, a nation states emerges.

The world as we see it today is composed of state-less nations, and multi-national states. States preceded nations, and nations preceded states. People have the right to identify themselves with a given nation or not. And they also have the right for self-determination and self-governance. 

The arguments centered on nationalism are commonly used against both Palestinians and Israelis in their right to establish their own nation-state. The arguments either refuse such claims or support these rights, albeit on false grounds. It does not matter whether Jewish tribes inhabited the lands west River Jordan thousands of years ago, or that religious texts bound Jews with that land, or that a long history of persecution was enough to earn the Jewsih people a safe plot they call their own. These people who identify themselves as a separate nation have now existed in the land known as Israel for a considerable period of time. Regardless of the grounds, they have every right to identify themselves as a separate nation, and to form a nation-state. Balfour Declaration or not, they have a right not to be part of a larger, all encompassing, multi-national government. The same logic must apply to Palestinians. Palestinians must not feel obliged to identify with an Arab nation that falsely transforms all Arab countries into their potential homeland. Palestinians, like Israelis, identify themselves as  a separate nation that shares history, culture, religion, language, and strife. They are equally free to establish their own separate nation-state, and not to be part of a larger, all-encompassing government.

People are free to become a nation, and to stop being one. No limits should be placed on what people decide as criteria to transform into a nation. As dangerous as this lesser evil is on stability, prosperity, development, tolerance, and international convergence, its denial has been proven much more perilous.  Thus, for the Israeli and Palestinian nations, the two states solution (a fair one) is the only solution available, until people from either side decide to redefine their national identity and just be people.