Name: How Nations Make Up National Identities | NYT - The Interpreter
Uploaded: 2018-03-13T07:50:06.000Z
Duration: 5 min 34 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

It's a big way many of us describe who we are,

Up until really recently, our identities came from stuff

with millions of strangers just based on borders.

That's because national identity is made up.

National identity is the myth that built the modern world,

but it also primes us for dictatorship, racism, genocide.

And today, we're fighting over whether to keep

To understand why, you have to see how new this idea is.

It's a place united by the French language

But as of the French Revolution, half of the people

These are the languages that people spoke,

just a patchwork that didn't line up with borders.

We know from modern genetics that ethnicity didn't line up

that language, race, and borders should add up to a country.

that says they've been like this forever.

People moved in big numbers from the country to the city,

New technology, like newspapers and trains,

made countries feel smaller and more interconnected.

War was changing into this vast all-consuming thing.

Governments were challenging religion for power.

Here's Napoleon taking his crown from the pope

These four things sparked an era of revolutions in democracy,

but they also unleashed ideas of nationalism, militarism,

This new identity meant that a nation got its authority,

not from the government, or the King, or God,

This changed the world, but it also changed how we think.

We experience whatever happens to our nation

“Rocky IV” can tell us a lot about what national identity

“The Russian towers above the American.”

A 1994 study tested the attitudes of Americans

All 216 participants were women because, quote,

“There were no males who had not seen 'Rocky IV.'”

participants who strongly identified as American

to make it look like Rocky lost, they felt a drop in self-esteem

and they became likelier to hold negative views about Russians.

But when they said something bad about Russians,

us want to humiliate and dominate the outsider.

That dynamic doesn't just apply to individuals.

One study found that any country whose team

That hostility also plays out against minorities and migrants

It only took a century for these problems of modern nationalism

to culminate into World War II,  something so terrible,

it convinced the world to try a new kind of national identity.

This model of identity is based on an idea from the United

Anyone can be American if you share values

“May I please remind you that it does not say

It's a stirring idea, but it never completely worked.

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How Nations Make Up National Identities | NYT - The Interpreter

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