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The above video (or link to video)
provides a glimpse of European borders from AD 1000 until present day. After
the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, European leaders cemented borders and
territorialized their nations by recognizing exclusive control over the people
within measured borders. This European idea has since been diffused throughout
the world with colonization, and the idea has persisted throughout time and, as
Waisbord notes, the questions isn’t whether or not the nation-state will
continue to exist but how the nation will continue to exist. As seen by the
video above, the West has a preference for distinctively drawn lines
designating what is French or what is Austrian, English, Spanish, et cetera. We
have seen how this nation-building technique worked after decolonization in the
Middle East, and with the introduction to the modern world of mass diasporas
(largely, according to Karim, due to colonization) borders and drawn lines
matter less and less to those professing nationalities in direct opposition to
the nations in which they live.
Waisbord
argues throughout his piece Media and the
Reinvention of the Nation that early, Western nation building and the media
that helped construct the nation-state largely served bourgeois elite in
creating a standardized, mass market for an ideal capitalist society. Certain
cultural behaviors must be taken into consideration in order to guarantee a
successful capitalist society, and obviously all cultures possess these values.
The idea of a borders and nation-states, then, might not be the best solution
for every society across the world. What works in Europe does not necessarily
translate in the rest of the world, and today with diaspora communities the
West is seeing “pay back,” as Karim phrases, by the colonized inside the
nation-states of those who were once colonizers. Diaspora communities do not
need borders and drawn lines to feel a common identity, especially with the
(mostly Western) advent of increased communications: radio and Internet, for
example. This, as hypothesized by both Karim and Waisbord, prove challenging
for the future management of the traditional, Western-ideal nation-state.
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