Tuesday, September 18, 2012

European Borders and Nation Building


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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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