Curt Mills #1: What makes a nation? What are its purposes? How do you know you belong to it?

According to the esteemed Wikipedia, “A nation may refer to a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, or history. In this definition, a nation has no physical borders.”  The very idea of nations and nationality seems to come in and out or favor, and with varying scope.  Is “Shaver Nation,” William and Mary basketball fans, a real nation?  Probably not, not in the sense described anyways.  Are nations even a good thing? 

The idea of nations seemed to be of paramount importance in the twentieth.  US President Woodrow Wilson discussed it glowingly in his push for and advocacy of the League of Nations, arguing that conflicts like the just passed Great War could be avoided if all peoples were granted a nation state, and when that happened, with the right to self-determination fully complete, an end point in history of sorts would have been reached.  Nationalism took an ugly turn historically with the rise of vicious nationalist ideologies in Italy, Spain, and of course Germany in the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s.  Following the close of World War II, the world stage seemed to be more dominated by supernational entities—the United States and NATO, the USSR and the Warsaw Pact and the Iron Curtain, and the Third World. 

What of nations now?  What does it still mean in modernity?  Writers like the late Christopher Hitchens still pick up the project today.  For instance, he advocated forcefully for the Kurdish people to be their own nation state.  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what does it mean to be in a nation as an American?  Is America a nation at this point?  We are “a nation of immigrants” is the old adage, muddying the traditional interpretation of the word, and making it still unclear what it means to be in a nation as an American.