Appiah chapter 3 country

The puzzle of belonging

• The chapter opens with Italo Svevo (Ettore Schmitz), a man of mixed Jewish, German, and Italian heritage from Trieste. His life—spanning shifting empires and identities—illustrates the complexity of deciding which country is truly yours

• National belonging isn’t about ancestry alone. Political boundaries change, cultures mix, and individuals often belong to several traditions at once

The idea of the nation

• Thinkers like Hegel claimed that a people “without a state” has no real history, implying that nationhood requires statehood

• Appiah challenges this, noting that many groups share ancestry or culture without wanting (or having) their own nation-state (for example, Jews before Zionism)

• A nation, he suggests, is a group of people who believe they share ancestry and care about that shared story. But that belief is often imaginative and selective

The problem of nationalism

• Nationalism is a modern invention, emerging in the 18th–19th centuries alongside Romanticism.

• Romantic thinkers (like Herder) celebrated the Volksgeist: the unique “spirit” or soul of each people, linking nationhood with shared language, folklore, and culture.

• But this idea was never fully accurate: few countries are monocultural, monolingual, or monoethnic. Real nations are always diverse.

Boundaries and belonging

• Nations have shifting boundaries, both political and psychological.

• As Europe’s map shows (Yugoslavia’s breakup, the rise of new states) nations are fluid constructs, constantly redrawn by conflict, migration, and politics.

• Trying to align nations perfectly with states leads to tragedy: annihilation, expulsion, or forced assimilation of those who don’t “fit.”

The myth of ethnic unity

• Multicultural realities undermine the idea of a pure national essence.

• England, for example, has always been multicultural, long before Caribbean immigration in the 1950s.

• No society has ever been truly homogeneous, and attempts to make them so are both impossible and destructive.

The politics of recognition and control

Singapore serves as a modern test case:

• Its government imposed order through the CMIO system (Chinese, Malay, Indian, Other) and English as a neutral lingua franca.

• This helped maintain peace, but also froze fluid identities into rigid categories, a tendency Appiah calls the “Medusa Syndrome”: what the state gazes upon, it turns to stone.

• The risk is that efforts to recognize diversity can also essentialize it, turning living cultures into fixed stereotypes.

Escaping empire and the global turn

• After empire, new nations sought to define themselves, sometimes by rejecting colonial legacies, sometimes by retaining colonial languages (as in Ghana or East Africa).

• But today, globalization challenges national identity once more.

• Populist leaders (e.g., Brexit advocates and Hungarian and Polish nationalists) assert the need to “reclaim” national sovereignty and purity.

• Yet, Appiah argues, this reaction misunderstands what truly binds a country together.

What holds a nation together

• A nation is not a natural or ancestral unity, but a shared political commitment.

• Drawing on Ernest Renan, Appiah argues that nations are “daily plebiscites”, voluntary, ongoing acts of cooperation among diverse people who choose to live together.

• Forgetting, compromise, and shared institutions, not blood or language, make national life possible.

The balance between patriotism and globalism

• We don’t have to choose between patriotism (loyalty to one’s country) and globalism (care for humanity).

• Healthy patriotism should mean commitment to shared governance and mutual care, not exclusion or purity.

• Pluralism and democracy depend on facing our differences, not erasing them.

Core takeaway

Nations are not ancient tribes reborn or natural communities united by blood or language. They are modern projects, built through shared institutions, imagination, and daily cooperation. National identity, like all identities, is constructed and evolving, and it can coexist with global belonging.