What Is a Nation?
What is a nation? It is a collection of people consisting of a common culture, common language, and common border. It allows for mutual understanding, mutual communication, and mutual protection. Most nation states are around the size of each of our American States. And our own States were effectively nation states of their own, with their own cultures, languages, and border defenses, until advancing technologies like railroads made communications and travel faster. Now that every city has real time communications and daily travel links, our cities in general have a single common culture while the rural regions around them continue to hold to the old cultures that the States were once known for. Now those are considered backwards by many, especially in the cities, and that has created a problem in America.
I contend that a people who talk to each other, agree with each other on the larger parts, and are willing to defend each other, are a strong people. The most visible of those is the defense part. A strong nation must be willing to defend itself, and that willingness is shown through the people ready to fight. Sometimes this is a standing army. Other times it is a citizen army ready to stand up when an invader comes. The key point is that the people in general must be ready to fight and die to protect their people. A nation filled with men such as these will stand when times grow hard.
Most nations are formed from a people with a common culture, language, and border. You speak the same words. Protect the land and each other. And when it comes to those other people out there, you like your neighbors more. You do the same things. Your culture is the same.
America is different in that we started with the idea of coming from many cultures and peoples. Our first national motto even said it. "Out of many." But it ended with the normal idea of nationhood. "Out of many, one." The idea was that we would welcome people from all nations, as long as they were willing to become one with us.
The America we are now is not one. We are divided, and that is not good. We have more than on culture and some are at war with each other. One culture opened our borders and brought in as many violent criminals as they could, and now they release those criminals back on the streets to commit more crimes. Where they hurt or kill more Americans. They sparked wars in a foreign land, and then interfere with attempt to end the wards and put an end to the killing.
One cultures wants to silence all dissent. And one culture values free speech. There are many other differences between those cultures, many of them fundamental in nature. How does a nation survive when it is not made of one culture, but more than one, and when one of them wants to silence and kill the other one?
That is one of the things that America must look to in the future if we wish to remain a strong nation. We must address the fact that our cultures at war with each other or our future is in question.
A nation that wishes to remain strong must have a common language. The people must be able to speak to each other and understand each other. To know what they are saying. This is why something as simple as an accent can divide people. Separate a people into the haves and have nots. On the Island of Great Britain, French-speaking nobility ruled over Germanic peasants for generations, until they spent 100 years fighting the French and learned to speak one language. What we now call English. They became a nation when they did that. A nation that would spread out and conquer the world in time. A strong nation must have a common language. Sometimes it is born with it. Sometimes it creates a new one. But without one, a nation is divided, and a nation divided against itself will never stand in the long run.
English has never been the official language of the United States, but it has been the effectively official language. Children are taught English in school, and immigrants who wish to become citizens must learn English before becoming a citizen. The vast majority of the people in America speak English because it is the default standard language.
One issue that the United States has run into the last few years, with tens of millions of illegal aliens having crossed our border, is that standard language. Many of those tens of millions of illegal aliens inside our borders don’t speak English and aren’t taking any steps towards learning it. The most common languages are in the general Hispanic family of languages, but some of the languages are so obscure that we don’t have translators. They come from nations so distant from us that we’ve just never seen them here.
A nation must assimilate newcomers into both its language and its culture if a nation is to remain united. Many nations have fallen to what became foreign invasions when they did not do this.
A nation must have strong borders to survive. History is filled with nations that did not maintain control of their borders and died. Many borders over history have been geographical. That river over there. The big stone next to the forest. That mountain range. Other borders are imaginary lines in the sand either claimed by the nation or agreed upon with other nations. Many wars have started because nations couldn’t agree on where the border was, or because one of them just wanted that piece of land and the other one didn’t agree to let them have it. What does a nation do when people claiming they own your land cross your border without your approval and take up residence on your land? If you are a nation that wishes to survive, you send them back where they came from. By force if necessary. History is filled with nations that did not do that and died.
The Continental United States of America has a pair of geographical borders and a pair of negotiated borders. The East and West Coast are fairly hard to dispute. The Northern Border is a mix of a geographical and arbitrary border that has not been disputed with Canada for over a century. The geographical border was formed after our 13 Colonies rebelled from Great Britain and the English loyalists moved north of the river and lakes we did not control.
The next twenty years were... interesting. France and England were in a nearly constant series of wars with each other, and didn’t want America trading with the other one. They wanted us to pick a side, and we wanted to remain neutral and trade with both. They captured our trading ships, we protested, they captured more, and life got interesting. In addition to that, the British in Canada increasingly pursued closer relations with the Indians and increased distrust on all sides results in inflamed tensions all over our northern borders. What we call the War of 1812 was just the point in which we joined the ever growing conflict between France and England.
It started with a bunch of raids back and forth. We burned a town. They burned a town. They captured a city. We captured it back. Neither one of us were really repaired for a war, and the first couple years of it were more raids and burnings than effective wars of conquest for either of us. Then England defeated France in 1814, and they turned their eyes on us. English troops burned down our Capitol and what we would later call the White House. And they went off to try to conquer some rather important bits of our territory. Including places like New Orleans which we had recently purchased from France. England wanted it. But England had been fighting France for two decades straight and were just sick and tired of it all. And America wanted to survive more than it wanted to kick English ass. We may have been a bit more aggressive if the English weren’t beating us most places they showed up, but in the end we all agreed that continued fighting just wasn’t what any of us wanted.
Do not look to how we Beat the Bloody British at the Battle of New Orleans. That happened AFTER we all agreed to end the war. New Orleans was just so far off the beaten path that nobody knew the war was over until after Andrew Jackson proudly stuffed that alligator’s mouth with cannonballs and powdered his behind. I’m still not entirely certain about that battle report, but I can promise that any alligator that happened to would absolutely lose his mind. Outside folklore, and the reality that England probably would have decided to hold onto New Orleans under the age old law of “Finders Keepers, Loser Weepers,” New Orleans was more the exception that proved the rule that... honestly... as much as we and England didn’t like each other, we also really didn’t want to fight each other that much.
So we agreed that the rivers and lakes on our northern border would continue to separate us until we ran out of rivers and lakes. Then we later agreed upon an arbitrary border going all the way to the West Coast and that border has been good ever since. Sure we gripe over it some times, and we often don’t like each other all that much, but we also really don’t want to fight each other.
The Southern Border of the United States of America was also ironically formed by war and rebellion. The Spanish first colonized Central and North America long before the United States moved westward. They moved up to the Rio Grande River area, to Santa Fe, and up the California coast. There they met the Russian Empire going south through Alaska and didn’t go much further. They claimed regions further north but couldn’t control them. The Indians did not agree that the Spanish owned the territory and made war on the settlers that tried to go north of the Rio Grande. The Spanish needed heavily armed settlers willing to fight to defend their land and a group of Americans who wanted to build a new life outside the United States swore loyalty to the Spanish Crown in exchange for being allowed to settle there. They became what history calls the Texians, and they and the Indians had a great many disagreements over who owned the land in the decades that followed. And then the Spanish colony rebelled from Spain to form the precursor of modern day Mexico. That changed everything.
When the nation that became Mexico rebelled from Spain, not everyone agreed with the rebellion. There was in fact a rather impressive civil war over the whole affair. And the new Mexican government was not what you would call gentle towards those they defeated. They were declared rebels, not true combatants, and executed. Even those who surrendered. It was a long and bloody affair in the south, and then the new Mexican army moved north of the Rio Grande where the Texians lived.
Now the Texians were none to willing to accept the rule of this new government. They’d sworn loyalty to Spain, not these new guys. Many Texians were Americans by birth, while others were Mexicans who didn't support the new guys. Why work with these new guys executing everyone they didn’t like when they could work with the United States? Of course the United States was still a long ways away and didn’t want a war with Mexico over old Spanish land. So the Texians and some American military volunteers fought, defeated, and captured the new ruler of Mexico. Got him to sign an agreement that Texias was independent of this new Mexico and everything was good. Everybody agreed. As history goes, agreements are often disagreed over.
The short-lived Republic of Texas survived for a time between Mexico and the expanding United States of America. The problem was that there were some disagreements with Mexico as to the exact nature of the Republic of Texas. Firstly, the ruler of Mexico had been captured when he signed the agreement that they were free. That was considered coercion, and the Mexicans had declared him no longer their ruler, elevated someone else, and did not recognize the entire agreement. Secondly, even if they did accept the agreement, they disagreed over the particulars. Texas said the agreement gave them all territory north of the Rio Grande River. Mexico said that they had a lot of towns full of Mexicans on the north side of the Rio Grand River, they weren’t giving them up, and if they DID accept a river border, it was a different river further north. But they still really didn’t.
The disagreement turned violent when Texas patrols between the two rivers ran into Mexican patrols that did not want them there. As far as Texas was concerned, that meant war. As far as Mexico was concerned, it was another chance to shoot dirty rebels. As far the United States was concerned... well... who doesn’t love the story of plucky underdog rebels standing up to a vast empire trying to kill them? We Americans eat those stories for lunch.
The United States and Mexico settled on the border between our nations after the Republic of Texas and Mexico got into their second dustup over whether or not Texas existed. Mexico said no and we’re going to kill you dirty rebels. Texas said yes and we’re going to shoot you first. And the United States bellied on up to the bar and said we’d like to have some input on this. Maybe we can talk things over? In Mexico City. So the United States Marines and the Texas Rangers took a little road trip down to Mexico City. Mexico did not by the way agree to the road trip, and in fact tried to stop it. And that’s how the Marines added “To the Halls of Montezuma” to the Marine Anthem. It’s amazing how many lines in that anthem were inscribed via extreme violence.
When it came time to negotiate over the border between the United States and Mexico, the American negotiators chose to meet the Mexican negotiators in the Mexican Capital. With a large number of very well armed American Marines and Texas Rangers. That’s called a power move in the negotiating environment. Especially since the Mexican army was not allowed to sit in on negotiations due to having been largely thrashed by the American Marines and Texas Rangers while escorting the American negotiators to Mexico city. The negotiators quickly came to an agreement on the border between Texas and Mexico. The Rio Grande River.
Now the United States of America had come a long way to negotiate with the Mexicans over the border, and some of the exchanges had been unkind. Some unkind words had been thrown back and forth. Some bullets. But the United States is a generous neighbor, so we chose to forget those unkind words and gave Mexico a bunch of gold in exchange for Mexican territory west of Texas all the way to the West Coast. California, here we come. As is sometimes the nature of agreements, there was some disagreement over what territory exactly belonged to whom. So a few years later, the United States bellied up to the bar with some more gold, and asked if Mexico wanted to negotiate some more, American style, or take the gold and come to a final agreement. Mexico took the money, walked out of the bar, and we’ve been in agreement over the border ever since. Oh... wait...
The United States border with Mexico has been a chaotic border most of its existence. Mexican gangs, and even the Mexican army, have crossed it many times to raid American towns. And American military units have crossed the border south to track down and kill Mexican gangs numerous times. Criminals wanted by one government or the other have crossed over the border to get away from the law for literal centuries now. It’s a national past time for criminals, and basically no attempt to fully close the border has ever been fully effective. Different administrations over the history of us bordering each other have deported millions of Mexicans who crossed the border illegally, often by using the military, but actually closing the border and keeping it closed has always been a very difficult process.
One of the difficult issues with the border between the United States and Mexico is that Mexico has been through a rather large number of failed governments over the centuries. And they don’t like the fact that we... negotiated their land from them. They in fact make it a national past time to print maps of Mexico including the territory we bought from them as part of Mexico. And Mexican people crossing the border carry those maps with them and often claim the territory as belonging to them. Tens of millions have crossed the border illegally in just the last few years in fact. With many tens of millions in the decades before that. And for an extra bit of joy, Mexican drug gangs are crossing the border with drugs, selling them to Americans, and killing hundreds of thousands of Americans over the last few years. The border is a serious problem that must be addressed.
In the end, all nations that wish to remain nations must address their border.Just as a nation must address matters of language and of culture.All three of those are required to maintain a strong nation.