Unfortunately I didn’t find the article that I was talking about in our previous meeting, but I remembered that article was based on Benedict Anderson’s work. So I set my self a quest to study a bit about his theory and researches about national identity or ‘nation’.

My question is what is national identity? The official definition is: “National identity is the person's identity and sense of belonging to one country or to one nation, a feeling one shares with a group of people, regardless of one's citizenship status.” But word national identity or ‘nation’ did not exist until 18th century. Those were the times of industrial revolution and French revolution when first European nation-state came into being as a response to nationalism in the European diaspora beyond the ocean, in colonies, namely in both Americas.  But in the eyes of simple farmer in Europe the world was still small; he did not know anything about so called imagined differences between people living 100 km away. Meanwhile in America they were trying to cluster political entities that sprang up in North and South America between 1778 and 1838. Wars and battles for land almost self-consciously defined themselves as nations, were historically the first such states to emerge and therefore inevitably provided the first real model of what such states should look like. Anderson holds that nationalism, as an instrument of nation-state building, was an American invention. Anderson’s definition of ‘nation’ is: “It is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign…It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” We should not be offended with word ‘imagined’ because it does not mean that a nation is false, unreal or to be distinguished from ‘true’ (unimagined) communities. Nation is or was constructed from different popular processes through which residents share nationality in common. That means that it was created by political and cultural institutions as people ‘imagine’ they share general beliefs, attitudes and recognize a collective national populace as having similar opinions and sentiments to their own. But again if we look from different prospective, to have one nation means there must be another nation against which self-definition can be constructed. So in order to that nation exists there must be political entities that have a limited spatial and demographic extent. According to Anderson, creation of imagined communities became possible because of "print-capitalism". Capitalist entrepreneurs printed their books and media in the vernacular (instead of exclusive script languages, such as Latin) in order to maximize circulation. As a result, readers speaking various local dialects became able to understand each other, and a common discourse emerged. Anderson argued that the first European nation-states were thus formed around their "national print-languages."
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Regardless of different definitions, theories and philosophy we live today in world divided in nations. But it is not that easy as it looks or sounds. I believe that nations can bring us closer and at the same time can bring conflicts.  Differences in nations can not only bring us closer but it can also inspire us. Who knows maybe one day we will live under one nation and we will live happily ever after.
If you are curious and you want to know more about national identity or if you are just bored I recommend you to read this: http://www.la.wayne.edu/polisci/kdk/nationalism/sources/anderson.pdf

Tanja