Dry and Uninspired wrote:

If Anthony D. Smith is correct, the ‘core doctrine’ of nationalism consists of the following:

1. humanity is divided into nations, each with its own character, history and destiny;
2. the nation is the sole source of political power;
3. loyalty to the nation takes precedence over other loyalties;
4. to be free, human beings must belong to a nation;
5. nations require maximum autonomy and self-expression;
6. global peace and justice can only be built on the basis of a plurality
of free nations.

It would seem to me that at least 3 is highly problematic for a Christian. Possibly some of the others as well.

What do you think?

I agree that 3 is out of the question and leads to idolatry of the State, perhaps the deepest and most insidious and dangerous belief that fueled and exasperated all the other evils and crimes of communist and fascist states. The state is more of a means of service to the people and community of peoples/nations than an end in itself.

seigneur wrote:

FZM wrote:

seigneur wrote:

Yes, there may be, if you look for issues very hard. The fact remains that Poland is among the most homogenous nations in the world. As is Lithuania, Slovakia, Czech, and most of the other countries in that region. Ukrainians, Belarussians and Lithuanians in Poland's history do not add any significant variety, because they are linguistically related and racially indistinguishable.

​My point was that the homogeneity of Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Lithuania etc. is a relatively recent phenomena, post 1918 and post 1945 and that it is something that has been consciously engineered. (Find all the linguistically and culturally homogenous nation states existing in the area of present day Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Czech and Slovak Republics, Ukraine etc. on a 1917 map.)  Incidentally Marxists 
played a prominent role in engineering it. 


 

Good point, but tendentious and irrelevant to my point (because every point is in a wider context to have relevance). Poles have been in what's now Poland (named Poland for a millennium at least) for as long as human memory and historical record goes. Did Marxists engineer it to be this way? In comparison, current so-called Americans are recent immigrants and they'd do well to be aware of this.

ETA: To make it very clear what my point was, if you missed it: There are objective characteristics to determine a country's nation-state-ness from "pure" to "diverse", the characteristics being linguistic, racial, and historical at least. By these measures, USA and Poland are very different. You say Poland is somewhat mixed too. The answer: Of course there is a foreigner in every country and when you go far enough in history, it was inhabited by different people, but when we get back to my point, which was to compare USA and Poland, then USA is far more diverse, its timeline is significantly shorter and its history is a story of mass extermination of natives by mass immigrants/invaders, while Poland is as homogenous as it gets in this world, and has been so for about a millennium, admittedly somewhat depending on how you draw the territory.

After how many hundreds of years does someone finally stop being an immigrant? Are my relatives in England of Norman and Viking descent and origin still immigrants?

Americans, Canadians, Australians, etc. are not immigrants and it is a post-modernism to even think or refer to them as such.

Timocrates wrote:

Americans, Canadians, Australians, etc. are not immigrants and it is a post-modernism to even think or refer to them as such.

Actually, it's post-modernism to fail to acknowledge historical realities, particularly when they are fresh in historical memory and in national psyche. Also, it's post-modernism to fail to acknowledge the objective criteria for a nation state, such as ethnic uniformity versus diversity.