News
Nations today live far from their native homelands
Posted Monday, October 26 2009 at 00:00
Similarly, the Kenyan State, existing only since 1963, contains such Nations as the Kamba, Luhya, Kalenjin, Kikuyu, Taita and Luo.
On the other hand, a Nation can be so large or so situated as to spill over into very many States.
The Arab Nation lives in more than 20 states, the Somali Nation in five States, the Maasai Nation in two States.
This is the case of Italy, France and Germany, Nations which spill over into what used to be called Yugoslavia (the Italians), into Belgium (the French), into Austria and Lichtenstein (the Germans) and into Switzerland (all three).
But Switzerland is probably the country which best expresses the difference between a State and a Nation.
The Swiss State contains three main Nations (or culturo-linguistic group) — Italians, French and Germans.
But how can they be called so whereas Nations nearby are known by those same names -- the Italians of Italy, French of France and Germans of Germany?
The answer is that Switzerland was artificially created by joining together a piece each of what used to be Italy, France and Germany.
But even these original homes of theirs are best called Nations because, when Switzerland was being carved out, Germany and Italy did not exist as States.
Only in 1870 did Otto von Bismarck and Giuseppe Garibaldi, respectively, unite them into States out of scores of principalities.
Thus, according to London’s Daily Mail recently, Col Gaddafi has launched a campaign to urge the UN to begin “the task” of sending “back home” the Swiss confederation’s ethnic Germans to Germany, ethnic Italians to Italy and ethnic French to France.
It is a case — as the English say — of those living in glass houses forming the habit of throwing stones.
The overwhelming majority of today’s Libyans are Arabs.
Therefore, if we began speaking the language of their present leader, we would have to say that the majority of Libyans are foreigners.
Their semitic ancestors arrived in Africa as conquerors from the Asian side of the Red Sea.
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