Define Country!!

[thesolar65]

What is the definition of a Country? And which ones does not belong to that category according to the members?

 

[khujliwal]

“God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: "This is my country."”

 

[IsaacNewton]

Imagined communities - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Benedict Anderson defined a nation as "an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign".[1] Members hold in their minds a mental image of their affinity: for example, the nationhood felt with other members of your nation when your "imagined community" participates in a larger event such as the Olympic Games. As Anderson puts it, a nation "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".[1] Members of the community probably will never know each of the other members face to face; However, they may have similar interests or identify as part of the same nation. The media also create imagined communities, through usually targeting a mass audience or generalizing and addressing citizens as the public.

...[T]he concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism [incongruence, divide] between each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state. (pp. 6-7)



What I learned as an undergraduate. That book profoundly altered my view of the world. Modern nationalism did not arise until invention of mass media devices such as printing press and universal literacy. In ancient days, I'm sure if you were in a village isolated in China, you wouldn't give much thought in being Chinese.