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Originally posted by Spanky
I think most "Americans" sometheselves as English. And then after the war they saw themsevles as Virginians, Georgians, New Yorkers etc. It wasn't until the war of 1812 that people started calling themselves Americans.
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I've been told that before the Civil War, people would say "the United States are . . ." whereas afterwards they would say "the United States is . . . ."
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It became a country right after WWI. Before then it was part of the Austro-hungarian empire. It lasted for only twenty years as a separate nation. And for hundreds of years it was part of the "German confederation".
Hitler didn't go into Austria to protect the "ethnic Germans" there. All Austrians were (and are) ethnic Germans. He went into Czeck to protect the Sudentenland Germans from the Slavik Czechs. Hitler was not from an ethnic German family living in Austria. He was an Austrian who considered himself part of the German nation (and again I am using the classical definition of nation) just like a Prussian would consider themselves German. Most people considered (prior to the formation of the political entity of Germany in 1876 or there abouts) all Bavarians, Hessians, Prussians and Austrians as German people who were part of the German nation. There is no Austrian language. Maybe an accent, possibly a dialect, but there is no such thing as the Austrian language. Austrians speak German.
Hitler didn't occupy Austria any more than he occupied Bavaria. There was a huge Nazi presence in Austria before he went in. At the end of the war Austria was occupied just like Germany.
Ethnic identity and national identity are the same thing. Hitler was a hyper nationalist. He did not consider Jews Germans because they were from (according to him) a different ethnic stock.
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I think we agree on most of the underlying history and are talking past each other because we are using words like "nation" differently.
I guess I picked the wrong example with Sikhs, since religion is the salient thing there. Except that the push for an independent Khalistan cuts across an ethnic group, per your explanation, and finds people wanting to define their nation by religion instead. With suggests that ethnicity is not as central to nationalism as you say.
