The United States is an international nation. So is Canada. So, too, is Mexico. 

The map above makes that clear.

Each of the three—the U.S., Canada, and Mexico—is itself a nation in the sense of that word whereby it means “sovereign country,” which is to say an independent “nation-state.”

In contrast, the same word, nation, is being used differently when it is embedded in the first term of the phrase “international nation,” at least in so far as that phrase is illustrated by the above map. In that first of the two terms of the phrase at issue the word nation is being used to mean something such as “tribe” or “people”— that is, “an aggregation of persons of the same ethnic family and speaking the same language," as the Online Etymological Dictionary puts it—rather than “sovereign country.” 

Thus, by saying that the United States, Canada, and Mexico are examples of “international nations” what is meant is that each is a sovereign territorial state in which dwell a variety of diverse tribes or peoples. 

Indeed, that is one thing the phrase at issue, which I have used as the title for this post can be taken to mean. However, it can also be taken to mean something else as well. 

*     *     * 

My preceding post, “Our Greatest Danger,” began with a quotation from “The End of Imagination,” by Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy that was first published in 1998 and republished in 2019 as the first article in her book My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction (Chicago: Haymarket Books). In another article from that same collection—this time an article that was originally published on October 29, 2001, shortly after the administration of George W. Bush used the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as a convenient excuse to begin bombing Afghanistan and preparing to do the same to Iraq—Roy makes the following cogent remark: 

            While we must not allow the fascists to define what a nation is, or who belongs to it, it’s worth keeping in mind that nationalism — in all its many avatars: communist, capitalist, and fascist — has been at the root of almost all the genocide of the twentieth century. On the issue of nationalism, it is wise to proceed with caution.

*     *     *

Although it was far from the only “genocide of the twentieth century,” the Nazi murder of some six million Jews in the killing fields and concentration camps set up for the purpose across most of Europe remains the most infamous. The murders were not confined to the borders of the international German nation-state, precisely because the Jewish people themselves were not confined to any one nation-state but spread across a multiplicity of sovereign nation-states that the Germans invaded. The Jewish people were thus an international (state-crossing) nation (people).

A bit earlier in the twentieth century, the sovereign international nation of Turkey committed genocide against one of the international nations that dwelt in part within Turkish borders: the genocide of the Armenians (which, of course, the Turkish nation-state still denies ever happened, thus deepening the erasure of so many lives).

Nor did genocide by and within such international nations—nations in the sense of nation-states—as Germany and Turkey have to wait until the twentieth century to occur. As the map with which I began this post itself suggests to anyone who thinks about it, the United States, Canada, and Mexico—to name the three examples pertinent to the map—in earlier centuries already committed just such genocidal acts against the various indigenous peoples or nations of North America. Nor was South American any different: genocide was also committed by nation-states there. 

*     *     *

The Jewish nation is an international nation, and has been for many centuries, wholly independent of the existence of any Jewish state such as Israel today. The Armenian nation is also an international nation, although there has never been any Armenian nation-state. The same is true for many of the indigenous nations of the Americas—namely, any that cross over the borders of two or more of the nation states that were constituted in the Americas consequent upon European invasions of the Western hemisphere. 

Thus, in the second sense of the phrase “international nation,” the noun nation as the second word of that two-word phrase means not a nation-state, as it did in the first sense, but rather a “people” or “an aggregation of persons of the same ethnic family and speaking the same language.” 

The very word nation derives from Latin natus, the past participle of nasci, "to be born." In that sense, one’s “nation” is the ethnic and linguistic community into which one is born. The people or ethnic-linguistic family into which one is born, it is important to point out, is distinct in most if not all cases from the sovereign nation-state within which one also happens to be born.

*     *     *

Genocide, or “ethnic cleansing,” occurs when an international nation in the first sense I have considered in this post—that is, a nation-state that consists of more than one ethnic family of people—attempts to de-internationalize itself, as it were. That is, it occurs when a nation-state endeavors to constitute a single ethnic identity for itself. 

It is in that way that “nationalism”—the prioritizing of the nation-state—has, as Arundhati Roy remarks, “been at the root of almost all the genocide of the twentieth century.” 

If we were to eliminate all concern with nations in the sense of nation-states, if we were to come instead to think solely in terms of nations in the sense of ethnic families, we could eliminate genocide altogether. What is more, then there would be no “international nations” at all any longer, in either of the two senses at issue. There would only be peoples living together in the same territory, even if that territory is as expansive as the entire globe, without any of those many peoples claiming sovereignty over that territory. 

No nation would then rule anywhere. Instead, there would be a perfect anarchy of nations.

*     *     *

That’s the sort of anarchy everyone should get behind.