Should a nation be defined by language and territory, by ruling party or by faith, asks Roger Scruton.
To understand what is happening in the Middle East today we
must look back to the end of World War I. The Austro-Hungarian Empire
had been destroyed, and from the ruins emerged a collection of nation
states. These nation states - including Austria, Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia - were not arbitrary creations. Their boundaries reflected long-standing divisions of language, religion, culture and ethnicity. And although the whole arrangement collapsed within two decades, this was in part because of the rise of Nazism and communism, both ideologies of conquest.
Today we take the nation states of central Europe for granted. They are settled political entities, each with a government elected by the citizens who live on its soil.
When the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, so too did the Ottoman Empire, whose territories embraced the whole of the Middle East and North Africa.
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