Contemporary society often makes snap decisions and wishful thinking predominates in the end. Nationalism did not escape the similar fate. During the history of humanity there were enough tragedies occurred due to this ideology. Therefore, people are accustomed to assume this is something virulent. The purpose of Gustavo de las Casas, who wrote the article “Is Nationalism Good for You?”, was to refute this common believe and show nationalism can play a significant role to economic and hence social growth. To be more precise, he talks about positive correlation between nationalism and wealth of a state, fight against corruption within it and authority of the law among its citizens. In addition, the author is “a doctoral student in international
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The term “selective altruism” also finds its place here. To prove it, the author uses an analogy with a family as a nation and neighbors as surrounding nations. The thesis itself could be considered as a strong claim, because is possible to explain it by referring to other sources about nationalism. For example, Ernest Gellner starts his “Nation and Nationalism” with words: “Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent” (2006, 1). Here the political unit is represented by state, whereas national unit is a nation itself. And by defining nation as a community where people “recognize certain mutual rights and duties to each other in virtue of their shared membership” (2006, 7) Gellner implicitly claims members of such community do share a desire to develop their own nation as well as to support other compatriots they recognized, and this lead us to an idea of selective altruism Casas narrates about. Nevertheless, in order to become a strong argument the thesis should be supported more than just with an interesting analogy. Thereby, it lacks an example of how selective altruism is important within existing countries and probably how it affects relations between …show more content…
This is such enormously debatable assumption, that two questions arise immediately. Firstly, was the crisis of national identity suffered by all post-Soviet states? What about those, who was joined forcibly, e.g. Baltic? It is doubtful, that citizens of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, countries who considered themselves under the occupation of the Soviet Union and left it first, suffered a lot from fact that they are no longer Soviet people. Secondly, what is the evidence that the crisis of national identity contributed to the appearance of corruption and underdevelopment? Unfortunately, these questions do not have a place to be answered in the article. Therefore it is possible to say this history example is not only invalid, but lead a reader to a dubiety in
The term “selective altruism” also finds its place here. To prove it, the author uses an analogy with a family as a nation and neighbors as surrounding nations. The thesis itself could be considered as a strong claim, because is possible to explain it by referring to other sources about nationalism. For example, Ernest Gellner starts his “Nation and Nationalism” with words: “Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent” (2006, 1). Here the political unit is represented by state, whereas national unit is a nation itself. And by defining nation as a community where people “recognize certain mutual rights and duties to each other in virtue of their shared membership” (2006, 7) Gellner implicitly claims members of such community do share a desire to develop their own nation as well as to support other compatriots they recognized, and this lead us to an idea of selective altruism Casas narrates about. Nevertheless, in order to become a strong argument the thesis should be supported more than just with an interesting analogy. Thereby, it lacks an example of how selective altruism is important within existing countries and probably how it affects relations between …show more content…
This is such enormously debatable assumption, that two questions arise immediately. Firstly, was the crisis of national identity suffered by all post-Soviet states? What about those, who was joined forcibly, e.g. Baltic? It is doubtful, that citizens of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, countries who considered themselves under the occupation of the Soviet Union and left it first, suffered a lot from fact that they are no longer Soviet people. Secondly, what is the evidence that the crisis of national identity contributed to the appearance of corruption and underdevelopment? Unfortunately, these questions do not have a place to be answered in the article. Therefore it is possible to say this history example is not only invalid, but lead a reader to a dubiety in