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Category talk:Greeks
Wrong category for Odyssey characters?
I just realized that the Greeks in Odyssey maybe don't belong in this category since this category was created specifically to refer to Greek nationals (as opposed to ethnic Greeks whose "nationality" may actually have belonged to the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt instead). In the 5th century BCE, Greece was not yet unified. Although, I protested that the Greece article was still appropriate because the Greeks then did have a concept of the Greek civilization, there wasn't a unified Greek state. People's "nationality"—we are using that term loosely since some political theorists believe it is anachronistic for antiquity but I disagree—would best have been approximated to their polis not Greece, at least not until Macedon unified Greece. I'm not sure about this though. What do you guys think? Sol Pacificus(Cyfiero) 20:57, June 8, 2020 (UTC)
- I'm for only using the term Greek nationals for after the formation of a Greek nation state. I think I’ve brought up this topic in regards to Italians and Spanish nationals as well. I’ve been braining storming of ways to better delineate between ethnic and national category pages. I know you like conciseness but I was mulling over the idea of "Citizens of the Macedonian Empire" as way to deal with this instead of "Macedonian nationals". Lacrossedeamon (talk) 21:32, June 8, 2020 (UTC)
- The problem we're contending with is that mainstream political science tends to see terms like nationality, sovereignty, nation-state, and probably even citizen as anachronistic for antiquity. Often, it is said that there were no such concept as sovereignty under the Peace of Westphalia which ended the Thirty Years' War and no concept such as nation-state in the entire world until European feudal kingdoms transitioned into consolidated states with clearly defined borders. I wholeheartedly disagree with this because I think this method of defining the nation, or the nation-state, or nationality is Eurocentric. It also tends to rest on flawed assumptions of every pre-modern country as being feudal, such as China, Iran, and Egypt. In any case, mainstream scholars hold that Ancient Egypt was never a nation or a nation-state, and the same goes for Ancient Rome or Greece and China prior to the 19th or 20th centuries. By this same reasoning, there were no such thing as a Greek nationality, an Egyptian nationality, or a Chinese nationality before the modern age. A minority of scholars do dispute that, in fact, Egypt and China qualified as nation-states from their inception, with the unification of Egypt under the Menes for example, but I have never met a professor who agrees with this or me.
- In any case, I just wanted to bring this to everyone's attention. I personally have always thought that words are what we make them and terminology develops when there is a need for them, and if terms like nation-state, nationality, and nation have to be defined so narrowly as fitting the modern European model of the state, then we lack a word to describe how ancient Egyptians or ancient Chinese or ancient Greeks conceptualized their country apart from mere ethnicity. Because contrary to popular misconception, these three peoples did have a concept of having unified civilizations in those days, even if the unified country at times fell apart. These people also accepted that there were foreigners of other countries who became part of their countries.
- A further problem is that nationality is sometimes or often treated as synonymous with citizenship, and sometimes both these terms are seen as misleading if the state in question didn't technically have strict citizenship laws. Hence, I am also not sure if "Citizens of Macedonian Empire" would work. For one thing, I find it unnecessarily wordy and for another, I'm not sure how citizenship laws functioned in the Macedonian Empire. Then again, even if someone from an ancient state didn't have the codified rights in that state as a Roman citizen did, it doesn't mean that they didn't have some other official status, especially when censuses were involved. So perhaps citizen doesn't have to be defined so strictly.
- Yet here's another thing. I have recently discovered that national and citizen are not always interchangeable because I only just learned last week that even though I am not a British citizen (I cannot live and vote in the UK), I am legally a British national via having been born in Hong Kong during British rule (which comes with a few privileges non-British nationals do not have). In a similar vein, American Samoans are legally US nationals but not US citizens while all US citizens are US nationals. In other words, national is broader and more general than citizen, and I would prefer it as the safer option.
- All this might give you a headache, and I'm really just sharing all the complications involved with the terminology here which I wish to get out of the way. My position is that we should feel free to use national, nation and nationality loosely regardless of what political scientists say. Citizen might also work, but I think national is broader and the safer option. Hence, to continue using the Egyptian and Chinese categories for nationals only, even if disputably anachronistic, is fine to me.
- For this Greek category, I think it is more complicated since whereas the first unified Egyptian and Chinese states began with their first dynasties, Greek history did not begin with one unified state. When you suggest that this page should only be used for Greeks after the Greek nation-state was founded, we still have to talk about when that is. Many political scientists probably don't think that Greece was ever a nation-state until it won its independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century. However, I would argue that the moment that the Greeks first had a unified state, it was a nation, a nation-state, and that was the Macedonian Empire—assuming that the Minoans and Mycenaeans never had one unified state. So I think that a category specific to "Macedonian nationals" or "Citizens of the Macedonian Empire" might be unnecessary. In my mind, we can take Greek "nationality" as beginning with the Macedonian Empire even if it Greece experienced periods where it was subsumed into other foreign powers.
- Mainstream political scientists often carve a binary between nation-state and empire, arguing that nation-states are not multi-ethnic whereas empires by definition are, and therefore a country like the Macedonian Empire could not have been a nation-state. Notwithstanding this, my professors used to tell me that what distinguish a nation-state like those of modernity with ancient states is that nowadays, there is a concept of borders whereas ancient states didn't have a concept of borders, e.g. the Macedonian Empire could expand as much as it wanted to. I have always taken issue with these points since there are many modern nation-states which are both multi-ethnic and have waged imperialistic wars of expansion, bringing foreign peoples into their fold. Just because a country embarks on a military campaign to annex territory, doesn't mean it doesn't have a concept of borders; just because a country has a concept of clearly defined borders, doesn't mean it can't seek to change those borders by waging wars of expansion. My professors never did answer these questions of mine to satisfaction, so I am forced to conclude that the Greek nation didn't begin only in 1822 but that it actually began in antiquity, with the Macedonian Empire.
- So going off of that, I have heard the common argument that Italy didn't have a nation-state until its unification in the 19th century either, but I am also skeptical of that because before its fragmentation into city-states, there was a transitional period where Italy was a single kingdom under the Lombards, and Italy was one of its names. Notwithstanding this, the Italians, like the Egyptians and Chinese, also had one unified nation when it was the Roman Republic and then the Roman Empire, and I've also always been skeptical about seeing Romans and Italians as two distinct people since there is a continuum between them.
- Germany and Spain I can actually see the "nation-state" argument making sense since in medieval Europe, ideas about where one country began and where one ended was chaotic. Boundaries overlapped due to the feudal geopolitical make-up, so the consolidation of feudal territories into what eventually became Spain and Germany (as well as England and France) fit that mainstream narrative of the rise of nation-states by political scientists. But this goes back to my point; this was not the geopolitical development in other parts of the world, like China, Egypt, Persia, and Greece, and even in Italy, the story is not quite the same.
- I really did not know how to organize my thoughts here or if everything I said here was necessary... xD Sol Pacificus(Cyfiero) 23:51, June 8, 2020 (UTC)