Looking Ahead or Stuck in the Past?

After I snapped out my daydream in politics class, I seriously started thinking about what my professor was ranting about: nationalism. He made the point that pretty much all people boast a fervor of nationalism, without actually considering how their nationalism came to be. Nationalism can simply be defined as a pride in one’s people and the belief that they have their own sovereign political destiny. Usually, countries boast a sense of “civic” nationalism, claiming that anyone within their borders is a part of their nation.  Today, countries and people use selective memory to remember the glorious parts of their history and try to forget instances of persecution, expulsion, or in the extreme, ethnic cleansing. What almost all people fail to recognize is that their own countries enacted policies like this to exclude essentially all ethnicities other than their own.

But don’t think that all these acts of forced separation and persecution are over now. Especially today we can see examples of ethnic segregation in the supposedly most advanced countries of the world. In France, for instance, the government has already made strong efforts to ban Muslim women from wearing burqas and have even tried to expel their Roma populations. Yes, there are significantly worse problems and leaders today like al-Assad in Syria, but countries, and more importantly people, should first think about how they view their own history and how they treat their own people, before trying to “help“ the rest of the world. 

But as we all know, ethnic tensions take place because of various ethnicities vying for political power. So is it a good idea to encourage ethnocentrism? Or should countries try to foster a “melting pot” identity like in the United States? I think countries should try their best to assimilate everyone in their society, instead of supporting a superiority complex for a certain group of people. Even though it may be harder this way, future generations would no longer have to feel a sense of guilt just because their ancestors took the easier way out in the short run.  

Protesters in Marseille, France fighting against the government's crackdown on Roma population