By admin 
This Saturday, the United States turns 250, and despite everything, we’re all going to try our best to have fun at the birthday party. But the occasion raises the question: Is 250 really all that “old” for a country anyway? After all, we’re on a planet where the city of Rome has been continually inhabited for 2,700 years, and the University of Bologna has been matriculating students for 938. San Marino, a tiny republic surrounded on all sides by Italy, still uses governing documents that date back to the 1600s. Is our celebration of a measly 250 years of continuous operation another example of American puffery? Or can we light a sparkler and genuinely enjoy a rare moment of earned self-congratulation this weekend?
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I asked a few experts in the history of nationalism to pronounce on America’s relative longevity, and discovered that the answer to this question is surprisingly complicated. What is a country? What is a nation? Are those two things different? Turns out the answer is: They could be. “It all resides in the definition. If a ‘nation’ is ‘people who live under a political system and feel like they are part of a system,’ there are far older places—China, parts of India, Britain and France,” said Charles Maier, professor emeritus of history at Harvard University. “If the question is about a constitutional system, we are, in fact, old.”
The terminology we use to talk about “countries” has been naturalized over centuries by the dominance of the form of the nation-state on the global political scene. A “nation-state” is a place with a single governing body, that enjoys the sovereignty to make its own laws, and consists of a community of people that understands itself to be a nation. Sounds like it could be pretty old, probably because it describes many countries we’re familiar with today. But the nation-state is itself a creature of the 19th century.
Siniša Malešević, professor of sociology at University College, Dublin, pointed out that although we understand some countries as being very “old,” that is colored by how those countries positioned themselves as everyone moved toward the form of the “nation.” As the nation became the dominant form of political organization in the 19th century, some countries started to tout their long civilizational history as part of their identity. But the nature of “continuity” can be subjective. Contemporary nations like Iran, Armenia, and Egypt can lay claim to being built on very old civilizations, but you could point out discontinuities and lapses in sovereignty in their histories that complicate the argument. In Denmark, for example, you could argue that the unification of warring tribes under Harald Bluetooth in the 900s marks the beginning of that country as an entity, but in the medieval era, Denmark was in fact governed in a union with Norway and Sweden; its conversion to its current governing system of constitutional monarchy came much later, in 1849.
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Some academics would argue that, for a nation to claim continuity, a long history of mutually understandable language and a sense of national belonging are key. As an example, “modern Greece builds on the idea of ancient Greece,” Malešević argued, “but ancient Greece is a very different place to contemporary Greece in terms of culture. Ancient Greek language was not standardized. And if you speak in ancient Greek to someone in modern Greece, they wouldn’t understand. It’s a different language.” Or think about the way Britain was during the medieval period—very “stratified,” Malešević said. “People at the top spoke a different language, often Latin, and populations would speak local vernaculars, which were not standardized.”
Or, take the example of Japan, another place with a deep civilizational history that’s gone through many phases when it comes to types of government. This was a “deeply stratified society” only 500 years ago, Malešević said. Despite living there, “peasants wouldn’t identify with ‘Japan,’ ” he said. The idea of “Japan” as a nation solidified only in modern times, “when people started identifying with the nation, rather than their village or their clan.” If you’re considering a “nation” to be a place where government derives from popular sovereignty, rather than from the divine right of kings, you could look at Britain’s Magna Carta, signed in 1215, which limited some of the power of the monarchy, as the start of that era in that country—but it was just the beginning.
So what is the oldest country, and why? These are obviously questions historians enjoy fighting over. “We wouldn’t have so many books and articles and disputes about this if it weren’t about definition and concept,” Maier said. As it turns out, America’s track record isn’t as long as some, but the nature of its longevity is much simpler to define than most. In the end, 250 years is “a long time for a constitutionally defined nation-state to exist, but it isn’t a long time for a national community to exist,” Maier said. At this point, we will take what we can get.
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