{"id":348,"date":"2026-07-04T09:35:42","date_gmt":"2026-07-04T09:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=348"},"modified":"2026-07-04T09:35:42","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T09:35:42","slug":"is-250-years-even-that-old-for-a-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=348","title":{"rendered":"Is 250 Years Even That Old for a Country?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This Saturday, the United States turns 250, and despite everything, we\u2019re all going to try our best to have fun at the birthday party. But the occasion raises the question: Is 250 really all that \u201cold\u201d for a country anyway? After all, we\u2019re 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?<\/p>\n

Read more America Was Never a Democracy<\/a><\/p>\n

I asked a few experts in the history of nationalism to pronounce on America\u2019s 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. \u201cIt all resides in the definition. If a \u2018nation\u2019 is \u2018people who live under a political system and feel like they are part of a system,\u2019 there are far older places\u2014China, parts of India, Britain and France,\u201d said Charles Maier, professor emeritus of history at Harvard University. \u201cIf the question is about a constitutional system, we are, in fact, old.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The terminology we use to talk about \u201ccountries\u201d has been naturalized over centuries by the dominance of the form of the nation-state on the global political scene. A \u201cnation-state\u201d 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\u2019re familiar with today. But the nation-state is itself a creature of the 19th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

Sini\u0161a Male\u0161evi\u0107, professor of sociology at University College, Dublin, pointed out that although we understand some countries as being very \u201cold,\u201d that is colored by how those countries positioned themselves as everyone moved toward the form of the \u201cnation.\u201d\u00a0As the nation became the dominant form of political organization in the 19th<\/sup> century, some countries started to tout their long civilizational history as part of their identity. But the nature of \u201ccontinuity\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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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, \u201cmodern Greece builds on the idea of ancient Greece,\u201d Male\u0161evi\u0107\u00a0 argued, \u201cbut 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\u2019t understand. It\u2019s a different language.\u201d Or think about the way Britain was during the medieval period\u2014very \u201cstratified,\u201d Male\u0161evi\u0107 said. \u201cPeople at the top spoke a different language, often Latin, and populations would speak local vernaculars, which were not standardized.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or, take the example of Japan, another place with a deep civilizational history that\u2019s gone through many phases when it comes to types of government. This was a \u201cdeeply stratified society\u201d only 500 years ago, Male\u0161evi\u0107 said. Despite living there, \u201cpeasants wouldn\u2019t identify with \u2018Japan,\u2019 \u201d he said. The idea of \u201cJapan\u201d as a nation solidified only in modern times, \u201cwhen people started identifying with the nation, rather than their village or their clan.\u201d If you\u2019re considering a \u201cnation\u201d to be a place where government derives from popular sovereignty, rather than from the divine right of kings, you could look at Britain\u2019s Magna Carta, signed in 1215, which limited some of the power of the monarchy, as the start of that era in that country\u2014but it was just the beginning.<\/p>\n

So what is the oldest country, and why? These are obviously questions historians enjoy fighting over. \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t have so many books and articles and disputes about this if it weren\u2019t about definition and concept,\u201d Maier said. As it turns out, America\u2019s track record isn\u2019t as long as some, but the nature of its longevity is much simpler to define than most. In the end, 250 years is \u201ca long time for a constitutionally defined nation-state to exist, but it isn\u2019t a long time for a national community to exist,\u201d Maier said. At this point, we will take what we can get.<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more Nina Totenberg\u2019s Alito Retirement Error Reveals a Much Bigger Problem<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Italy. Japan. Greece! There are many countries that seem older.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":347,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[167,179,126,141],"class_list":["post-348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-history","tag-holidays","tag-international","tag-united-states"],"yoast_head":"\nIs 250 Years Even That Old for a Country? - Home Move Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=348\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Is 250 Years Even That Old for a Country? - Home Move Chronicle\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Italy. 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