🚀 Add to Chrome – It’s Free - YouTube Summarizer
Category: Political Science
Tags: governancehistorynation-stateracismsovereignty
Entities: AristotleBhagat Singh ThindCanadaCaucasusFoucaultGrotiusKristoff MeinersKurdishRomaTreaty of WestphaliaWhite Lotus
00:00
so if we've talked about different ways that we can think about governance I mean the easiest way to talk about what we mean by governance is to look at some of the structures right the most kind of common one to think about when we talk
00:15
about political science again because political science is concerned with political leadership we start with the nation state which is a bit odd but okay it's a political unit that claims supreme authority which we understand is
00:30
sovereignty and the legitimate use of force over a defined territorial population use of force because that's what allows you to form a militia or form a military that then can protect the idea of that entity so you know with this famously
00:48
comes from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 where the idea was is that a bunch of Kings get together after a war and say listen I'm going to stop interfering in your space if you stop interfering in my space so the use of
01:05
force then is just the idea that I'm going to be the one who uses Force here you can't use it in my territory and I won't use it in yours it is largely a fiction it's a story that doesn't actually Bear out in any type of anthropological way right
01:21
because you know Empires and invasions and people are constantly moving and challenging each other's Authority but what it is is a it's an analytical Fiction it's a it's a way that that one king can say okay I know I've always interfered in your territory I'm always spying on you and all the rest of it but
01:37
we are going to say for the purposes of of ruling I'm the one in charge here and you're the one in charge there and this is most kind of developed when it comes to one particular theorist grocius who who was trying to figure this out when
01:53
you're in international waters because a lot of I mean the bulk of the planet is covered in water and the bulk of these interactions that were taking place between states often involved you know shipping your troops over to somewhere else in order to get resources or access to trade or those types of things and so
02:09
a lot of these Concepts emerge then and make more sense when you like it's one ship in one ship this ship is French and this ship is British therefore you can't interfere which happens on my ship and I can't interfere what happens on your ship when it's extrapolated onto land it
02:24
gets a lot more messy because we have to establish borders borders that may or may not be where they were in the past and may or may not have institutions or resources or structures or rivers or whatever it is um that that you need access to and so it's a largely a fiction but it's a
02:42
fiction that that caught on on both through force and the reproduction of ideas the idea that in 1900 there were only about 55 sovereign states and by 2022 there's 193. so we're moving towards this as as the kind of the the
02:57
standard or let's just say the standard of what is considered a a political unit that we can all understand um but this is a very specific way of of of Imagining the world which also
03:13
involves a lot of forgetting of the world um so I'm just going to use this here um hopefully this doesn't result in the copyright strike and I I just want to comment on it because analytical Concepts like reducing everything to a single Sovereign Nation State reducing everything that happens
03:28
within the borders of Canada eliminates its experience with indigenous communities with French communities with English communities with Americans going back and forth with all of the history and experience is all reduced to this one simple concept and
03:47
those Concepts then overlap and exist with other ones and so there's a very specific ignorance a specific political ignorance in the concept of sovereignty so I'll just do a little bit about this and then we'll we'll kind of come back to
04:02
specifically 1648 is a very specific framework that puts the state over Nations even though we've got 4 000 Nations and only 193 States Ville Caucasian the answer is surprisingly you know what this show is
04:18
about most people know the definition of Caucasian as a white-skinned person of European descent right not really outside of America white people generally aren't seen as Caucasian at
04:35
all why because almost every country has a different definition for Caucasian a person from the Caucasus region which in case you're wondering is actually right over here with parts of Russia Georgia Armenia Azerbaijan and Northern turkey so immediately when we bound these
04:53
nation-state things we know that there's multiple Nations within them but we still pretend like the nation and the state are synonyms and so this is a very specific reading of of this very specific understanding of history and there's a reason that in 1900 there was
05:08
only 55 because there were supplementary factors into deciding whether or not you were a legitimate nation-state so why has Caucasian become synonymous with all white people well buckle your seat belts because things are about to get pretty racist a century before Hitler's rise to
05:25
power there was another German man who believed white people were the perfect race Kristoff miners who was one of the earliest adopters of scientific racism now hold on because it's about to get really unscientific miners believed that Caucasians aka the actual people from
05:40
that region between Russia and Turkey had quote the whitest most blooming and most delicate skin in fact he viewed every non-caucasian race as ugly inferior immoral and animal-liked he also believed from the Middle East and Asia had little intelligence and were
05:57
predispositioned to be evil but this goes back to the discussion of Aristotle right because if you are constantly framing success and hierarchy through your own definitions or more accurately when Aristotle's framing it through the Greek
06:12
citizens of which he is not part that is going to be inherently exclusive and that exclusion is going to rest on a whole bunch of other assumptions that aren't framed when we make the simple nation-state claim scientists
06:32
race of men the people of Georgia and what made the Georgian people so beautiful well this creepy guy had a huge collection of human skulls and out of the 245 the Georgian skull was his favorite did I mention that he had a
06:47
collection of 245 human skulls so this one I'm sure he was doing science right like isn't that what we want to do here to social science weirdo using no science at all decided that all of humanity must have
07:02
come from this region spoiler alert we didn't he also decided that all light-skinned people from Europe belong to the same race Caucasian then he split the rest of the world into four other races which he referred to as degenerate forms of God's original creation sounds
07:18
like a fun guy those other races were Mongolian the yellow race Malayan Brown race Ethiopian the black race and American the red race lumenbach's racial classifications went on to be adopted by the newly formed United States because of course it did it helped our founding
07:34
fathers justify things like slavery and selective immigration quotas but that was a long time ago right so why does the word Caucasian persist while other old-timey racial categories like negroid have disappeared well there seems to be a few reasons that are a little intertwined in America there's
07:50
a long legal history of the word the Supreme Court has actually used Caucasian in 64 cases including one from 1928 that is key during the 1920s only free whites or Caucasians were allowed to become naturalized citizens in 1928 bhagat Singh thinned an Indian man who
08:07
fought for the U.S in World War One tried to become a US citizen by arguing that many anthropologists defined Indians as Caucasians after a major legal battle the Supreme Court decided that Caucasian really only meant white Europeans this decision leaked so this
08:24
is the key problem of the move of the analytical category of the nation-state is that it is going to like Aristotle citizen reflect a very specific understanding of someone who's a veteran who served in the war fighting for who you were and still doesn't get the thing
08:39
that you would call citizenship right so the nation-state is an analytical category which is filled in by all these other things including whatever the attitudes of the day are the racism of the day and and the opinions of the day codified the modern American definition of Caucasian as whites with European
08:56
ancestry why else you don't exactly know for sure but one reason uncaucasian is likely stuck around is because of its power language is one of the most systematic subtle and significant vehicles for spreading racial ideology and Caucasian implies that white people are different from other racial groups
09:12
in America it may white people are somehow connected in a way that's not just based on the pigmentation of their skin it even sounds kind of scientific even though it's really really not so were you surprised by the history of the word Caucasian sound off in the comments below and we'll see you next week right
09:27
here so what we're talking about here when we are putting forward this concept of nation state is very much a claim over territory right it's the idea that you should be able to
09:44
possess that territory because you have back to that definition the legitimate and ultimate Authority you uh alongside the use of force and the use of force is key here because that means if you have the best use of force the most strategic
09:59
use of force the best technology or Weaponry you can be on the top right and so this is what sovereignty allows us to do because we know that the actual experiences of nation states doesn't actually reflect any sovereignty they're constantly invading one another there is
10:15
no idea that sovereignty is a well-established legal International legal Norm or something no everybody is constantly interfering with everybody else's sovereignty but it's a fiction we maintain in order to have those who can make those claims organize resources around it so when we do that we're
10:32
automatically saying who counts and who doesn't back to Aristotle in the political animal those who are Political Animals are those who are allowed to speak those who aren't aren't citizens aren't allowed to do so and and they don't have full rights and so we have this framing of sovereignty that
10:48
immediately grants rights to some groups and not to others so the thought exercises here is that women didn't always have the right to vote at one point they didn't now they did what happened sovereignty might have been the same for Canadians prior to and after
11:03
women's rights to votes which came about in the 1900s through all sorts of suffrage movements suffrage being the right to vote and women demanding the right to vote and Men then I guess granting the right to vote so this is the weird part right is is that we have this sovereignty then establishes who is
11:18
who is legitimate actor speaker political animal and those who aren't because they can just make noise it's so gross right but they can make noise but we can't hear it because like literally the votes don't count right and so um the idea of the
11:36
sovereignty coming from the nation state of 1648 is a peace agreement that recognizes One Sovereign Kingdom and mutually we recognize another Sovereign Kingdom's right to non-interference and in the modern nation state we'll talk about this is really what this means is the right to to take life or let life
11:52
live and so we'll get back to that when we talk about Foucault and the later section but it's the idea that that just because you control the territory and have legitimate let's say military authority over the territory doesn't mean it's legitimate
12:08
to everybody who's there right it never has been that's why there is only 50 of them and now we've got 193 and many of those are highly contested right because we just don't do it so I mean if you saw White Lotus season one the whole premise here is that like there's you know you
12:24
know it's Hawaii it's the you know big tourist destination very American very dominated but there are people there in the US who are like I'm not so sure that that's the case um I don't think any of these memes are going to be testable or anything but it what they do is they reinforce and I've
12:40
got a whole bunch later just a slew of them to reinforce the ways in which you know these these Concepts that we put forward these political concepts are done at such abstract theoretical way to make it seem like they're you know science right they're a hard concept that once you have political science you
12:56
will understand but realistically I put them in a meme and explain it just as as as easily right and so sovereign states are what we consider the modern institutional apparatus of politics based on those assumptions we
13:11
can frame them differently we can say they're authoritarian we can say they're totalitarian when liberally we'll talk about those differences quickly in a bit but the problem is is that in order to have coherence we have to build nationalism right so often we create you
13:28
know in Canada we didn't have we would most Canadians who fought and died in World War one and two fought under the British enson a different flag the Canadian flag didn't come out until after World War II so for much of that experience I mean in early days of
13:44
Canada we didn't have an independent foreign policy because we were a colonial part of the British Commonwealth so those capacities to develop your Independence require you to develop identities which then you can map onto the sovereignty so that you can make claims right and so Nations we have
14:01
many of them yeah eight thousand Nations 100 193 States so the nation states are not going to match up so what you're going to have to do is identify kind of a dominant nation and put that on your state in order to have nation state status now some can just never do that
14:16
Canada's long had this because we are bilingual because we have French nation and English nation and let's be clear indigenous nationhood all over the place as well um and so we are this is what reconciliation is we are trying to
14:32
reconcile the idea of the modern nation state with the idea that the nation part doesn't make any sense and for most of those communities has been a source of alienation you can do that now with Alberta Alberta for a long experience has an alienation with the idea that
14:49
Ottawa reflect represents it and so even Alberta can want to succeed right like it's the same thing and so there are nations that never got a state but the Kurds just never got a state the Roma don't continue to exist predate all the nation States and are still throughout
15:05
Europe right and face all sorts of prejudice from those States because they want to be nation states and those nations are inconvenient to them and so the nation state is a fantasy of Kings it is a single culturally homogeneous population that doesn't have any basis or factor history it's an analysis it's an analytical understanding it's
15:21
political science the danger of this of course is that once you link a demos or a people to a state than any people in that state who you identify as not people or the ones that shouldn't be there or non-citizens are the subject of
15:39
kind of horrible things and so man has this book it's called The Dark Side of democracy we're here because the rise of democracy is the rise of of genocide and and killing of entire populations because one population is competing to have the nation state so while it seems
15:54
simple to say oh we've got 193 nation states it's actually really complicated because this idea that we're constantly trying to ground the statehood in our nationhood reproduces all these weird things where like they keep kept insisting from my daughter when she was in school you know what's your ethnicity
16:10
what's your ethnicity I mean Generations here of White Settlement have meant that we are white settlers in Canada that's all it means but like this constant Obsession well if you're actually British or Scottish or Irish or French or whatever it gives you more of a a
16:26
nationhood to ground your ethnicity to ground your identity and so it just doesn't make a ton of sense because then it says somehow well if you can clearly identify your ethnicity as being recent I guess somehow it's better versus you
16:43
know where else so I mean settlers or settlers right and we just don't want to frame it as that so what happens then and here's just a tick tock talking about it is the way in which those 50 original nation states reproduce all these weirdness for all
16:58
the 193 we have now and it reproduces a very Western experience about about how this happens so this is just talking about like basic Notions of nationalism that come from the nation-state and the idea that we've got these things like flags and anthems that are welcome to my
17:17
old national anthems are within the Western classical music Canon yeah I've always wondered this is a fantastic example of what statehood is a performance which is used by unrequired of actors at times in order to be taken seriously as a legitimate International political entity so as new nation states we're developing they had to adopt the
17:33
mannerisms of the prevailing power Brokers in the International System in this case European nation states in order to be taken seriously as a legitimate political activism we see this all throughout history ancient Greece had a similar effect on its surrounding policies and likewise Chinese hegemony had ripple effect before the Advent of European
17:48
colonialism and we even see non-state actors nowadays like NATO or the European Union adopting things like flags and national anthems in order to be taken more seriously and look like they fit in to the international political Arena and this is a form of diplomacy called image management and
18:04
it's all about maintaining a certain aesthetic in order to be taken seriously for example using a microphone that's not actually plugged in because that makes makes it look like you should be taken more seriously so yes this is the central issue is that
18:20
and this is why I call it ignorance ignorance isn't um a lack of information in this case specifically with the nation state it's a specific framing of sovereignty of an ideology of a framework that absolutely doesn't have any basis in history or
18:37
fact but that we use to reorganize the system and those who set up the system then everybody else who comes into the system wants that thing they want their nation-state status so I'm a nation I want statehood so the Kurds in particular have long demanded statehood the problem is is that we've already set up borders around Iraq and and turkey
18:54
that are going to be challenged by that statehood and so Nation statehood as an idea as a concept as a political concept makes sense it's sense making but it's inherently contested and that's why it's
19:09
political and deeply political that's why we start with it when we start talking about politics