what makes a country a country?

 what makes a country a country?

this question has bothered me for 20 years. it started when i was studying law. the question kept popping up in my head.

ten years later in the 2010s, i still had no idea how to answer the question. the whole thing seemed arbitrary, and it doesn’t even seem like we know whether a country is actually a country. there are awkward situations everywhere where a land, a government, claims to be a country but is not, and where they claim not to be a country but they are. or trying to claim both at the same time.

and of course being in one of the few places where our nationality changed on paper without armed conflict, it was inherently difficult for us to grok what nationalism actually means.

then came 6 very turbulent years. we dreamed, and we faced reality.

what i learned was immense compared with what i learned during my days in law school. law was one important  aspect of the identity and workings of a country, but it wasn’t the only one.

a country is built on top of dreams and desires, blood and sweat, on history and current events, on culture and the arts, on the military and violence, on realities and fictions, and of course, law codifies all this into some kind of impartial language that pretends the context is irrelevant.

i didn’t realize the question was so profound and ran so deep. of course there was no theory on how a country becomes one. every country has a unique and difficult story, not to be commoditized  and  trivialized. they often rhyme but are not comparable. and they definitely cannot be “engineered”.

it must be life. with a spirit, a mind and a body. the birthing of a country is nothing less than a miracle