Convincing citizens to sacrifice for the good of the nation seems like it would be a difficult task, but between early indoctrination, constant propaganda and peer pressure it has a successful road map.
Consider the concept of sacrificing your life thousands of miles away from your home to help one group of people you don't know defeat another group for goals which are often ill defined. If you survive you may get the privilege of killing complete strangers because they are "the enemy".
Now this is called serving your country and that is the noble purpose that inspires the action. The fact that so many have died on all sides for this noble purpose is a testament to the success of the indoctrination road map.
If you simply consider the human condition it is the same for everybody, whatever your nationality or location. We are born, struggle to survive and eventually die. However there are perceived differences based on skin color, religion, wealth and politics that feed into a nationalistic story line.
They are different is the primary argument, how they are different varies. In a country such as America, forged by immigration that means we encapsulate so much diversity, this adds a dimension to the argument. However, the appeal to the dominant group and those who want to be part of that group can be successful.
We create myths about the past, like how every previous group of immigrants immediately dropped all their cultural norms and languages to assimilate. Clearly there are areas in most major cities and towns in parts of the country where this lie is obviously false, but it persists. In fact the typical path is based on a number of generations before assimilation is complete, although complete is a bit hard to define since certain cultural preferences persist for many generations.
Why and how the nation state arose is of course debated by academics and some theories are discussed in the link below.
http://www.columbia.edu/~aw2951/WimmerFeinstein.pdf
(to be continued)
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