"No nation is older than 250"
"No nation is older than 250"
306 comments
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Dumb people hear something, misunderstand it, and repeat an incorrect version with authority and without any critical thinking. I'm sure this person heard that the US is the oldest existing democracy. The next oldest, depending on the criteria you use, is probably Switzerland at 175+ years. But does this person really think that the US has existed longer than, say, the ancient Egyptians, the Ottomans, the Byzantines, etc.?
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The oldest existing democracy is Iceland depending on how you define democracy. But that was around 930 ad and had free men participating in making laws
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depending on how you define democracy.
This part of your comment seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting.
According to the ancient manuscript Landnámabók, the settlement of Iceland began in 874 AD, when the Norwegian chieftain Ingólfr Arnarson became the island's first permanent settler.[15] In the following centuries, Norwegians, and to a lesser extent other Scandinavians, immigrated to Iceland, bringing with them thralls (i.e., slaves or serfs) of Gaelic origin. The island was governed as an independent commonwealth under the native parliament, the Althing, one of the world's oldest functioning legislative assemblies. After a period of civil strife, Iceland acceded to Norwegian rule in the 13th century. In 1397, Iceland followed Norway's integration into the Kalmar Union along with the kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden, coming under de facto Danish rule upon its dissolution in 1523. The Danish kingdom introduced Lutheranism by force in 1550,[16] and the Treaty of Kiel formally ceded Iceland to Denmark in 1814.
Influenced by ideals of nationalism after the French Revolution, Iceland's struggle for independence took form and culminated in the Danish–Icelandic Act of Union in 1918, with the establishment of the Kingdom of Iceland, sharing through a personal union the incumbent monarch of Denmark. During the occupation of Denmark in World War II, Iceland voted overwhelmingly to become a republic in 1944, ending the remaining formal ties to Denmark. Although the Althing was suspended from 1799 to 1845, Iceland nevertheless has a claim to sustaining one of the world's longest-running parliaments. Until the 20th century, Iceland relied largely on subsistence fishing and agriculture. Industrialization of the fisheries and Marshall Plan aid after World War II brought prosperity, and Iceland became one of the world's wealthiest and most developed nations. In 1950, Iceland joined the Council of Europe.[17] In 1994 it became a part of the European Economic Area, further diversifying its economy into sectors such as finance, biotechnology, and manufacturing.
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It does a lot of heavy lifting when defining the US to be a democracy too.
You'd have to be a white supremacist to think the US was a democracy when slavery existed. Sure some people may have been voting, but there were Lords in a lot of places in Europe voting on stuff for a very long time.
We may as well say the Holy Roman Empire was a democracy because people voted for who would be Emperor. Sure the peasants didn't get to vote, but it doesn't matter if not every one gets to vote? Or does it?
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And how you define nation/country. You could say the Isle of Mann, but it probably doesn't meet the definition.
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Those are not nations in the modern sense. Modern Turkey and Egypt have only been around since after WWI. Byzantium hasn't been a nation since they were conquered by the Ottomans.
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The post doesn't say existing nations, it says there has never been one longer than 250 years.
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How do you define a nation? Rome, Byzantium, the Ottoman empire, etc., those were all empires. You can debate whether you want to consider them nations.
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The US is an empire unless indigenous peoples don’t count
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Same for the US, if you want to debate semantics.
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Lol debating semantics is exactly what's happening in this post
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If a country has ethnic/lingual, racial, gender/sexual, or wealth requirements is it really a democracy?
I'm not convinced that the USA was a democracy prior to 1964.
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When Greeks invented the term they stipulated only free men were able to vote. So depending on how you want to look at it, any country that allows free men to vote is a democracy. We've (modern people) just updated the terms of service to suit our current version of morality. We might decide our thinking outdated and misguided in the next 250 years and change things again. Hell we might even give trans people, women and people of colour equal rights to white men, you know, like legal protections and such. We might not try to suppress their votes... idk has anything actually changed since 1964 or did Americans just visit the moon?
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Yeah words are a cultural construct, we're speaking modern English so I don't really care a ton about the word choices of philosophers 2500 years ago speaking a different language.
We should definitely make sure that our society provides rights for all, and work towards a truly representative democracy.
I think things have definitely changed since 1964.
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When do you draw the line then? If 2500 and 250 years ago is too far back for theory and philosophy to apply, when does it?
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I'm not saying their philosophy/theory doesn't apply, I'm just saying that what the word "democracy" meant to them is pretty irrelevant in a modern context. I wouldn't call apartheid South Africa a democracy, would you?
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In that case there wasn't any democracy up until maybe 100 years ago (no clue what country first ticked all the boxes, or when)
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Yeah 100 years seems like a good guess. Basically the aftermath of ww1.
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The US didnt become a democracy until the civil rights act in 1964.
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US is the oldest existing democracy
It is not. Not a democracy, at least in its modern sense.
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It wasn't one back then either. Women and black people weren't allowed to vote from the start.
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It wasn’t one back then either.
If the Greeks were a Democracy then so was the United States; they both used the same rules.
If Women and Minorities are your defining line then Great Britain didn't become a Democracy until either 1928 or 1969.
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Yeah.
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306 comments