Matt Steinglass continues the debate on the formation of national identity:
It is fruitless to attempt to deny the reality of a nation once it has come into being, though it's also a typical strategy of imperial control.
The French relied on differences in dialect and political fragmentation to deny there was any such thing as a Vietnamese people, breaking the country up into Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchine. (That argument recently resurfaced in Mark Moyar's "Triumph Forsaken", an apologia for America's Vietnam War.) I've heard Turkish nationalists insist at great length that there is literally no such thing as Kurds, denying even the existence of the Kurdish language. Chinese will deny the existence of a separate Tibetan people. Serbs long insisted there was no such thing as a Bosnian. Some Russians used to insist that Ukrainians were simply Russians who spoke a difficult dialect. And had a few wars and other political events turned out differently, they might have been right.
The Dish 