Walter Hinteler wrote:The country was called 'Germania' by Tacitus
Designations of a territory do not a nation make. See Ning's post on the "France" of old.
Many a current writer refers to "Siberia", but does that mean there exists a Siberian people - or that a 31st century historian can say: see, there was a Siberian nation 1000 years ago already, because the country was called "Siberia" by Solzhenytsin? No, obviously.
In fact, there are a whole bunch of peoples in Siberia, Yakuts, Chukchi's and the like, plus a majority of Russians, and if ever in the upcoming millennium the Urals come to separate two states, "Siberian" might well become more than a territorial or externally assigned label - but tracing the community's lineage back to the name's first occurrences would be foolish.
Many a Romanian nationalist likes to point to Roman-era literary references to "Dacia", in order to prove that "the Romanian nation" goes back two thousand years. Humbug - or, let's say, ideologically inspired reinvention of history.
Or - to add another example - there was a Batavia in ancient times, and the wild people living there were called "Batavians". But the link with the current-day Dutch nation that the founders of the modern Dutch state set out to suggest by calling it "the Batavian republic" is spurious. We might want to imagine some straightforward line of ancestry and the notion that we are continuing an identity first felt by them, but truth is, the Batavian wanderers were most probably not concerned with anything remotely like national identity, acting on family or village loyalty or tribal identity at best, instead.
Luxembourg is pressing for dominance?
