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The rise and fall of nations is an endless process of territories being joined and rejoined in varying mosaics, of people displaced and resettled, of power expanding and contracting. A new nation may be established through conquest, as was England when the Normans defeated the Anglo-Saxons, who had in turn shaken off the Danes, who had in turn put down the Anglo-Saxons. The original population of France was subdued by the Romans, whose remnants were driven out by the Franks, who in turn established an empire that under Charlemagne embraced large parts of Germany and Italy. In most cases of nation building through conquest, sheer force is not enough: there must be emotional and psychological power at work that sooner or later legitimizes the seizure and leads to an amalgamation of conquerors and conquered. Otherwise, the process of conquest is reversed. This has happened countless times. A classic example: Netherlanders rebelled against the rule of Spain in the 17th century, and the Belgians in the 19th century rebelled against the rule of The Netherlands. The rebels, for their part, must be able to make their rebellion stick and have it recognized by the world.
New countries may be established through a combination of immigration and revolution, as in the U.S. and Latin America, where settlers cut loose from their colonial masters. The process may also occur through a kind of rebirth—a deliberate revival of an ancient state or civilization in a new form, often but not always accompanied by revolutionary war. Modern Greece fought for its independence from the Ottoman empire partly in the name of its ancient, glorious incarnation, and modern Germany struggled for national unity remembering its identity under the Holy Roman Empire.
The breakup of empires has always given rise to new states. After World War I, the Paris Peace Conference put together Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia from disparate (and still not fully united) remnants of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and independent Serbia. The collapse of the colonial empires after World War II brought about a rash of such arbitrary creations. Many ex-colonial countries had sovereignty conferred on them by their former masters under the U.N.'s aegis, without the often salutary experience of having to fight for their freedom. Such countries are apt to be based on arbitrary old colonial boundaries. They are either so small that they have no independent viability, as in the case of Chad or Dahomey or Upper Volta, or else so large and composed of such disparate tribes that they have no common sense of nationhood, as in the case of Nigeria.
In the creation of modern Israel, traces of most of these precedents can be found—conquest, war of liberation, immigration, rebirth, international action—although no really close parallel exists. Judaism is a unique mixture of race, nationality and religion. There is no other people that has been dispersed for so long from its original home, yet has maintained the memory of that home as a living reality.
The Homeland Plea