Most Americans take it for granted that there is an American people or nation with its own particular culture and traditions, and that the human race in the world as a whole is divided among culturally distinct peoples or nations.
The twenty-first century is the era of the nation-state. Today there are 193 members of the United Nations General Assembly, even though at the time of its formation, the UN had only fifty-one members. Where did those 142 members come from, in the last seventy-seven years? The new states were formed from the partition of former European empires like the British and French Empires, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which was the successor state to the Romanov Russian Empire, and in some cases, like those of Yugoslavia and Sudan, the disintegration of post-colonial successor states into even smaller states.
