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Copenhagen, Denmark

Nationalism, oh that hated word, how dare you be useful at some point? This is not going to be a lecture on the marxist theory on nationalities. (Although I think the Marxists here in E-Sweden are shamefully unaware of this theory. It's quite impressive actually how blatantly unaware of this aspect, a critical aspect, of Marxism they are. But then again it must get boring chosing to roleplay your own actual political values. I mean....uncreative. Or is it just insecurity in your own political beliefs?)

I digress, that is a whole 'nother article. Now we are going to discuss the merits of creating a national identity. An interesting aspect of nationalism is that it was actually created relatively recently. The national identity I mean. The current form that we know and understand today, the brave flag-waving patriots, whether ye be blue and yellow and mellow or red-white dynamite. It's amusing that Europeans accuse Americans of having no culture when the creation of most European national identities is younger than the nation of America.

Of course the immediate thing you have to wonder then is, "how the hell do you figure that? What about all the works of art of our nation that came before the 19th century?" Those works came from the geographical region yes, but have been appropriated to give people a sense of pride in their own nation. Despite the fact that they didn't actually write those books themselves, they just happen to live on the same piece of land later on. Don't get me wrong, I'm also guilty of these nationalist feelings from time to time.

Nationalism is a unifying force. The general idea is to create a community. Naturally the easiest way to create a community is by separating yourselves from everyone else around you. Hence the creation of the Us Vs. Them dichotomy. Denmark has clearly been quite good at that. What we have been lacking is the creation of positive cultural influences. We had attempted that at earlier points in time, (Den Danske Kultur, the creation of a religion, etc. etc.) But those who were working on that are no longer with us.

The positive aspect of adding this "great national works" point into our nationalism is that it helps us in our nationalism. For example we could act all aloof and say things like "Damn right, that was Mads Mikkelsen my countryman who was the villain in Casino Royale", fucking brilliant. Or "Fucking A, Lars Ulrich from Metallica is Danish, isn't that AWESOME \m{"

The point is that if we repeat these narratives of our nation often enough, it'll make us look cool. I know I know, you're probably sounding skeptical? You're probably thinking, "but...but Sweden's cool too?" Yes it probably is. But if we monopolize this market on coolest nation (which even when we're not doing anything we're still more popular, no offense or anything but you are the evil empire). Once we have that aspect down people will start believing it too. They will sympathize, they will join our rank and file. In fact more and more Swedes will sympathize too.

Unfortunately it hasn't been going so well. I've encouraged several people to start writing articles in Danish (And I still encourage it! I would too but Danish is not my mother tongue and it is not my strong suit.)

Moving on, Denmark and her master narrative. This is the brilliant part, if Denmark were to take the role of the victim early on, then that would by default give Sweden the role of the victimizer. Now really I've never been keen on that, and I would like to think that Denmark has never truly surrendered. Denmark is a nation of men (this was one of the narratives we built up but have forgotten recently.) A nation that never surrendered, and we will continue to act that way. We will not act like indignified, and molested entities.

The rather amusing part is that we could then monopolize everything of culture. We could start making claims about how Nephew is so much cooler than everything on the Swedish music scene. Sure it's not true, but who's going to argue? We'd just be admired. We could go on and claim how awesome and how much better our film industry is. (Which is true, well if you chose the right films and not the artsy crap that is made sometimes.)

In short, nationalism = community, which is a strength in Erepublik. The Danish population has been relatively stable. We've lost people and we've gained people. We've established a sense of community that people then feel an obligation towards. This is not true of the Swedish community which even though your forum is far more active (but no offense, most of those sub-forums aren't worth reading....) you still have no community feeling. It's so easy to divide Sweden between it's largest party and everyone else that it's like shooting fish in a barrel (not to mention gives a person a ridiculous amount of views and many long winded comments.)

Anyways I'm tired and have lost my train of thought. Nationalism is interesting!