A few of the odder national identities

Thisisafakename's post about being an American abroad made me think about how we define nationality.  For the most part, such identities form naturally but since nationality creates groups politicians have been able to induce feelings of identity in some absurdly artificial ways.  For example, Italy has had a pretty sharp distinction between its northern and southern regions.  While these differences are real, the Italian fascist party Lega Nord decided to invent a fictional region, Podania, uniting all of Italy north of the Po River into a separate nationality.  While the area occasionally united for defense against France or the Holy Roman Empire, its various cities more often fought each other.  The party claims one Alberto da Giussano as the region's hero, who valiantly fought in one of the few moments of regional unity in the 12th century.  Or at least he fought valiantly in a poem, because outside of the invention of an author, da Guissano never existed.  Politicians for the Lega Nord also came up with an anthem, a camping van, a soccer team and militant youth group so I guess that's pretty much the makings of a country.  The soccer team went on to beat a league of soccer teams fielded by ethnic groups without their own countries.  Hooray!  I guess most nationalities are artificial at some level, but few are so crassly invented by a political party for the purpose of whipping people into xenophobic frenzy.    There are other fairly artificial national identities, like Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan, both of which were created for political purposes.  Stalin didn't feel comfortable with the notion of a large bloc of Muslim Turkic peoples at the southern edge of his empire, so he took various historical elements and re-wove them into Kyrgyzstan.  Much of the country's notion of identity comes from the epic poem of Manas.  At about a half-million lines, the poem is the world's longest poem and has existed for centuries.  However, its story and its hero are not particular to Kyrgyzstan, but to the vast region and its Turkic peoples.  Stalin had bureaucrats write versions of the oral histories with all of the events occurring within the newly created borders of the country, thus giving the people a unique identity from their neighbors, who now were descended from Manas' enemies.  Now Manas and the poem are the main cultural elements the Kyrgyz people point to that separates them from their neighbors who share their language, ethnicity and religion.  Turkmenistan is honestly too bizarre to cover in the remainder of this post, so I'll leave it until next Saturday when you can read about the wonderful Saparmurat Niyazov who used his absolute power to rename bread after his dead mother.  I really miss that guy.