That nations are social constructs has long been a known and unpleasant fact. The mechanism that makes millions of people identify themselves as members of a certain nation is a mystery. Even greater is the mystery when self-declared members of a certain nation - have sympathies or antipathies towards some other nation, or when those simple emotions escalate to the point of open love or hatred...Emotions (and not reason) are the core of the collective identity of the people, be it secular or religious...and in all those identifications only emotions are hidden, and those are the terrible ones. Fear, above all.
Do not seek and do not expect rationality because it does not exist within the framework of collective belonging, mostly because nations are artificially arbitrary constructs and to a large extent ethnicities as well. It is not even worth wasting words on religious affiliations in that regard. The emergence of sympathy and even identification with a nation in which the individual was not `born` is probably because he feels inferior as a member of `his` nation...and thinks that by affiliation with another nation he will be better off. Especially if it is a larger nation, as is the case with Russophilia or Americanophilia.
Why would a member of a certain nation feel inferior at all? So let's take a Macedonian, a Serbian, a Bulgarian or an Albanian, they all see that their nation is insignificant on the world stage, poor standard, poor life, nothing significant in terms of art or science...eventually if some incidental sports success or semi-success happens, only then would they feel like part of something `significant`, a larger day-life situation that will take them away from their individual insignificance and throw them into the collective ecstasy of identification with someone's individual success that is experienced as personal. Extremely irrational, foolish and infantile, but at the same time a sad reality...
In all that chaos there are some rules, let's say Russophilia appears because of the Cyrillic alphabet, Orthodoxy, Slavicism, power (real and imagined), technological progress (completely imagined in this case), in rarer cases because of some Russian writers from the distant past, the Bolshoi Theater, etc. or a little bit of all of that, in that mess in the head there is something that the individual feels as `theirs`, recognizable, `ours`...with makebelief as a pillar of perception. It often occurs in retirees or in people who were raised by retirees.
With Americanophiles (I don't know if it's the right expression but it doesn't matter) it's clear - after all, it's about the dominant empire and cultural dominance in all fields, we all say hi and bye and no shit, no one says goodbye, much less sayonara or a random Mandarin word for a random thing. That's that hegemony, whether we like it or not. Our grandfathers grew up with westerns and musicals, it's been present for a long time, and John Wayne and Gary Cooper and the silicone sex bombs, it's about generations of people subjected to the influence of American mass culture... although not a more rational phenomenon than Russophilia, it's still a shade more logical. In addition to the aforementioned `philias`, there is also the occasional Anglophile, Francophile, Germanophile, perhaps Italianophile or admirer of all things Japanese (Nipponophile!?)
Which is somewhat understandable despite being bizarre. If we are guided by outdated and false ideas about `national` cultures and influences, and for the purposes of this post we can let our brains `identify` a little - the need to `root` for a certain `nation` that still means something in the world is understandable. What is less understandable, and even borders on absurdity, are the outbursts of Serbomania, Bulgarophilia and, less often, Greekomania - phenomena where identity is redirected towards equally weak and insignificant matrices that have nothing to offer more than the original affiliation itself. This is worrying for the members of that nation (I wonder what that nation could be?) because they feel so worthless and inferior that they identify with their neighbors' worthless identities.
Perhaps it is a matter of relapses, influences from the past, because in the race to invent nations in the 18th/19th century, the Russian paradise under Ottoman slavery in the Balkans began to divide into nations, and by chance, the groups of people who identified themselves as Serbs, Greeks and somewhat later Bulgarians - invented nations before the group of people who would identify themselves as Macedonians did, and thus had a head start for propaganda...And where individuality is subordinated to the collective, where belonging to oneself and to the people who mean something to you in real life - is replaced by belonging to invented communities - there evil is born, hatred, and in the end irrationality triumphantly dances over millions of dead people...which means almost the entire planet Earth, sans Antarctica.
(Roger Mortis, 119)
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