This business about Russia, Ukraine and NATO has led Your Humble Blogger to think about the modern nation-state, and more than that, to wonder what other people think about the modern nation-state.
I think most Americans, on a gut level, think that European countries are “normal” countries, and also that European countries are “natural” countries. I could totally be wrong about that, because I often am wrong about what Americans think, so I’m curious if any of y’all feel like we have at idea in our cultural mindset.
Specifically, I think: People in the US have an idea that France is the place where there are French people who speak French; Germany is the place where there are German people who speak German; England is where there are English people who speak English, etc, etc, and that we think that that is pretty much normal for a country: a political boundary enclosing a single language and cultural group. And that other countries that comprise multiple ethnic or language groups—Switzerland, let’s say, or Iraq, or the old Yugoslavia, or —are not “normal” countries, to the extent that they differ from that idea.
Now, obviously, everyone even in the US knows that not everybody who lives in the boundaries of France is cultural or ethnically French (vaddevah dat means) and grew up in a French-speaking home. There are individual exceptions. Most of us, probably, could even acknowledge that “normal” countries are not ethnically or linguistically homogenous—that there are regions of Spain where people call themselves Basque or Catalan rather than Spaniards. But I think—again, on a gut level, rather than on an analytical level—that we tend to think of that as an aberration, rather than as a normal part of a nation-state.
Even people who know a lot of European history tend (I think) to find it hard to think of France, f’r’ex, as the place where people lived who historically spoke French, Occitan, Breton, Basque, Alsatian… and were ethnically Burgundian, Angevin, Savoyard, Breton, Norman, Lotharingian… That “France” is as much a made-up nation comprised of long-standing ethnic groups with centuries of wars against each other as “Yugoslavia”, or as “The European Union”. That “England” is the same way, and “Spain” and “Germany” and all the rest of them. And, obviously, “Ukraine”.
And I think that’s important to keep in mind when we think about “Russian-backed separatists” in Ukraine, or when we think “sovereignty” and other concepts.
I don’t mean to say that I don’t think we in the US or in NATO should not defend Ukraine from a Russian invasion, if there is one! Or that they should. I think that if Russia invades, it will be a terrible result no matter what. But I think it’s harder to think about what is actually going on if we maintain the gut feeling that there is and of right out to be a think called “Ukraine”, and that it is properly a nation that naturally rises out of the ethic group called Ukrainians who speak Ukranian and are therefore distinct from ethnic Russians who speak Russian (or, I suppose, ethnic Poles who speak Polish).
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
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I agree that most Americans think about nations the way you say they do. Indeed, I believe that most have an understanding of nations and national identify that is even less nuanced and less accurate than you suggest.
When you propose that “Most of us, probably, could even acknowledge that “normal” countries are not ethnically or linguistically homogeneous—that there are regions of Spain where people call themselves Basque or Catalan rather than Spaniards,” I doubt it–if by “most of us,” you mean most U.S. citizens. If, as I saw from recent polling, only a third of U.S. citizens can find Ukraine on a map, I doubt that “most of us” know that communities identifying as Basque and Catalan exist within the boundaries of the nation state of Spain. Sadly, I expect that, for the majority of U.S. citizens who are aware that there are people who are not culturally or ethnically French living in France, their awareness extends no farther than to know that France and other European nations experience immigration from the Middle East and Africa. That’s the usual way in which diversity within nation states is reported upon in the U.S. media; there is much less reporting on cultural diversity with a history going back more than a thousand years.
As you point out, it is more accurate to understand nation states as entities whose status is primarily legal and secondarily cultural. The invasion of one sovereign nation by another is a violation of the law of nations, and it’s on that violation that NATO’s opposition to Russia’s apparent intent to send its armed forces into Ukraine is based. However, as you say, most people in the U.S. think that the legal status of nations is justified on the basis of the nation giving sovereignty to an ethnic or cultural group that has some right to self-determination, even though the examination of actual nation states shows that few nations are actually constituted that way. It does seem worth noting, however, that there is a nation of Ukraine because the people living in that region decided that there should be a nation of Ukraine, which figured into the decision of the rest of the world’s nations to recognize Ukraine as a nation.
Nations are complicated and the reliance of the international order on nations is problematic; it’s not clear to me, however, what a better alternative could look like, and the alternatives that are obvious are also obviously worse. Do you have any ideas about that? Or are you mainly suggesting that a more nuanced understanding of nations would enable Americans to reach a better understanding of how international relations should be conducted?
I don’t really have any good ideas about it, other than, as you say, a more nuanced understanding would probably be useful. Or, failing that, a simple skepticism about the idea of the nation-state. It wouldn’t have to be very nuanced to be more useful than a belief that nation-states are a natural outgrowth of a homogenous culture–if we replaced our idea of a “normal” country as being like our incorrect view of France or Germany with an idea that a “normal” country was more like India or Bolivia, that would probably be an improvement. It would be better not to believe in any “normal” nation-states at all, probably, and I suspect that our professional diplomats have in fact been trained out of such thinking.
And I also think it would be helpful if we also managed to reject the idea that the US would be more stable or better-governed or in any way improved if it were more like this non-existent “normal” homogenous nation.
Thanks,
-V.
I should add that your point about the law of nations is an excellent way of looking at it—if we were to attempt to justify Donetsk and Luhansk being within or without the borders of “Ukraine” based on some idea of natural nationhood, or even of popular sovereignty, we would get bogged down very quickly. But looking at it from the point of view of the law of nations, it seems clear that it is a violation for Russia to “recognize” the independence of those “nations”—and that if the “leaders” of those “nations” invite the Russian military to assist them in keeping order, sending in the tanks would be as much an invasion of Ukraine as it would be to send in the tanks without such invitations.
Thanks,
-V.