The Undivided Past Page 10
As Frederick Jackson Turner put it in 1891, “ideas, commodities even, refuse the bounds of a nation.… This is true especially in the modern world, with its complex commerce and means of intellectual connection.”90 Twenty years later, in words reminiscent of Joseph Chamberlain’s, Franklin Jameson made the same point: “the nation is ceasing to be the leading form of the world’s structure; organizations transcending national boundaries are becoming more and more numerous and effective.”91 He was aptly articulating the spirit of an era that saw the establishment of a host of new international bodies, among them the first European common market in 1860, comprising Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Prussia, and Austria; the International Red Cross, which was set up three years later and based in Switzerland from the 1880s; and the Latin Monetary Union of 1865, involving France, Belgium, Italy, Greece, and Switzerland.92 To be sure, these transnational initiatives and organizations were unable to prevent the outbreak of the First World War. But they do serve to remind us that there was a great deal more to the history (and to the habits of thought) of the nineteenth-century world than the fact of the nation-state—and the attendant national identities and national enmities.93
TOWARD POSTMODERN NATIONAL IDENTITIES?
This interconnected world, characterized by multinational empires and composite monarchies, and underpinned by the relatively unhindered movements of people, money, goods, and ideas across the oceans and around the globe, crashed and burned in 1914–18, with the defeat and disintegration of four great transnational, land-based, polyglot, multiethnic empires: the Russian, the German, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Ottoman. And it was Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States—one of the surviving land-based empires, with an increasingly diverse population—who insisted that the problem of pre-1914 Europe had been too many empires but too few nations.94 Hence the task of the peacemakers was to reconstruct Europe (and the Middle East) according to “historically established lines of allegiance and nationality,” by creating nation-states out of the wreckage of the former empires, as the most compelling units of collective human loyalty and identity, in which all citizens would speak the same language and come from the same stock. By better aligning nation-states with national identities, on the basis of rational principles and democratic ideals, Wilson believed that he would bring into being a new, better, and more stable world.95 Hence the appearance (and in some cases the reappearance) in central and eastern Europe of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia (to which, farther west, would soon be added the Irish Free State), and the creation in the Middle East of a Turkish nation, and also of the League of Nations Mandates of Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Iraq, and Palestine.
Never before had so many names so suddenly appeared (or reappeared) on the maps of Europe and the Middle East, but in truth the peoples of these regions were still so mixed up that it was impossible to create such coherent nations (and with them identities) as envisioned by Wilson’s doctrine of self-determination in all its simplistic grandeur. In 1919, the American secretary of state, Robert Lansing, asked himself, “When the President talks of ‘self-determination’ what unit has he in mind? Does he mean a race, a territorial area, or a community?”96 These were good questions, which were never adequately addressed or satisfactorily answered. Sometimes strategic and diplomatic considerations were too urgent to yield to the claims of nationality: as when Germany lost lands to France and Poland, Austria to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Italy, and Hungary to Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia; and as when any union between Germany and Austria was explicitly forbidden, in defiance of the principle of self-determination. For such reasons did France and Italy obtain large German-speaking populations (in Alsace-Lorraine and South Tyrol), while in Romania the acquisition of Transylvania and large swaths of Hungarian territory meant the number of native inhabitants declined from 92 percent of the population in 1914 to 70 percent in 1920.97 But by far the greater obstacle was that the nations that were reestablished or newly created were themselves unavoidably multiethnic and multilingual. Poland, as reconstituted, contained more than two million Germans and three million Ukrainians and Belorussians; Czechoslovakia, according to Lloyd George, was a “polyglot and incoherent” amalgam of Czechs, Slovaks, Magyars, Ruthenes, and Germans; while Yugoslavia was populated by Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Albanians, and Hungarians. So much in practice for Woodrow Wilson’s much-vaunted principle of “national self-determination”: as a basis for redrawing the boundaries of postwar Europe, it was utterly impracticable and did not work.98
Matters were no better when the victorious powers turned to creating new nations in the Middle East, as the Ottoman Empire was partitioned with little cognizance of existing tribal solidarities or ethnic identities. When Turkey became independent, straddling Europe and Asia across the Dardanelles, it still included substantial minorities of Kurds and Armenians, who in 1920 briefly but unsuccessfully set up their own autonomous states.99 The new nations of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Jordan were administered by France and Britain as League of Nations Mandates, but they were effectively colonies, all of them artificial constructs, devoid of any shared sense of national unity or historic or collective identity. King Faisal, the first ruler of Iraq, a nation in which Arabs and Kurds, Sunni and Shia had been summarily bundled together, was well aware of the problem:
There is still—and I say this with a heart full of sorrow—no Iraqi people, but unimaginable masses of human beings devoid of any patriotic idea, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever.100
It would be even worse in Palestine, where in accordance with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British resolved to establish “a national home for the Jewish people,” while at the same time doing nothing to prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing inhabitants, 90 percent of whom were Muslim Arabs.101
The result of this meddlesome mapping was that much had changed—yet very little had changed. Before 1914, the land-based polities of Europe and the Middle East were not so much nations as imperial agglomerations, with many ethnicities, languages, and religions; after 1919, the new nations of Europe and the Middle East were smaller political units, but each contained many ethnicities, languages, and religions, making it difficult to achieve any viable identity or collective sense of solidarity. At the same time, the creation by Lenin of the Union of (fifteen) Soviet Socialist Republics successfully perpetuated most of the tsarist multinational and multiethnic empire under a new Communist despotism.102 Nor was it believed that nation-building, to the extent it was accomplished, would suffice to keep the peace that had proved so fragile in a simpler world of a few empires related by royal blood and terrifyingly inflexible alliances of mutual defense. Even Woodrow Wilson, for all his (flawed) faith in the principle of national self-determination, recognized in national autonomy a danger of national aggression that needed to be checked, and he fought to establish the League of Nations, in the hope of providing some structure of global governance.103 The Republican administrations that succeeded Wilson were in their own way no less internationalist, as they sought to restore the global system of finance and trade, based on the gold standard, by which money and goods and people moved easily across national boundaries, as they had done before 1914. And in a very different idiom, when Eglantyne Jebb established the Save the Children Fund in 1919, she did so specifically to help alleviate the widespread postwar famine that had broken out in central and eastern Europe as a result of the Allied blockade, but more generally as “an effective assertion of the oneness of mankind [and]…our common humanity.”104
The inadequacy of the nation as a redemptive form of human solidarity was thus doubted virtually as soon as it was revived; but in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash and the ensuing Great Depression, these transnational endeavors were effectively given up, and it is often arg
ued that the 1930s suffered from the vigorous reassertion of national interests—diplomatically, militarily, and economically—amid the fatigue and fecklessness of global efforts at harmonizing the world’s political and economic aspirations. The League of Nations failed to restrain national aggressors, especially Germany, Italy, and Japan, while the international financial system that had been so laboriously reconstructed during the 1920s collapsed into ruins, as autarky and national self-sufficiency became the new economic doctrines. In reality, though, it was not so much national as imperial interests that again reasserted themselves, the ensuing hostilities of the Second World War amounting to another global battle waged by and for empires, rather than a struggle of nations. However intense their galvanizing nationalistic rhetoric, Germany, Italy, and Japan sought to enlarge their territorial dominions in, respectively, eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Far East. Meanwhile, Britain and France sought to defend their empires in Africa from Mussolini and Hitler, and to win back the colonies they had lost to Japan in the Far East.105 And in victory the United States and Soviet Russia greatly expanded their empires, not only as maritime powers, with their mighty fleets dominating the oceans, but also as land-based hegemons, as the ostensibly free nations of western Europe became increasingly dependent on American financial aid and military protection, and as the new nations of eastern Europe were annexed into the Communist sphere. The First World War had been a conflict of empires disguised as a conflict of nations, and the same was true of the Second.
Just as the years after 1919 had witnessed the flawed creation of nations and national identities in Europe and the Middle East, the three decades after 1945 saw similar developments, over a longer time span and a greater area of the globe, this time in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere in the Third World. The British Raj in South Asia was given its independence and divided up between India and Pakistan; the Far Eastern dominions of Britain, France, and the Netherlands were dismantled; the African empires of the European powers were brought to an end; and most of the islands in the Caribbean and the few colonies in Latin America became independent. In virtually every case, following what would become a familiar pattern, the indigenous leaders of the fight for freedom and liberation would seek to define their new nation and unify their followers by exploiting and fomenting resistance to the imperial metropolis and its local proconsular agents. And in most cases, the former colonies were launched on their way to independence with the familiar and essential accoutrements of national autonomy and identity: not just a state structure and government bureaucracy, but also flags, anthems, stamps, currency, and ceremonials, as well as foundation myths and founding fathers, all in due course to be celebrated in new statues and new national histories.106 The singular irony is that these new nations and postcolonial identities were modeled on those very same European nations and identities as had allegedly evolved in the decades before 1914, and whose domination they had struggled to overthrow.
Yet in the Third World after 1945, as in Europe and the Middle East after 1919, these instant contrivances of overnight nationality rarely achieved the hoped-for reality of coherent unity or collective identity. Britain’s Indian empire was brutally partitioned, and this was done largely (and hurriedly) on the basis of religious differences (which seemed clear) rather than of distinct national solidarities (which were far less apparent). In Africa, the colonial boundaries that subsequently became national borders had been set by the European powers when they divided up most of the continent during the late nineteenth century. Many of these boundaries were arbitrary and artificial, as they took no heed of historic precedents, local circumstances, or tribal or ethnic or religious groupings. In the case of the British colony of Kenya, for example, the mix of Lwo, Masai, Kikuyu, and Turkana tribes had no ethnic, linguistic, or historical reason to be regarded as one nation. Nor was this an atypical example. As Chief Awolowo, one of Nigeria’s leading nationalists, observed in 1945, in words reminiscent of King Faisal of Iraq a generation earlier, “Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression.” (Indeed, it contained more than two hundred ethnolinguistic groups.) Accordingly, when African colonies became African nations, they typically lacked any shared sense of history, language, or identity beyond that which had been briefly superimposed by the departing colonial power, and then been taken up by the nationalists themselves as they agitated for independence, which was often the only issue on which they could agree.107
Not surprisingly, it has often proved exceptionally difficult for those in charge of these new postcolonial countries to establish a common sense of national unity or collective solidarity. Attempts to create instant federations out of former British colonies that were themselves often artificial constructs met with scarcely any success: in Central Africa (Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland), in East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika), in Malaysia (Malaya, Singapore, Borneo, and Sarawak), and among the islands of the Caribbean. In three cases, they failed completely, and even in the partially successful instance of Malaysia, Singapore later withdrew.108 Religion has failed to keep some nations together, when it might have been expected to do so, and it has also divided others, when it was clearly expected not to do so. Even while sharing the same Muslim faith, and thus an antipathy to the predominantly Hindu India, West and East Pakistan shared little else (not even a common language apart from English), and they eventually fell out, the latter becoming the separate nation of Bangladesh in 1971. Nigeria and Sudan have both sundered into a Muslim north and a Christian south: in Nigeria, the original federal structure quickly disintegrated, with Biafra seceding for a time, while in Sudan, civil war has been rife for decades, and recently the country has formally split in two.109 Meanwhile, tribal and ethnic divisions have on occasions resulted in protracted civil wars, sometimes culminating in secession and genocide, as in Zaire, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and Uganda.
The most recent phase of nation-founding also followed the consequence of the collapse of an empire, this time the implosion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which ended the Warsaw Pact and saw the demise of Communism. Coming into being since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, these postimperial successor nations fall into six distinct categories. First are those in eastern Europe already in existence, but under the thumb of Moscow since the end of the Second World War, and now free and independent again, namely Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Second are those born of some significant adjustments and dissolutions: the reconfiguration of East Germany (reunified with West Germany); the division of Czechoslovakia (peacefully sundered into the Czech Republic and Slovakia); and the breakup of Yugoslavia (brutally shattered into Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovenia, Croatia, and Macedonia). Third are the former Baltic nations, created in 1918–19 and forcibly annexed by the USSR in 1940, and now independent again, namely Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Fourth are the emancipated Soviet republics bordering eastern Europe and on the Black and the Caspian Seas, namely Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. Fifth are the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, which now became independent, namely Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. And finally there is the keystone, and now the residuary legatee of the old Soviet Empire, namely Russia itself.
This was an extraordinarily sudden and rapid transformation, as a new generation of European and Asian leaders sought to mobilize their peoples in mass opposition to the Communist imperium. Yet it would again be a gross oversimplification to describe the motivations, trajectory, and outcomes of these revolutionary movements as the successful realization of national aspirations and identities, let alone functioning national polities. In fact, the cataclysmic events that began in 1989 were in many ways not so much national but transnational, particularly in terms of the complex interactions and coordination of the revolutionary leaders and participants, as in the case of the links between activists in Poland and Ukraine.110 It is also clear that the causal link between the rise of national
ism and the fall of Communism did not operate in just one direction: the breakdown of Soviet power and will (largely unanticipated by Western analysts) did at least as much to stoke the sudden upsurge of national feeling, solidarity, and identity in subject countries as nationalist sentiment did to topple Soviet Communism. This was certainly the case in the former Central Asian Soviet republics, which had been a construct of Soviet intellectuals in the early 1920s rather than a primordial aspiration of any of those Central Asian peoples, and where nationalist sentiment was the fruit rather than the cause of Soviet collapse.111
To be sure, there were discernible feelings of national solidarity in parts of eastern Europe: this was (and remains) true in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, where these identities persisted during the decades of Soviet occupation, and where hostility to the USSR was strongest in 1989.112 In the same way, the failed uprisings in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) offered a unifying narrative of national suffering and striving in the minds of those peoples. But few of the countries that regained their independence in 1989 did so within the same borders as had existed in, say, 1938, and such national aspirations and solidarities as did develop were, as so often, rarely simple or straightforward. In Poland, they relied heavily on the patronage of the Catholic Church and on the support of the native-born pope, John Paul II. In the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, Islam was a more unifying force during the initial stages of disengagement from the USSR than nationalist sentiment, which only developed later—if at all.113 And among other new countries such as Belarus and Moldova, national identity was notional at best, while the independence of Georgia and Ukraine “was not so much about self-determination as self-preservation.”114 As for the further division of Czechoslovakia in 1992, and the brutal fragmentation of Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1999, even the smaller shards of allegedly national communities remained multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious—characteristics they shared with most of the new nations in Europe and Asia.115