Death of a Nation-State

"Soviet" taken by Atticus Mullikin in 2003, hosted on the AtticusInk Flickr

NPR Senior News analyst Daniel Schorr recently offered some observations on Kosovo's secession from Serbia…

"You might call the last few decades, 'The era of breakaway states.' The latest to break away is Kosovo, a province of Serbia. When Kosovo, most of its 2 million people ethnic Albanians, demanded its freedom from Serbia, Serbia launched an ethnic cleansing campaign that ended only after it was bombed by NATO forces. And finally Kosovo declared its independence. Its sovereignty is recognized by the United States and its principle European allies, but ardently opposed by countries worried about their own separatist movements, like Spain, Romania and Cyprus.

Probably the most fervent opponent of a Kosovar nation is the Russian Federation, which doesn't want the influence of the West growing in its own backyard. Russian fears were aptly addressed by the IHT's Roger Cohen shortly before Kosovo's announcement. He correctly predicted that Russia would call an emergency UN Security Council meeting, that it would fret over instability within its own borders, and that it would warn of a ripple effect for other nations with separatist movements. Cohen differentiated Kosovo by saying…

Kosovo is not Transdniestria or Abkhazia or South Ossetia. It is an anachronistic remnant of a now defunct country, Yugoslavia, a province that has been under UN administration for eight years....

Transnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia are breakaway provinces of Moldova and Georgia respectively, and there has been talk that any decision by Western powers to recognize Kosovo might influence Russia's support for autonomy movements within these provinces, whose position around the border of the Caspian Sea affect oil development in that region. Russia might also be concerned for its own integrity, with the Republics of Chechnya and Dagastan an integral Russian link to a large swath of the Caspian coastline. The Soviet Union was Balkanized, and the Russian Federation emerged, and might Balkanize as well were it not for Vladimir Putin and his compatriots, who seem to be banking on Russia's energy hand to keep its sphere of influence intact and stable.

Cohen speaks of "anachronistic remnants." But to a great extent, the whole system of nation-states is an "anachronistic remnant," a holdover from a time when we conceived of a "nation of people" as a centre around which political entities were built. It's a nice, neat paradigm that hearkens the days of pan-…-ism, take your pick of the plethora in Eurasia alone; German, Slavic, Turkic, Albanian, Kurdish, Serbian, and Arabic to name a few. All of these experiments have failed, often at the cost of millions of lives. Why? Because nation-states are fictitious constructs that use nationality as a façade to justify the ascension of their elites. People do not live, marry, socialize and do business in the neat, tidy packages national borders insinuate – at least not for long. Populations have a tendency to become wildly heterogeneous, to the point where national identity becomes completely rhetorical.

Kosovo may seem insignificant, but we've been here before. It was a Russian alliance with Serbia after the death of Archduke Ferdinand at the hands of a pan-South Slav-ist (the meaning of Yugo-slav) that set off the Great War. Many of us who labour under the notion such scenarios are a thing of the past forget the tagline "War to End All Wars," the munitions dumped into the Atlantic and the apocalyptic conflict that followed, where through the mirror darkly we saw Hitler and Stalin's reverse-reflection of nationalism: genocide.

The aftermath of that war is the world we see today, minus one gargantuan Soviet Union and one big Yugoslavia: a world of nations formed predominately by conquest, warfare, mass-murder and authoritarianism. Kosovo's declaration of independence is primarily driven by acts of genocide that occurred in the 1990's, when the ethnic tensions that sat idle under the Iron Curtain were allowed to rekindle amid the Balkanization of the Balkans.

Balkanization: a chic geopolitical term derived from the repeated breakup of the Balkans, that convergent point between Turkic, Greek and Slavic identities, Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic religiosities, and a dozen sets and subsets of each of these. But Balkanization is used to describe a worldwide phenomenon. Kosovo isn't the exception, but the rule of the future. What we're seeing is the Balkanization of the nation-state system, period.

Don't believe it? Check the short list of nations opposed to Kosovo's independence. Russia, Moldova and Georgia we've discussed. Azerbaijan is struggling with Nagorno-Karabakh. Cyprus is split between the Turkic north and the Greek south. Romania has the Hungarian Szekler region at its center. Sri Lanka must contend with the Tamils and Vietnam the Degar and the Hmong minorities.

Perhaps most telling on this list is Spain, which is not merely struggling with ETA and Basque separatism, but with independence movements in every autonomous region. In Janurary 2006, General Jose Mena, the head of the Spanish military, threatened military occupation of Catalonia if the region went beyond the "limits of the Constitution." The General was promptly sacked, but the nation shook in its boots for a few days. Spanish officials have even compared the situation in Spain to Yugoslavia.

Still don't believe it? Check out the short list of nations who either support Kosovo's independence or probably soon will. Belgium almost fell apart when the 2007 elections left no party sizable enough to form a government. In April of 2007, after the successes of the Scottish National Party, Tony Blair had to argue to keep Scotland a part of the U.K., and Wales and Cornwall are also seeking greater autonomy. France must contend with Corsica, Alsatia, Occitania, Brittany and its own Basque region. Germany has Bavaria, and Bavaria has Franconia. Italy has Sardinia, Siciliy, Liguria and Lombardy. Croatia: Istria. Czechia: Moravia. Denmark and Sweden: Scanland. The list goes on and on throughout the world.

But why are nation-states becoming obsolete? Globalization for one thing; borders are breaking down amid increasingly integrated economies. The advent of participatory democracy, for another; national minorities are able to actively pursue their agendas within the international community, at least more so than in the past. But my hunch is that the information age is responsible. Every action of government is under the microscope of public scrutiny, the historical conquests that led to national fomentation are finally laid bare and the rapid disappearance of local and regional languages, cultures and identities has renewed interest in protecting identity within the globalized world.

Really, if you take a nation like France, a collection of different peoples with dozens of languages, dialects and cultures, who are watching local identity being eaten away by Parisian indifference, what benefit is there to keeping the whole thing intact? With the advent of supranational governments like the European Union, which was created to coordinate the mutual benefit of its members, does it really – I mean really – make a difference if Catalunya or Brittany or, eventually, Kosovo, is a separate country?

Theocracy, monarchy, despotism; these are the fetishes of yesteryear. The 20th Century gave us a placebo in the form of nationalism, where the strictures of faith scapegoated science as the culprit behind the most horrifying death toll in human history. The aftermath is the confrontation we now see playing out between old-world authoritarians, who want to regress to an imagined, fictional glory of the past, and new-world egalitarians, who want to do away with the old system but have no idea what to replace it with.

Time will tell the outcome. The process of national dissolution is not going to stop. The map of the world has changed since the beginning of human memory, and will continue to do so. The question with which we're faced – before this whole business of having global confrontations over tiny, breakaway enclaves becomes ugly – is, "What kind of international system will keep the peace?" Human civilization must look into the mirror, and ask itself some serious questions.

Hopefully, this time, it will not be through the mirror darkly.

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